Printing Thomas Hardy’s Pronouns

FINALLY LAYING DOWN HIS PEN upon The Dynasts (1903-8), Thomas Hardy resignedly declared: ‘Well, there it is: some pages done carefully, some galloped over, & now staring me accusingly in the face. I wonder if I shall ever be able to revise them’.¹ To anyone familiar with Hardy’s lifelong, compulsive revising habits – particularly in relation to his verse – this ‘wonder’ rings with more than a slight disingenuousness. As Samuel Hynes’s account of the compositional history of this ‘carefully and copiously revised’ work reveals, Hardy had, in fact, already begun amending the earlier portions of his three-volume poem by the time this ‘wonder’ was expressed.² Having scribbled revisions into printed copies of Part First (1903) and Part Second (1906), Hardy would soon offer Part Third (1908) its own share of alteration: amending The Dynasts in its entirety several times over the course of the next two decades, Hardy made his last corrections in 1927, the year before his death. It was not for want of revision, then, that errors continued to linger in the text. Indeed, it was much to Hardy’s frustration that, in 1921, he was forwarded a letter from an eagle-eyed reader who had discovered a misprint – ‘despise’ in place of ‘despite’ – in his edition of the poem. Having already corrected The Dynasts for no fewer than five republications, a reasonably disgruntled Hardy wrote to his publishers:

I am much obliged to the Bedford gentleman for pointing out the misprint. I find that it occurs in every edition of ‘The Dynasts’ except the first in three volumes, where it was correct – so that the printers are guilty, & not I; though of course I should have noticed it. (Letters, vi. 86)

The pages that had once stared at Hardy ‘accusingly’ had, it seems, become the stage for wider accusations: ‘the printers are guilty, & not I’.

Hardy would often think about textual error in terms of moral culpability. When writing of another set of mistakes in 1919, he declared: ‘They are, happily, innocent misprints, not the guilty sort that make a banal sense of a passage’ (Letters, v. 316). Elsewhere, similar divisions would be drawn: ‘The following slips are those I noticed more particularly: some are obviously accidental: some are blameworthy’ (Letters, iv. 82). Just as the underscored ‘blameworthy’ implies a party to be blamed, so ‘guilty’ misprints were considered the product of a guilty hand, and Hardy was always eager to establish whose. Having obtained the proofs for his sixth volume of verse, Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), he turned to Sydney Cockerell for assistance in locating any hidden blunders: formerly secretary to William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, Cockerell was particularly attentive to printing matters, and it was his ‘rare eye for misprints & other errors’ that earned him these previews of Hardy’s proofs (Letters, vi. 121). When Cockerell promptly produced a list of corrections, Hardy replied: ‘Only think: three of them were of errors made by the printer, & were not in the MS., e.g. I wrote “Thence” – they printed “Hence”, &c’ (Letters, vi. 122). Whether deflecting blame or, on occasion, accepting it – ‘I am just now immersed in the drudgery of correcting blunders (partly mine, partly printers’)’, he would admit elsewhere – Hardy rarely located an error without also identifying its origins (Letters, vi. 26).

With the exception of the posthumously published Winter Words (1928), all of the extant holographs of Hardy’s verse – of which there are eight, one for each collection of poetry he published – were produced as printer’s copies; these are late-stage drafts filled with small-scale tweaks, submitted for the typesetting of proofs. Handling these manuscripts occasionally entails reading around tangible traces of the printing process: from the fingerprint stains of ink-covered hands to roughly pencilled proof marks, these pages remind us that these poems were passed between the highly fallible hands of printers. As a result of Hardy’s habit of destroying the rougher drafts of his verse, very few revisions from earlier stages of the compositional process survive. The vast majority of the amendments we now have access to, therefore, are those that sit in a particularly pressing proximity to print: besides these amendments made to printer’s copies, the corrections Hardy made in proof and alterations made post-publication were almost all to survive.

Hardy’s acute concern for negligible textual blunders – partly his, partly printers’ – prompted him to read his poems extremely closely, his ‘microscopic’ gaze facilitating a range of notably slight revisions.³ But with the extant holographs of Hardy’s verse typically deemed ‘fair’ copies – drafts, that is, that exhibit minimal alteration – the notably minor amendments they house have been recurrently overlooked. Terms which denote magnitude are often, after all, imbued with connotations of value: ‘minor’, ‘slight’, and ‘minute’ are all commonly used to describe Hardy’s verse revisions, and while they aptly reflect the scale of these alterations, they also pass an implicit judgement on their importance, encouraging their critical neglect.⁴ As Phillip Mallett summarises: ‘Hardy was a lifelong reviser of his texts, but the changes made to the poems rarely extend beyond the rewriting of a line or a word’.⁵ Samuel Hynes, meanwhile, similarly contends that although Hardy was ‘a lifelong reviser of his poems … individual changes in the texts were rarely extensive’.⁶ Critical interest in Hardy’s revisions has, in consequence, been confined almost exclusively to his more substantially altered prose, as in Simon Gatrell’s seminal study Hardy the Creator (1988).⁷ Indeed, while Gatrell offers painstaking attention to the drafts of Hardy’s prose, he simultaneously asserts: ‘There is little to say about the manuscripts of Hardy’s poetry’.⁸ But if the extant holographs of Hardy’s verse exhibit only minimal alteration, these ‘minor’ amendments should not necessarily be dismissed: despite their magnitude, these undeniably slight revisions were, I hope to show, also deeply significant.

