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Scarce in original
cloth
Tess of the D’Urbervilles. A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. “Tess is that rare creature in literature: goodness made interesting. She is human life stretched and racked, yet forever springing back to renewal… She comes to seem for us the potential of what life could be, just as what happens to her signifies what life too often becomes. She is Hardy’s greatest tribute to the possibilities of human existence, for Tess is one of the greatest triumphs of civilization: a natural girl.” –Irving Howe FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE in scarce original cloth of Hardy’s masterpiece, one of only 1000 copies printed. “Hardy intended Tess of the d’Urbervilles for serialization by Tillotson and Son of Bolton, but before the whole manuscript was in their hands they turned it down on moral grounds, alarmed that they had contracted for a story involving seduction and illegitimate birth. Two further rejections followed, from Murray’s Magazine and Macmillan’s Magazine, and it became obvious that the novel would have to be modified for the periodical market. Hardy recounts that in rewriting portions of it to make it suitable for a family paper, the Graphic, in which it finally appeared in 1891, he ‘carried out this unceremonious concession to conventionality with cynical amusement’. The seduction scene was omitted, all references to Tess’s child expunged, and at the editor’s request, Angel Clare was made to wheel the milkmaids through a flood in a wheelbarrow to avoid close physical contact. Tess appeared in weekly installments in the Graphic from 4 July to 26 December 1891”; the first book edition, with the “offensive” passages restored, appeared in November 1891. (David Skilton, “Note on the text”, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Penguin, 1978.) “The occasional negative reviews of Tess, though hurtful to Hardy himself, were overwhelmed by the popular response to the novel's deeply imagined portrayal of a heroine moving through hopes and betrayals, surmounted difficulties and deceptive idylls, to a tragic conclusion whose ‘justice’ the author's passionate advocacy profoundly challenges. Tess is also the most eloquently written of the novels, and the one in which the natural world and the topography itself—the landscapes Tess so doggedly traverses—are most continuously and richly represented.” (DNB). Provenance: from the library of noted publisher and book collector Crosby Gaige, with his bookplates on front pastedowns of each volume. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., 1891. Octavo, original gilt-decorated tan cloth; custom half-leather box. Three volumes. Text clean. Mild toning to spines (as usual), rectangular patch of abrasion at top front panel of each volume, volume three slightly cocked. Scarce in original cloth with all three volumes first issue. $14,000. |
HARDY,
THOMAS.