Abstract
Letters, it has been argued, feature so frequently in Victorian novels, Hardy’s included, largely because they are a convenient plot device. Focusing on two of Hardy’s so-called ‘minor’ n o ve ls, Desperate Remedies and A Laodicean, this chapter engages with and complicates this claim. The representation of written communication, and of specifically modern technologies and networks of communication, I argue, is by no means subservient to plot, but an essential component of Hardy’s artistic strategy. I demonstrate that by making his plots revolve around various characters’ interactions with Victorian networks of communication, Hardy addresses broader questions about the relationship between human individuals and the structures—personal, social, cultural, economic, and ideological—in which they exist.
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Notes
- 1.
See Daunton, 122. Daunton explains that ‘[t]he Post Office was remarkably prompt in using the railways for the conveyance of mail’, taking advantage of the new technology before Hill even began campaigning for postal reform. He notes that with the introduction of penny postage and revision of the ‘circulatory system’, the Post Office became increasingly dependent on railway companies, which, in turn, became legally obliged to assist the postal service. See also Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (London: Phoenix, 1999). Standage explains that the telegraph network, initially run by different private companies, came under Post Office control in 1870. It existed in mutual dependence with the railway. W. F. Cooke and Charles Wheatstone were the first to successfully put the telegraph to commercial use, because Cooke ‘identified a niche market for his product: the railway companies’ (45). They succeeded in their venture, because they obtained permission to lay telegraph wires alongside the railroad, in exchange for granting the railway companies free usage of their invention, which became essential for the co-ordination of rail traffic.
- 2.
Hardy, ‘General Preface to the Novels and Poems’, in PW, 45.
- 3.
Nemesvari, Sensationalism, 19.
- 4.
Rimmer, ‘Hardy’s “Novels of Ingenuity” Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta and A Laodicean: Rare Hands at Contrivances’, in Companion to Thomas Hardy, 267.
- 5.
Nemesvari, Sensationalism, 11,
- 6.
Jean Brooks, 152; Jane Thomas, Femininity and Dissent, 7–8.
- 7.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), xi–xii.
- 8.
See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
- 9.
See Keep; see Kate Thomas, 13–14.
- 10.
See Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 40. Daly writes that ‘to be immersed in the plot of the sensation novel was to be wired into a new mode of temporality’.
- 11.
E. S. Dallas, The Gay Science, vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 293–4.
- 12.
See Walter Kendrick, ‘The Sensationalism of Thomas Hardy’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (1980): 493. For Kendrick, ‘plot takes full and deliberate precedence over character’, while ‘time and characters are worthy of record in Desperate Remedies only when something relevant to the chain has happened in it or to them’.
- 13.
Lawrence O. Jones, ‘Desperate Remedies and the Victorian Sensation Novel’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20 (1965): 49.
- 14.
Winifred Hughes, ‘The Sensation Novel’, in Companion to the Victorian Novel, 265.
- 15.
Devine, 107.
- 16.
Daly, 47.
- 17.
Ken Ireland, ‘Trewe Love at Solentsea: Stylistics vs. Narratology in Thomas Hardy’, in The State of Stylistics: PALA 26, ed. Greg Watson (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2008), 69.
- 18.
Joe Fisher, The Hidden Hardy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 35.
- 19.
Rimmer, Notes to Desperate Remedies, 440.
- 20.
Daunton, 122.
- 21.
James Wilson Hyde, The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1885), 118. Menke, 38.
- 22.
Menke, 38.
- 23.
Daly, 4.
- 24.
Lock, 64.
- 25.
Rimmer, ‘Novels of Ingenuity’, 273.
- 26.
See Keep, 142.
- 27.
Neill, 9.
- 28.
See Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980), 174. Also see Nemesvari, Sensationalism, 8, 13.
- 29.
See Neill, 4.
- 30.
See Judith Bryant Wittenberg, ‘Thomas Hardy’s First Novel: Women and the Quest for Authority’, Colby Quarterly 18 (1982): 54. Wittenberg argues that Cytherea initially appears as a rather independent woman, who is gradually deprived of her autonomy. She maintains that a ‘problematic characterological moment in Desperate Remedies occurs when Cytherea, after completing the initial newspaper research into the mystery of the supposedly deceased first Mrs. Manston, announces that she cannot “take any further steps towards disentangling [it]” and lets the men take over the planning and implementation of the detective work’.
- 31.
On the different ways in which Hardy’s female characters deal with desertion or ambivalent marital status, and for an explanation of Eunice’s unique position among them, see Davis, 91–4.
- 32.
Menke, 70.
- 33.
See ‘A Wife in London’ (CP 61); ‘The Telegram’ (CP 323); ‘At the Altar-Rail’ (CP 345); DR, II.5, III.5; PBE, II.12; TT, I.11, II.6, III.9–11; Tess, 55, 57; Jude, IV.2, IV.5, V.2; The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved, ed. Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 1997), chapters 6, 31, 33.
- 34.
Patricia Ingham, Thomas Hardy (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2003), 35. Notably, in A Laodicean, Hardy refers to 19 letters (not including the applications Somerset receives after advertising for an assistant, most of which are stolen by Dare) and 26 telegrams.
- 35.
See Jane Thomas, Femininity and Dissent, 106.
- 36.
Menke, 27.
- 37.
Jane Thomas, Femininity and Dissent, 109.
- 38.
Ibid., 102.
- 39.
Ibid., 97.
- 40.
Keep, 146.
- 41.
Jane Thomas, Femininity and Dissent, 102.
- 42.
Hardy describes this incident in his ‘Real Conversations’ with William Archer, quoted in IR, 67.
- 43.
Clayton, 222.
- 44.
Nemesvari, Sensationalism, 129.
- 45.
On how the telegraph was used by railway companies, gamblers and the betting industry, the police and the press, see Standage. On the notion of the telegraph’s ‘putative transparency and neutrality’, see Menke, 95–7.
- 46.
See Kate Thomas, 139. Also see PW, 15. In the 1881 Preface to the novel, Hardy comments that patrilineal romances are the novelistic norm, remarking that ‘[t]he changing of the old order in country manors and mansions may be slow or sudden, may have many issues romantic or otherwise, its romantic issues being not necessarily restricted to a change back to the original order; though this admissible instance appears to have been the only romance formerly recognized by novelists as possible in the case’.
- 47.
Kate Thomas, 138.
- 48.
Jane Thomas, Femininity and Dissent, 99; Nemesvari, Sensationalism, 131.
- 49.
Jane Thomas, Femininity and Dissent, 99.
- 50.
Rimmer, 278.
- 51.
Sam Halliday, ‘Deceit, Desire and Technology: A Media History of Secrets and Lies’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 37 (2001): 144–5.
- 52.
See Nemesvari, Sensationalism, 71.
- 53.
See Malton, Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 119. According to Malton, ‘[i]n its assumption of Somerset’s identity, Dare’s forged telegraph shows how such technologies do not merely reproduce reality, but, like the forgery, have the capacity to thoroughly alter it. The telegraph eliminates the necessity of conventional identifiers such as handwriting, and thus further problematizes the uncomfortable translation of the “self into the signature”’.
- 54.
Neill, 60.
- 55.
Menke, 214.
- 56.
Neill, 56.
- 57.
Hardy, ‘1881 Preface’, in PW, 15.
- 58.
Garson, Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and Social Power in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 381.
- 59.
Nemesvari, Sensationalism, 147.
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Koehler, K. (2016). ‘A Story of To-Day’: Hardy’s Postal Plots. In: Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29102-4_6
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