Hardy is, of course, not alone in having conceived of textual error in terms of guilt. Geoffrey Hill, for instance, would come to formulate the notion of ‘empirical guilt’: ‘an anxiety about faux pas, the perpetration of “howlers”, grammatical solecisms, misstatements of fact, misquotations, improper attributions. It is an anxiety only transiently appeased by the thought that misquotation may be a form of re-creation’.⁹ In Hardy’s case, the connection between ‘empirical guilt’ and the act of ‘re-creation’ accrues a particular pertinence. Always deeply troubled by his own proximity to error, Hardy’s desire to deflect blame is exemplified by his printing troubles, but extends well beyond them: an eagerness to divert culpability can be traced in many of his amended drafts, especially in those verses that are themselves about guilt. While Hardy’s tendency to attribute his own mistakes to his printers would leave the lines of blame somewhat blurred, his revised manuscripts and proofs testify to a similar smudging of guilt: having initially assigned blame to one party, Hardy would often amend his drafts to settle culpability upon another. His highly charged pronouns were, I argue, essential to this process: in his frequent amendment of these minor words, Hardy performed a blame-shifting across his poems that would, in several senses, recall his protestation to his publishers: ‘not I’.

At the receiving end of Hardy’s accusations were R. & R. Clark, the Edinburgh-based printers employed by Macmillan & Co. ‘The mark of an Edinburgh printing house’, Robert Wilson and James Waterston declared in 1921, ‘is a hall-mark of printing excellence in the literary world’: ‘Mistakes are uncommon, and many authors and publishers prefer to get this guarantee of typographical excellence rather than to entrust work to cheaper book centres where carelessness may prevail’.¹⁰ The Clarks were a particularly well-respected Edinburgh house, and even an easily displeased Hardy could, on occasion, acknowledge their reputation, though his trust remained less easily given: ‘In respect of the 7 volumes of verse’, he once asked his publishers, ‘what do you think about my reading them over? The Clarks are quite excellent printers, but as no human printer, or even one sent from Heaven direct, can be trusted with verse, I don’t mind reading them’ (Letters, vi. 6). Writing here in 1920, Hardy was preparing for the publication of the Mellstock Edition of his collected works – all thirty-seven volumes of it; and, while declining the opportunity to re-examine the proofs of the prose volumes, he was typically protective of his poems. Two days later, he would write to his publishers again to urge: ‘As to proofs of the verse-volumes, it is certainly safer that I should read them’ (Letters, vi. 7). Hardy’s anxiety was akin to that he had expressed in 1911, when plans for this de luxe edition were first put in motion: ‘Lying awake last night I was thinking that unless I correct those proofs myself there will be errors in the text – of a minute (the worst) kind’ (Letters, iv. 162). This insomnia-inducing anxiety of ‘minute’ errors – of which misprints were emblematic – only increased where his verse was concerned: ‘I would ask’, he later wrote, ‘that … misprints may be especially guarded against, as such are more disastrous to poetry than to prose’ (Letters, v. 206).

While Hardy’s sensitivity to error was clearly heightened when his verses were at stake, it was as early as 1895 – amidst the publication of Jude the Obscure (1895) – that he affirmed: ‘It is impossible to trust a printer’s reader, even if no changes whatever are made; the subtler misprints escaping him’ (Letters, ii. 91). This, for Hardy, was generous language. Becoming only more antagonistic with time, he later denounced his printers as simply ‘stupid’, while an innocently enquiring Clement Shorter would soon stumble into the firing line: ‘What has obscured your ancient intelligence?’, Hardy wrote to the journalist in 1909, ‘Accustomed more than I am to the idiots called printers’ readers did you not see at once that, in a list entirely of women, “Mr.” must be a misprint for “Mrs.”?’ (Letters, ii. 124, iv. 21). Hardy was far from alone in this aggravation, with many of his contemporaries venting a similar sense of frustration through their own correspondence. Henry James, for instance, was equally emotive in his denouncement of the ‘hideous’ and ‘odious’ misprints that he deemed ‘deformities’: ‘it lacerates me to see my careful prose so disfigured’.¹¹ And even James Joyce, who is often said to have embraced the creative potential of error – ‘These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of’, he famously proclaimed – could not always see the lighter side of misprints: ‘I am extremely irritated by all those printer’s errors’, he complained when examining the proofs of Ulysses (1922), ‘Are these to be perpetuated in future editions? I hope not’.¹² Few were quite so emphatic in their derision, however, as A. E. Housman, who, like Hardy, printed with R. & R. Clark. Thoroughly fed up with printers’ ‘pranks’, Housman wrote to his publisher to demand:

