When Thomas Hardy’s new book, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, was accepted for serialization in the weekly illustrated newspaper The Graphic, it had already been turned down twice, “on the score of its improper explicitness,” as Florence Emily Hardy put it in a biography of her husband. One editor complained that the impression it left was “one of rather too much succulence.”
At first Hardy refused to make any changes, knowing as he did that succulence was exactly what people want in their fiction, but he finally relented. In order to make it palatable to the editor of The Graphic, several passages had to be excised or modified, though Hardy took great pains to preserve the book as intended for its future publication in volume form. (“The work was sheer drudgery,” Florence explains, “the modified passages having to be written in colored ink, that the originals might be easily restored, and he frequently asserted that it would have been almost easier for him to write a new story altogether.”)
“The seduction scene was omitted,” wrote David Skilton in a note on the text published in the 1978 Penguin edition, “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.” Mercy me.
“Hardy carried out this unceremonious concession to conventionality with cynical amusement,” Florence wrote, “knowing the novel was moral enough and to spare.”
The bowdlerized version was accepted, and the novel—such as it was—serialized in weekly installments in The Graphic from July 4, 1891 to December 26 (by which time, the full-volume edition, with full physical contact painstakingly restored, had been published).
Some critics found even the redacted text shocking, while others loved it. “It may be mentioned that no complaint of impropriety in its cut-down form was made by readers,” Florence claims, “ except by one gentleman with a family of daughters, who thought the blood-stain on the ceiling indecent—Hardy could never understand why.”
The novel is now, of course, a classic, celebrated for challenging the late Victorian social and cultural norms around gender and sex, and Hardy’s refusal to blame Tess for the things that befall her.
