| ||
III
Besides more concretely establishing differences between the American book text and the English serial, presentation of a few of the revisions made for Macmillan's Magazine illustrates the sort of thing that Hardy as an artist gave attention to. Touches of humor concerning the servant Grammer's sale of rights to her corpse to Fitzpiers for physiological experiments are added to the English serial version by references to "the head in question" and "heathen's chopper" (pp. 142, 143). An erudite adjective, "accipitrine" (p. 254), is deleted for Macmillan's Magazine, as are "macaroni" and a technical architectural term, "double-cyma," in references to Fitzpiers (p. 120). Redundancies are taken out: in the American texts, Fitzpiers describes his youthful love for Felice as "a colossal passion in posse; a giant in embryo;" in Macmillan's Magazine he terms it "a colossal passion in embryo" (p. 227). A word in Hardy's manuscript which Mowbray Morris, the editor of Macmillan's Magazine, had not liked, "horizontality,"[5] was left
One interesting category of variants, certain manuscript passages that were published in America but not in Macmillan's Magazine, implies that the American text represents to a certain degree Hardy's intentions more fully than does the English serial. But the likely explanation for this fact is entirely non-aesthetic; the editors of Macmillan's Magazine were forced to excise several passages in order to fit Hardy's copy into available space in their magazine. Proof of this assertion is circumstantial: the eighth, ninth, and twelfth monthly portions in Macmillan's Magazine, from which the following material was deleted, end flush on the bottom of the last page given to the particular month's serial. A 250-word-long passage describing a meeting in church between Fitzpiers and Mrs. Charmond early in their affair is in the American text (p. 260), as are the following italicized passages describing Mrs. Charmond's haste and emotion in returning home after her trip to Melbury's on the night of Fitzpiers' accident:
Once outside Melbury's gates, Mrs. Charmond ran with all her speed to the Manor House, without stopping or turning her head, and splitting her thin boots in her haste. She entered her own dwelling, as she had emerged from it, by the drawing-room window. In other circumstances she would have felt some timidity at undertaking such an unpremeditated ["unprecedented" in the manuscript] excursion alone; but her anxiety for another had cast out her fear for herself.
Everything in her drawing-room was just as she had left it — the candles still burning, the casement closed, and ["and" is not in the manuscript] the shutters gently pulled to, so as to hide the state of the window from the cursory glance of a servant entering the apartment. She had been gone about three-quarters of an hour by the clock, . . (p. 317).
Also contained in the manuscript and the American texts of The Woodlanders, though not in the English serial, are Grace's wish that either she or Marty had been Giles's wife "for a little while, and given the world a copy of him who was so valuable in their eyes" (p. 404),
| ||