You must not print editions of A Shropshire Lad without letting me see the proofs. I have just been looking through the editions of 1918 and 1921 and in both I find the same set of blunders in punctuation and ordering of lines, some of which I have corrected again and again, and the filthy beasts of printers for ever introduce them anew.¹³

Recurrently denouncing ‘atrocious’ misprints, Housman rarely restrained his irritation: ‘One can no more keep printers in order than Job could bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades’.¹⁴

Of course, such frustrations were nothing new: for as long as authors have ushered their works into print, they have faced the threat of misprints. As Adam Smyth succinctly asserts: ‘early modern books were awash with errors’.¹⁵ Partly historicising these textual blunders, he explains:

There were technical reasons why errors were so common – printing was difficult, particularly when dispersed across agents, presses, and print shops, with the pressures of deadlines and balance sheets – and it seems generally that authors, printers, publishers, and readers expected printed books to carry mistakes.¹⁶

This is perhaps the reason why, amidst a surge of recent critical interest in error, significant attention has been granted to literature produced in the early modern period.¹⁷ By the time Hardy published his first volume of verse, however, print had come a long way: the intervening centuries had witnessed the introduction of stereotype, electrotype, linotype, monotype, lithography, and mimeography, to name just a handful of inventions that had served to transform the material realities of print.¹⁸ And, over the course of Hardy’s poetic career, much would continue to change. Producing eight volumes of verse between 1898 and 1928, Hardy was writing in a period defined by a ‘radically transforming print ecology’ – one underpinned, as critics of modernist literature often note, by the rapid expansion of small presses and a booming magazine culture.¹⁹ But even amidst this ‘sea change’ in print, a distinctly human capacity for error remained constant – as did the accusatory behaviours that had long appended misprints.²⁰

Indeed, many print manuals from the period read as arenas for the hashing out of blame; allegations could abound, even, between the different pillars of the same printing house. As Henry Bishop protested in The Practical Printer (1895):

A dirty proof is not only a disgrace to a man, but is a positive loss to him and to his employer … And yet how often do we hear a compositor trying to excuse himself when a mistake has been allowed to pass, by blaming the proofreader, instead of taking the whole blame upon himself, where it rightly belongs!²¹

Proceeding to argue that ‘compositors often accuse readers of spiteful motives and actions where they do not exist’, Bishop clearly empathised with the plight of the proof-reader.²² ‘This long-suffering individual’, wrote George L. Miller in The Building of a Book (1906), ‘lives in a chronic state of warfare with the compositors on the one hand and the author on the other’.²³ Not everyone, however, was as sympathetic. F. Horace Teall’s Proof-Reading (1899), for instance, would suggest that proof-readers, too, could be guilty of attempting to shirk accountability: ‘A proof-reader has no real right, under any circumstances, to shield himself from blame by saying that “the copy-holder must have read it wrong”. Nothing could be meaner than that’.²⁴ But while compositors were turning against proof-readers, and proof-readers upon copy-holders, blame was just as often projected away from the printing house entirely. Printers were more than aware of the derision being voiced against them by the likes of Housman and Hardy, and were unafraid to retaliate: ‘The careless or ignorant writer’, Dora Knowlton Ranous asserted in Good English in Good Form (1916), ‘compels the compositor to spend time in deciphering manuscript that should be readable at a glance’; ‘The idea that compositors can decipher any kind of a scrawl given them to set’, suggests Adѐle Millicent Smith in Proofreading and Punctuation (1907), ‘leads many writers to make the first draft of a work very carelessly’.²⁵ Textual error, Teall similarly insisted, ‘is really the result of carelessness on the part of authors in not writing as their matter should be printed and insisting upon having what they want’.²⁶ Between so much shifting blame, it would seem that guilt was less easily located than error itself.

When The Little Review began serialising Joyce’s Ulysses in 1918, the magazine soon found that it had misnumbered the novel’s episodes and was forced, as Amanda Sigler has documented, to apologise for what it termed ‘some untraceable mistake’.²⁷ This idea of untraceability speaks to Hardy’s own preoccupations with origin – his eagerness to follow the thread of a textual blunder back to himself or his printers. These threads, however, were easily tangled, and Hardy would sometimes prove guilty of knotting the lines of culpability himself. The poet’s rather dubious tendency, for instance, to use the terms ‘corrections’ and ‘revisions’ interchangeably – the former typically referring to the amendment of a printing error, the latter to an alteration arising from an authorial change of mind – has already been observed by James Gibson. Writing on Satires of Circumstance (1914), Gibson notes that when Hardy sent a list of amendments to his publishers for the 1915 reprint of the volume, these ‘“corrections” euphemistically included revisions’.²⁸ Particularly contentious were the supposed ‘corrections’ to ‘After a Journey’, upon which Gibson notes: ‘the first printing had “the unseen waters’ soliloquies”, but the second printing “the unseen waters’ ejaculations”; the former was no printing error’.²⁹ The elision was a common one with Hardy, who consistently conflated the terms across his correspondence, repeatedly disguising his revisions as print-based corrections.³⁰

