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Notes
3 January 1882 [published 4 January] letter to the Daily News, The Collected Letters of Sir Arthur Pinero, ed. J. P. Wearing (1974), p. 60.
See, for example, Thomas Hardy: The Excluded and Collaborative Stories, ed. Pamela Dalziel (1992), and Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (1984). There has also been some speculation as to the contributions that Hardy's first wife, Emma Hardy, may have made to his work.
British Library Add. MS. 53267 J; the licensing ticket of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, still attached, is dated 25 February 1882.
Since Hardy destroyed so much of his incoming correspondence for the years prior to 1918, these letters of Carr's must be seen as having in some sense been deliberately preserved.
The Times, 2 January 1882, p. 6; they each wrote very similar letters to the Daily News, 2 January 1882, p. 2.
James F. Stottlar, 'Hardy vs. Pinero: Two Stage Versions of Far from the Madding Crowd', Theatre Survey, 18 (1977), 42.
In Mrs J. Comyns Carr's Reminiscences (p. 76), for example, she dates the dramatization of Far from the Madding Crowd later than those of two Hugh Conway novels, Called Back and Dark Days, which were produced in, respectively, 1884 and 1885.
Although the dramatization, as he pointed out to a French correspondent in August 1882 (The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, 7 vols. [1978-88], i. 108), was not under his exclusive control, he was presumably in a position to negate any proposed revival. The absence of U.S. copyright protection for British authors rendered him helpless to prevent an unauthorized New York adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd from being produced (under that title) in April 1882 (see Vera Liebert, 'Far from the Madding Crowd on the American Stage', The Colophon, n.s. 3 (1938), 377-382), but when the British actor-manager Frank R. Benson applied in 1895 for permission to produce a dramatic version of the novel Hardy's response was unequivocally negative (Benson to Hardy, 21 June and 15 July 1895, Dorset County Museum).
Letter of 11 July 1926 to Philip Ridgeway (Frederick B. Adams collection). I am grateful to Mr. Adams for generously allowing me access to his collection and to the Trustees of the Estate of the late Miss E. A. Dugdale for permission to quote from unpublished Florence Hardy and Thomas Hardy materials.
This was the wording adopted in the Prince of Wales programme; the Globe Theatre programme differed only in that Carr's first initial was omitted (copies of both programmes in the Richard Little Purdy Collection, Beinecke Library).
Although a blank leaf of notebook paper has been pasted together with the first incorporated leaf of The Mistress of the Farm, the printed text of p. 19, containing the opening of the second act, is in fact completely recoverable.
For ease of reference this foliation will be used throughout, even though it includes covers and endpapers, excludes blank leaves, and is continuous throughout the two notebooks.
That at least two copies of The Mistress of the Farm were used is clear from the presence of both p. 65 and p. 66, each of which is pasted to a separate leaf. The printed text of p. 63 was not incorporated in Far from the Madding Crowd, but it—as well as the text on the verso of the fragment—remains recoverable.
Examination of other plays sent to the Lord Chamberlain's Office during the 1870s and 1880s suggests that this was a frequent but by no means universal practice.
It is worth nothing that Boldwood seems not to have been part of Hardy's original conception of the novel; see Life and Work, p. 97.
Nor, indeed, is he identified thus anywhere in the licensing copy of Far from the Madding Crowd.
In his 5 January 1882 letter to the novelist William Black, Hardy wrote: 'as Carr was the go-between throughout I should have some difficulty in proving that conversations were reported to the management, & showing how Pinero attained his knowledge of the play. This is what is asserted in Town—that Mrs. K., who was acquainted with our play, handed on the ideas to Pinero' (Collected Letters, i. 100-101).
In the midst of the Pinero controversy, Hardy was himself accused of having plagiarized scenes in A Laodicean and The Trumpet-Major from, respectively, a Quarterly Review article and A. B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes. The Academy (18 February 1882, pp. 120-121) quoted 'without comment' the parallel passages printed in the New York periodicals, the Nation (19 January 1882) and the Critic (28 January 1882). See also Collected Letters, i. 103-104.
'honestly? he un' (fo. 14v). Hardy evidently intended to comment on the exchange between Bathsheba and Troy with respect to Fanny's lover, said to be in Troy's regiment: 'Bath.—Then you will find out for me whether he means honestly by her? Troy.—Honestly? Bath.—Yes; if he intends to marry her?'
Dorset County Museum; I have supplied the period following 'first' and omitted following 'copied' an unwanted 'I' that Carr, writing in haste, failed to strike through.
Fo. 36. Also erased and then rewritten was the additional sentence, 'The object of making it on wedding day is plain enough but of little consequence in the circumstances' (the second 'of' was rendered as 'by' in the later version).
These and other precautions still did not prevent one critic from complaining: 'At the close of the play Mr. Carr has committed an error in allowing Bethsheba [sic] to seek consolation in the arms of Gabriel Oak a few minutes after the violent death of the man who, with all his faults, was still her husband' (The Athenaeum, 4 March 1882, p. 293).
This choice of means of death demonstrates once again the dominance of the suicide-by-drowning component of the Victorian myth of the fallen woman; see Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988).
The Era, 4 March 1882, p. 8. Sketches of characters and episodes from the later Globe Theatre production appeared in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 20 April 1882, p. 148.
One of Hardy's annotations to Act III states that 'Robin is a little too violent here & elsewhere. He should not be offensive to audience' (fo. 43).
The Theatre, 1 April 1882, p. 245; in the Academy review (13 May 1882, p. 348) of the London production Robin's killing of Troy is compared with Boldwood's in the novel and found to be 'a much more commonplace and melodramatic solution'.
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