A Pair of Blue Eyes

Abstract

In October 1871 Tinsley had ignored Hardy’s reference to his progress with another novel, “the essence of which is plot, without crime—but on the plan of D. R.”¹. On July 8, 1872, however, following the critical success of Under the Greenwood Tree (and perhaps a publishing emergency of his own), he wrote to ask whether Hardy could have the new story ready for serialisation in Tinsleys’ Magazine from September onwards. Hardy promptly replied that the request was unexpected and the manuscript needed “a great deal of re-consideration”, but that he would call and discuss the matter before leaving London later that month.² The results of that call appear in the letter to Tinsley of July 27, in which Hardy set out in detail the terms already discussed between them for the publication of “the story I have in preparation, ‘A winning tongue had he’”—terms such as to lend plausibility to the anecdote in Early Life (118–119) about Hardy’s having made a point of looking up the copyright laws beforehand.³ It must have been at this moment, with an assurance of both serial and volume publication for his next book, that Hardy could for the first time begin to think of himself as a fully professional author, and it was during the composition of A Pair of Blue Eyes that he finally abandoned his original career as an architect.⁴