Of course, there is scope to suggest that Hardy intended to imply nothing more than a sense of rectification at play when using the term ‘correction’ to refer to a revision, and that Gibson is, perhaps, a little too suspicious of this conflation. Yet Hardy’s equally liberal use of the word ‘misprint’ would seem to warrant further questioning. In the manuscript of ‘Waiting Both’, the opening poem of Human Shows (1925), Hardy commences:

These were the only alterations Hardy made to the poem at this stage of composition: altering ‘Mean’ to ‘Yea’, before striking through the revision and stetting his original choice, he was content to submit the poem to his printers in this form. Upon receiving the proofs, however, another alteration would spring to mind: the collective ‘our’ of line 3 was to be altered to a singular ‘his’. Having made the amendment, Hardy would write on the flyleaf: ‘misprint p. 1 “our” for “his”’.³² In turning from the proof to the manuscript – just as the implicitly accused and likely bemused compositor might have done upon receiving the corrected proofs – it is difficult to accept the designation of this amendment as a ‘misprint’. As the manuscript makes plain, Hardy’s clear hand had written ‘our’, and the compositor had faithfully set that pronoun; this alteration was, again, no misprint, but another shift of mind rather shiftily disguised as a fault of the Clarks.

It is particularly fitting that this revision-cum-misprint is, however else it might be categorised, a pronoun. For Hardy placed a significant weight upon these seemingly minor words, which were often subject to amendment. As, for example, in ‘The Brother’: ‘O know you what I have done / To avenge our sister?’ the eponymous speaker ashamedly declares in the poem’s opening lines, having murdered a man he thought, mistakenly, had ‘wantoned with’ his sister (CPW, iii. 218). The ‘our’ here is curiously ambiguous; it is never made clear whether the speaker is engaged in an oddly plural self-address, or otherwise whom he questions. A third sibling perhaps? Or are we, as readers, unwillingly drawn into this familial drama? More curious, however, is Hardy’s late revision to the line, which had originally read: ‘O know you what you have done’.³³ It remains similarly uncertain whether this initial ‘you’ is directed towards the unknown counterpart of ‘our’, or if the guilt-ridden speaker addresses himself in a dissociated second person. It is precisely this oscillation of accusation, the tension that arises between ‘what you have done’ and ‘what I have done’, that underpins so many of Hardy’s verses, as fault finds itself recurrently relocated through subtly revised pronouns.

As the author of poems titled ‘She, I, and They’ and the ‘She to Him’ quartet, Hardy’s interest in pronouns is easily discerned, and Norman Page has defined the presence of these words across his poetry as ‘pervasive’: ‘The total number of pronoun openings in Hardy’s verse – that is, poems in which the very first word is a pronoun – is, by my count, 244, or about one in four of all his poems … I suspect it would be difficult to match this in any other English writer’.³⁴ Hardy’s manuscripts and proofs, meanwhile, also reveal a clear preoccupation with these words, as scores of revisions shift the collective to the individual, trade first person for third, and even exchange the masculine for the feminine. The poem ‘Four Footprints’, amongst countless others, reveals the particular pressure that Hardy placed upon pronouns: both in the initial act of composition, and in the subsequent process of revision. As two lovers revisit the scene of a former parting, we find their pronouns paired together unobtrusively: ‘Where stood last evening she and I’ (CPW, i. 275). But, as the second stanza swiftly follows with ‘I kissed her wet face’, the suggestion of tears begins to unsettle the stability of this ‘she and I’ pairing, pre-empting the third stanza’s twist:

While the first two stanzas are narrated by Hardy’s presumably male speaker, here in the third we are introduced to the voice of the female lover. But as ‘she’ becomes the speaking ‘I’, the transfer is not a neat one: the ‘I’ that had spoken hitherto is not the ‘him’ to whom she now refers. As the tangibility of the cold wedding band – ‘yes; feel that ring’ – urges the pair into a physical proximity, the closeness of touch jars against the emotional gulf that now sits between them, as ‘she’ confesses her marriage to another. The traditional prominence of pronouns in marriage vows – I take you to be my – seems to echo ominously in the background of this poem; it was, in fact, precisely the steady, recyclable nature of these vows that had once perturbed Sue Bridehead: ‘I am going to vow to you in the same words I vowed in to my other husband, and you to me in the same as you used to your other wife’, she laments to Jude in a line pointedly saturated with ‘I’s, ‘you’s, ‘my’s, and ‘me’s.³⁵

