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Notes
Richard Little Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), pp. 55-57; Carl J. Weber, "Tragedy in Little Hintock: New Light in Thomas Hardy's Novel, The Woodlanders," Booker Memorial Studies: Eight Essays on Victorian Literature in Memory of John Manning Booker, 1881-1948, ed. Hill Shine (1950), pp. 133-153.The present article is indebted to Professor Weber's listing of American editions and printings of The Woodlanders. Also, every reader familiar with Weber's work will recognize the authority for many details given here regarding transatlantic publication: see esp. his Hardy in America: A Study of Thomas Hardy and his American Readers (1946), pp. 11-132.
The only Harper book text available for direct comparison with the MS was a 1906 copy in the E. N. Sanders collection of Hardiana in the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester. I have checked the results of the collation of this 1906 text against a hardcover American first edition and a Franklin Square paperback (#572), both published by Harper and Brothers on March 25, 1887, and a 1905 printing by Harper and Brothers. All of these volumes have an identical text, having been printed from the same plates. Permission to quote from MS material has been given by the Dorset Archaeological and Natural History Society and by the Hardy estate trustees, Lloyd's Bank of London and Miss Irene Cooper Willis. Parenthetical page references to The Woodlanders, regardless of the version being discussed — the MS, Harper's Bazar, Harper book text, or Macmillan's Magazine — are to the pagination in the 1912 Wessex Edition and in the more readily available Macmillan Library Edition (London, 1963).
Carl J. Weber, "The Manuscript of Hardy's Two on a Tower," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XL (1946), 3, asserts that this was the reason for sending duplicate handwritten MSS of Two on a Tower. Weber also demonstrates that Hardy made revisions in the second MS of Two on a Tower that was sent to America; since this duplicate MS was not used by Atlantic printers, it contains readings that have never been printed (Weber, 6, 11-13), just as the Harper book text of The Woodlanders contains passages that appear in no other version [see below in text].
According to a letter to Hardy by the publisher Frederick Macmillan, dated March 29, 1886 (Dorset County Museum MS). Macmillan reports that Morris thought the noun to be "an unusual & perhaps not very pleasant looking word."
Carl J. Weber, "Thomas Hardy and His New England Editors," NEQ, XV (December, 1942), 686-687. Of course, the permission extended only to correcting grammar and "obvious errors." In the American texts of The Woodlanders, punctuation and capitalization differ frequently from usage in English versions, and the spelling conforms to American practice, e.g., "honor" and "wagon" for "honour" and "waggon."
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