“‘I love you better than any man can’”: Sensation Fiction, Class, and Gender Role Anxiety in Desperate Remedies

Abstract

The explanation of why Hardy’s first published novel, Desperate Remedies, is a piece of sensation fiction has become something like received wisdom among Hardy scholars. In the Life, Hardy asserts that his initial attempt at novel writing, The Poor Man and the Lady, was accepted by the firm of Chapman and Hall on the condition “he would guarantee a small sum against loss—say £20,” and that since “[t]he offer on the whole was fair and reasonable… Hardy agreed to the guarantee.”¹ When the aspiring author wrote some time later to inquire why he had not yet received proofs, Frederick Chapman sent him a note asking whether he would be willing to talk to the reader who had evaluated the manuscript and obtain his advice. Hardy agreed, and although he did not recognize him immediately, he subsequently realized that his evaluator was George Meredith, who proceeded to make a series of recommendations that resulted in Hardy deciding to withdraw the manuscript from consideration. Although “[n]o record was kept… of their conversation… the gist of it he [Hardy] remembered very well,”² most crucially Meredith’s suggestion that Hardy “rewrite the story, softening it down considerably; or what would be much better, put it away altogether for the present, and attempt a novel with a… more complicated ‘plot.’”³ Critics have largely accepted Hardy’s assertion that the tale of illegitimacy, blackmail, suspected bigamy, and murder that resulted came about because he acted “all too literally upon Meredith’s advice,”⁴ but none have considered how unlikely it would have been for the more senior author to provide such advice in the first place. It is revealing that as Chapman’s reader Meredith “declined Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne, which later became tremendously popular,”⁵ denying the publisher an extremely lucrative best seller. Meredith’s detestation of plot-driven melodrama was well known, and Hadley points out that in his own fiction Meredith “pathologizes the melodramatic mode, turning it into a psychic disturbance in need of a cure… In place of a melodrama of telling incident… Meredith plots a narrative of psychic development.”⁶