While this standardised declaration roots pronouns firmly in place, Hardy’s revisions seem intent upon recasting them. His alterations to ‘Four Footprints’ suggest he thought closely about which pronouns to use, and where to place them; turning to the manuscript of the poem, we find only five amendments, two of which centre upon these minor words. Where the second line of the poem now reads ‘Where stood last evening she and I’, Hardy had originally written: ‘Where we stood last night – she and I’.³⁶ It is difficult to tell whether ‘night’ gives way to ‘evening’, forcing Hardy to remove an extra syllable in order to maintain the octosyllabic nature of the line, or if he was intent upon removing ‘we’, and thus forced to add an additional syllable elsewhere, replacing the monosyllabic ‘night’ with the disyllabic ‘evening’. The end result is, either way, the removal of the collective pronoun, which leaves these lovers – ‘she and I’ – only tentatively tied together by an easily ruptured conjunction. Further revisions, however, would see the collective reinstated. In the final stanza of the printed edition of the poem, Hardy writes: ‘And she whom I held is as though she were not, / For they have resumed their honeymoon tour’. Hardy’s ‘they’ here is the product of revision, with the closing line in the manuscript having read: ‘For the pair have resumed their honeymoon tour’. Both variants – ‘they’ and ‘the pair’ – speak to the communality of the newly married couple as they depart from the speaker, whose subsequent isolation is reinforced through the increasingly lonely ‘I’ left to ring throughout this final stanza: ‘I went … I pass … I held’. But, as a monosyllabic pronoun, ‘they’ arguably jars much more sharply than ‘the pair’ against the ‘she whom I held’ of the previous line, while also calling out to that other pronoun: the redacted, unarticulated ‘we’. In tracing these parallel revisions – the removal of one collective pronoun and the instatement of another – we can see Hardy thinking through the poem’s theme of displaced love as he revises, and manipulating the power of pronouns to subtly, yet sharply, recouple these three lovers.

A consciousness of the power a pronoun might wield was, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has suggested, well-established amongst Hardy’s early contemporaries:

Victorian poetry gravitates towards some of the smallest words in the language: pronouns. ‘Me’, ‘you’, ‘we’, ‘they’, and so on, can carry a heavy weight of implication, not just by gesturing towards arguments they do not state explicitly, but also by obliging poets to consider the extent of their personal involvement in a particular subject.³⁷

Hardy’s own attentiveness to the weight of these minor words is notably heightened in poems which envision the souring of love – poems where distinctions between the individual and the coupled become all the more poignant. In ‘The Shiver’, for instance, another pair are pulled apart through a rupturing of the communal. During revision, Hardy would choose to redact what was the poem’s sole instance of a collective pronoun; in shifting ‘our words’ to ‘my words’, he leaves the verse composed through individual pronouns alone. It is a subtle shift, to be sure, but one which builds towards the poem’s concluding punch: ‘I seek her again; and I love you not now’.³⁸ The ‘our’ that finds itself ruptured through revision seems to preface the poem’s staged disintegration into a series of scattered individuals: ‘I’, ‘her’, ‘I’, ‘you’. As the speaker’s brutally blunt exchange of one lover for another is plotted through pronouns, the swift interchange of ‘her’ for ‘you’ echoes through the parallelism of this closing line which, in its neatly balanced construction, speaks all the more pointedly to an acute imbalance of feeling.

A sustained and systematic attention to pronouns was, Hardy’s proofs and manuscripts reveal, common practice for the poet as he revised. In ‘Her Apotheosis’, for instance, pronouns form the sole focus of revision as Hardy decides whether to narrate the poem in the first or third person; moving through his draft, he underlines every instance of ‘them’ and ‘their’, tentatively pencilling ‘? me’ or ‘? my’ in the margins, and later adopting these alterations in print.³⁹ Pronouns similarly draw attention in ‘At a Pause in a Country Dance’, as Hardy ponders several substitutions at once. Stepping neatly into the shoes of an unfaithful wife, he writes:

These are the lines that reached print, but in the manuscript Hardy had first written: ‘Not much when your husband full trusts you’. It was upon receipt of the proofs that Hardy turned his focus toward this line’s pronouns, pencilling in a number of potential variants:

Later returning to strike through both the original ‘your’ and ‘you’, along with the surplus variants ‘one’s’, ‘a’, and ‘one’, Hardy left behind only ‘my’ and ‘me’. Between the manuscript edition of the poem, the printed version, and the variants which were, for a time, left to hover in the proofs, there are six potential variations of this line, each diminishing or heightening the sense of deceit conveyed. The original ‘Not much, when your husband full trusts you’ establishes a distance between husband and unfaithful wife, and in turn between the wife and her own unfaithfulness, that the revised version does not. The removal afforded by the second-person address – which deploys something of the ‘tonal blankness of “you”’ described by Douglas-Fairhurst – allows the wife to refer to some unspecified husband, and to an undefined betrayal.⁴¹ As pronouns are swapped in and out, however, revision sees ‘me’ and ‘my’ stepping in to tip the scale of the deceit, as the speaker is forced to accept accountability without equivocation: ‘Not much, when my husband full trusts me’.

