Ghosts

Hugh Haughton

• The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate
  Macmillan, 604 pp, £30.00, April 1985, ISBN 0 333 29441 6
• The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy: Vols I and II edited by Lennart Björk
  Macmillan, 428 pp, £35.00, May 1985, ISBN 0 333 36777 4
• Emma Hardy’s Diaries edited by Richard Taylor
  Mid-NAG/Carcanet, 216 pp, £14.95, January 1985, ISBN 0 904790 21 5
• The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol. V: 1914-1919 edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate
  Oxford, 357 pp, £22.50, May 1985, ISBN 0 19 812622 0
• The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy: Vol. III edited by Samuel Hynes
  Oxford, 390 pp, £32.50, June 1985, ISBN 0 19 812784 7
• Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660-1900 by K.D.M. Snell
  Cambridge, 464 pp, £30.00, May 1985, ISBN 0 521 24548 6
• Thomas Hardy edited by Samuel Hynes
  Oxford, 547 pp, £12.95, June 1984, ISBN 0 19 254177 3

In a letter of May 1919 Hardy told his friend Sir George Douglas he hadn’t been doing much, ‘mainly destroying old papers’. ‘How they raise ghosts,’ he added. He was still at it in September when he complained of the ‘dismal work’ of destroying papers that were of ‘absolutely no use for any purpose God or man’s’. Such remarks must sound particularly dismal to Hardy’s modern editors and biographers. They could certainly find a use for his papers. Hardy’s marvellous late harvest of lyric poetry is riddled with ghosts like those he mentions here, and many, like ‘The Photograph’ with its vivid account of a woman’s portrait burnt in a ‘casual clearance of life’s arrears’, must have been by-products of the literary bonfires at Max Gate. For all that, the ghosts of the papers are bound to haunt the scholars.