Far from the Madding Crowd Read Free

wrote to Hardy asking him for a story to run in installments, a common way for Victorian novels to reach their readers. Hardy assented enthusiastically, later writing that he wanted to prove himself “a good hand at a serial.” To that end, Hardy cooperated with Stephen when the editor demanded changes in the novel. The Victorians had very strict standards about representing anything that might bring a blush to the cheek of a young person, and they enforced these unwritten codes through unofficial censorship, much as Wal-Mart demands that the music it sells not contain profane or vulgar language. Novelists who wanted to have their work distributed through the big circulating libraries would have to pass muster. The owner of the biggest circulating library (Mudie’s) was an evangelical Christian, and he wanted to make sure the books he rented out could be safely read by unmarried women and young people. An imaginary figure called “Mrs. Grundy” enforced the rules. The editors of family magazines faced a similar difficulty, and Leslie Stephen apologetically adopted a “Grundyism” that would permit a country parson’s daughter to read anything in his magazine. If you would like to compare this edition with the version that Hardy actually wrote, before it was censored, you should get a copy of the Penguin Classics Far from the Madding Crowd, edited by Rosemarie Morgan. That text reproduces the manuscript edition, while this one relies upon the Wessex Edition (for which Hardy made a restorative, though incomplete, revision). Morgan has written about Hardy’s experience with Leslie Stephen in a book called Cancelled Words (Routledge, 1992). She shows how Hardy’s blasphemous oaths, frank language about human sexuality, his character’s gestures and speech, and references to body parts (including the “buttocks” of horses) were altered by Leslie Stephen’s revisions. The most significant loss to the published version of Far from the Madding Crowd is a long passage describing Fanny Robin and her stillborn child (Penguin Classics 259-60). In the edition in your hands, the whole scene is reduced to a single line. Hardy’s struggle with the cultural watchdogs (literary critics, editors, and sometimes even bishops of the church) continued throughout his novel-writing career. It culminated with the censorious public reaction to Tess of the D’Urber villes and Jude the Obscure, after which Hardy abandoned fiction writing for poetry.
    Though Thomas Hardy certainly adjusted his works willingly when he published them in magazines, he also restored them for republication in book form. Also, some passages that we would consider rather racy survived editorial cuts. For instance, in chapter XXVIII, Hardy creates a narrative annex (a bounded space in an alternative setting in which strange and surprising events take place) when he sends Bathsheba down into a fern-lined, saucer-shaped hidden valley. In this secret place, Sergeant Troy demonstrates his intricate swordplay all around Bathsheba’s body. A reader does not have to be an expert in Freudian readings to see the sexual symbolism of this erotic scene. Recognizing the thinly veiled sexual challenge of Troy’s action helps to explain why Bathsheba feels so intensely—“that minute’s interval had brought the blood beating into her face, set her stinging as if aflame to the very hollows of her feet, and enlarged emotion to a compass which quite swamped thought. It had brought upon her a stroke resulting, as that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream—here a stream of tears. She felt like one who has sinned a great sin”—when all that has happened is a kiss.
    This orgasmic passage covers its tracks by converting the wetness of sexual arousal to a liquid stream of tears, and it uses a literary allusion to the Old Testament to further dignify Bathsheba’s sexual awakening. Hardy often makes references to the Bible and to classical texts, as well as to literary works