This pivoting of culpability upon pronouns – the way in which these words shift under Hardy’s revising pen, and, in turn, serve to shift a speaker’s proximity to wrongdoing – feels particularly pressing in the poetry that confronted his greatest source of guilt: the well-documented neglect of his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford. While these verses are often lauded as Hardy’s greatest, they are also considered his most remorseful. It is Jahan Ramazani who most thoroughly unravels the ‘complex guilt’ of these elegies: ‘guilt over the wrecked marriage and guilt over the aesthetic mining of that wreckage’.⁴² Suggesting that ‘Hardy vacillates between blame and self-blame’, Ramazani traces Hardy’s tendency to pivot from the position of accuser to accused, in one breath blaming Emma for the collapse of their marriage, and in the next professing his own wrongdoing.⁴³ The manuscripts and proofs of these poems reveal the full complexity of these vacillations: while Ramazani follows Hardy’s unstable perspective as it shifts across poems, and sometimes across stanzas, in attending to the poet’s revisions we can also see a blame-shifting that occurs between drafts of the very same poem.

When revising the autograph draft of ‘I Need Not Go’, a poem written in the early years of his lengthy separation from Emma, Hardy made a series of tweaks to the final stanza:

When Hermann Lea, Hardy’s biographer and occasional bicycling companion, published Thomas Hardy’s Wessex (1913) shortly after Emma’s death, he provided a particularly blunt summary of the poem: ‘There is nothing for us to remark here except the prime fact that Stinsford Churchyard holds the tomb in which She lies’.⁴⁵ This somewhat disparagingly underscored ‘She’ not only identifies Emma as the poem’s subject, but notes and extends the poem’s own pointed play with pronouns. While Hardy’s rewriting of the final line removes one ‘me’ of many from this stanza, it is in altering the fourth line’s ‘from her’ to ‘so long’ that he more pointedly reduces the presence of the third person to just one pitiful occurrence: ‘She will not blame me’. This lonely ‘she’ is left situated amongst seven first-person pronouns – ‘me’, ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘me’, ‘me’, ‘me’, ‘me’ – while even ‘inflame’ and ‘blame’ visually echo this overflow of self-centred pronouns, each gesturing towards the selfishness that unsettled this deeply imbalanced marriage. Putting the finishing touches to his draft, Hardy would also remove the exclamation mark that had once concluded the poem; replacing it with a more subdued full stop, he offers a pitifully muted ending – one that quietly echoes Emma’s own resignation to her ill use: ‘She will not blame me, / But suffer it so.’ While Hardy deflects the prospect of accusation here, his revisions seem to work against him, passing their own judgement on the scene; subtly heightening our sense of his callousness and Emma’s neglect, these are alterations that seem to subtly point their finger, underscoring – as Lea later would – the isolation of the poem’s lonely ‘she’.

‘At a Fashionable Dinner’, meanwhile, sees Hardy tentatively treading through the guilt of his swift remarriage to Florence Emily Dugdale, just fifteen months after Emma’s death. Turning back the clock, he imagines a still living Emma strangely prophesying her own passing, along with Hardy’s subsequent remarriage:

Though Emma is here, in the printed edition of the poem, christened ‘Lavine’, in the manuscript we find she was at one stage ‘Emleen’. Read together, the two variations leave little room for doubt that Hardy had his own Emma Lavinia in mind. He seems uncertain, however, of how clear to make the poem’s personal resonance: the manuscript draft reveals that Hardy first wrote ‘Lavine’, later trying out ‘Emleen’, only to reinstate his original choice. Oscillating between varying degrees of distance from ‘Emma’, he seems to test out the proximity of a nickname, before retreating to the safer distance of a variation on a middle name. The shifting of these proper nouns is, expectedly, coupled by oscillations between pronouns:

Here in the manuscript, Hardy first writes: ‘That means your new bride, when you win her: / Yes, I feel it to be!’ But, after an initial round of revision, these lines shift to read: ‘That means a new bride, when you win her: / Yes, so it must be!’ In returning to the draft, Hardy arrives at a combination of these variants, finally publishing: ‘That means your new bride, when you win her: / Yes, so it must be!’ Shifting the subjective ‘I feel it to be’ to the more decisive ‘so it must be’, Hardy’s wider revisions ironically lack the certainty conveyed by this amendment; in the preceding line, he alters ‘your’ to ‘a’, only to change his mind once more. The subtle difference between ‘your new bride’ and ‘a new bride’ seems situated in the sense of possession conveyed by the second-person pronoun, with the vaguer, less definitive determiner holding the new wife, Florence, at an arm’s length. Just as Hardy’s other revisions play with varying degrees of distance from Emma, altering her name from ‘Lavine’ to ‘Emleen’ and back again, here he appears initially desirous to distance himself from Florence, too. Returning to his revised draft to reinstate ‘your’, and all the possession that pronoun conveys, Hardy knows all too well how true Emma’s peculiar prophecy has proven.

I have argued elsewhere that, in the case of the Moments of Vision (1917) holograph, Hardy manipulates the mutability of his manuscript in order to highlight a division which had become contrastingly immutable: a marital strain that was now, in the face of Emma’s death, ‘past amend / unchangeable’.⁴⁷ But while the revisions encountered in this particular manuscript often lean towards an acceptance of fault as Hardy strives, futilely, to make amends, a consideration of the poet’s wider corpus reveals a more complex picture: Hardy certainly grappled with his guilt as he returned to reread his verses, but he was not always inclined to position himself closer to fault. Many of his alterations made elsewhere would, in fact, work rather to deflect culpability. In ‘If You Had Known’, for instance, a poem that mines an irremediable regret, Hardy writes: ‘If you had known / You would lay roses, / Fifty years thence, on her monument … What might have moved you?’ (CPW, ii. 406). Dated 1920, the poem shares its title with its opening line, both of which had once read ‘If I Had Known’.⁴⁸ Composed eight years after Emma’s death, and published after ten, the distance of a decade does not seem to have enabled Hardy to accept his guilt. In returning to the poem to methodically alter ‘I’ and ‘me’ to ‘you’ throughout, Hardy distances himself from his own line of interrogation; projecting the poem’s accusations away from himself and towards an unanchored, unspecified second person, he is able to displace his allegations towards a more distanced ‘you’. Perhaps the simplest shift of all, however, arrives in ‘Without, not Within Her’, where Hardy makes just one pointed change to the final stanza, which in the manuscript reads:

There is ample reason to be suspicious of Hardy’s use of the third person: as the author’s ghost-writing of his (auto)biography proves, ‘his’ and ‘him’ could often mask ‘my’ and ‘I’ in Hardy’s writing. And, as this poem reflects once again upon Hardy’s occasionally bitter treatment of Emma, in shifting the first-person ‘my’ to a third-person ‘his’ – ‘And out from my spirit flew death, / And bale, and ban’, becoming ‘out from his spirit’ – we see Hardy making another swift sidestepping of his own culpability.

Frustrated with the presence of misprints in his verses, Hardy was prompted, when writing to Henry Newbolt in 1906, to make a telling joke:

I am thinking of approximating to the methods of the early ages, writing my books on parchment, & lending them round; or what would be a somewhat more practical method, getting type-written copies of my next book made under my eye, & supplying them to the public on application by post to the author, with postal order. (Letters, iii. 234)

This lightly expressed wish to oversee every step of production himself masked real feeling and frustration: the pipe dream of keeping his books under his watchful eye at every turn speaks to the palpable tension between Hardy’s desire to have his verses printed, and his deep-rooted distrust of the processes by which they reached print. Just a month after his letter to Newbolt, Hardy sent Florence Henniker a copy of the recently published The Pocket Thomas Hardy: Being Selections from the Wessex Novels and Poems (1906), compiled by Alfred H. Hyatt, accompanied by a note which read: ‘I am sending a little book for which I am not responsible, although only my words are in it – so far as they can be called mine with so many misprints’ (Letters, iii. 243).⁵⁰ With Hardy’s words wrestled from his grasp by printing errors, he questions to whom they now belong, but it is the possessive pronoun – ‘mine’ – that fittingly gestures towards Hardy’s wider strategy for complicating the origins of the words we find printed in the poetry. Where we catch the poet shifting pronouns around, and particularly where nudging them away from the first person, we too are given cause to question: whose words are these?

Hardy’s relationship with Emma struggled to survive the poet’s inattentiveness; gesturing back towards the succeeding clause of Hardy’s printing quibble – ‘though of course I should have noticed it’ – it is precisely a distracted or misplaced attention that often orbits Hardy’s guilt. In ‘Ten Years Since’, he admits ‘with casual look … light note I took’ of Emma (CPW, iii. 31), and in ‘The Flower’s Tragedy’ she is simply ‘unnoticed quite’ (CPW, iii. 103). In ‘Overlooking the River Stour’, meanwhile, he berates himself for all he failed to observe during the more tranquil years of their marriage. The poem’s eponymous river runs through Sturminster Newton, the Dorsetshire town where Hardy spent two years with Emma at the beginning of their marriage: ‘the Sturminster Newton idyll’, he would recall in his biography, ‘our happiest time’.⁵¹ Composing the poem years after Emma’s death, and following decades of a bitter separation, Hardy recalls his fixation on the details of the landscape, lamenting: ‘O never I turned, but let, alack, / These less things hold my gaze!’ (CPW, ii. 223). The poem more broadly, however, appears caught in an attempt to rally against the poet’s distraction: full of its own metrical turns, each stanza trots onward from pentameter to trimeter to tetrameter, before turning back, while its rhyme scheme, in its twisting abbaab structure, performs recurrent turns of its own. Amidst all this metrical restlessness, the poem seems to strive, almost, to loosen Hardy from his own fixation, urging him to make the turn he is left at the poem’s close to lament never having performed. Tugging at their composer’s sleeve, these lines implore Hardy to break loose from his distracted dwelling. But, as he would later lament in ‘Surview’: ‘Whatsoever was just you were slack to see’ (CPW, ii. 485). And while this second-person self-address is full of self-reproach, it appears to let its speaker off lightly when we consult Hardy’s original line: ‘Whatsoever was just you would shun to see’, the manuscript reads.⁵² In returning to replace the active ignorance of ‘shun’ for a somewhat less culpable ‘slack’, Hardy mitigates his agency in this oversight, just as so many of his revisions attempt to shirk accountability.

As Hardy’s printing woes remind us, oversight could also be a distinctly textual concern: ‘It is vexing’, he lamented after the publication of Moments of Vision, ‘what a number of oversights occur in a first edition – at any rate with me’ (Letters, v. 294). Appending this letter with a list of corrections for the second edition of the volume, Hardy figures revision as the clear rectification of oversight – a chance to look again. To equate revision with re-visioning is to risk perpetuating a somewhat tired critical trope, but it is difficult to ignore that this stage of composition was one that often enabled Hardy to redirect his once distracted gaze. ‘The Voice’ presents an apt example: perhaps the most celebrated of the many poems Hardy wrote after Emma’s passing, it strives to offer her a rather belated attentiveness. Pronouns, again, are important here. As Eric Griffiths observes in his compelling close reading of the poem, Hardy ‘disperses the vocables “me” and “you” across the page, the dark, scannable space wherein he lacks her, his “all”’. Placing these two pronouns at the centre of his reading, Griffiths maps Hardy’s steady acceptance of Emma’s irresponsiveness by charting a stream of rhymes and half-rhymes across the poem, mapping a gradual transition from address to isolation; the poem’s earlier stanzas, he finds, are saturated by chimes of ‘you’ – ‘view you’, ‘drew’, ‘to’, ‘knew you’, ‘air-blue’ – while the latter half pivots its attention towards echoes of ‘me’: ‘breeze’, ‘mead’, ‘here’, ‘being’, ‘near’.⁵³ But for all this close attention to the poem’s pronouns, there is one ‘me’ that Griffiths misses. Turning to the manuscript of the poem, we find that the final stanza runs:

As ‘Thus with me’ is altered to ‘Thus I’, while the comma that originally appended both phrasings is shifted to a semi-colon, several factors seem at play amidst these minor revisions: perhaps Hardy was keen to avoid repetition with the ‘me’ that arrives in the following line (‘Leaves around me falling’), or perhaps he was striving towards metrical punchiness, the truncated ‘Thus I’ falling more bluntly than ‘Thus with me’, just as the semi-colon swift on its heels provides an impactful pause. And while both variants deploy first-person pronouns, the loss of ‘with’ marks the severance of the last fragile thread of connection between Hardy and the voice that might be Emma’s; as ‘with’ disappears, so too does Hardy’s always uncertainly sustained hope of companionship out on this wet mead. ‘The Voice’ is, after all, a poem less about connection than isolation: Hardy’s now, Emma’s then. And as the isolated ‘I’ steps in for ‘with me’, the sense of division reached by this final stanza – as Hardy acknowledges he is, in fact, the only figure in the vicinity – is mimicked upon the page, where this single, capitalised letter is left to loom lonelily.

This play with pronouns ought, by now, to serve as the first sign that a shifting of blame might also be occurring within the poem; for while Hardy was an undoubtedly inattentive husband, in ‘The Voice’ we find indifference projected only outward: it is the breeze which is listless, Emma who is wistless. This strange transferral of indifference, as Emma roams unheeding of Hardy’s pleas – ‘let me view you, then’ – occurs across the Emma poems. While in ‘Your Last Drive’, she is positioned ‘past love, praise, indifference, blame’ (CPW, ii. 48), in ‘Looking at a Picture on an Anniversary’ she is ‘unmoved’ and implicitly unmovable (CPW, ii. 283), and, in ‘The Going’, even her death is framed as her departing ‘calmly, as if indifferent quite’ (CPW, ii. 47). In the latent echoes of ‘alter me’ – just about audible within the poem’s ‘all to me’ – we hear what is traceable across the manuscript draft, as Hardy uses revision to amend, and most often exchange, the roles that he and Emma had adopted in life. Indeed, Emma seems less ‘consigned’ than assigned to wistlessness by Hardy, who finds yet another means of deflecting culpability in recasting himself in the role of the attentive spouse:

While Emma’s demonstrations of care are thus diminished through revision – ‘you long waited me’ becomes the somewhat less enduring ‘you would wait for me’, just as her position as a figure ‘standing attent’ as Hardy nears is reduced to her merely ‘standing’ – Hardy is sure to gather up the attentiveness Emma loses. Hence, while Griffiths notes the poem’s ‘quiet shift from the second person of “Woman much missed” to the third person of “the woman calling”’, there is an even less audible shift to be found prefacing this one: ‘Woman much missed’ was, in fact, a late substitute for the manuscript’s less affectionate ‘O woman weird’.⁵⁵ It is Emma’s generic ‘hat and gown’, meanwhile, that would in proof become re-remembered as the ‘air-blue gown’, the added layer of detail, the hint of specificity, allowing Hardy to play at an attentiveness we know he often lacked. And as Hardy’s revisions ring with deflection, it is the altered ‘Thus I’ which is left to loom amongst amendments that call subtly to that other, equally defensive, construction: ‘not I’.

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/R012709/1].

Footnotes