HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE  H0078 9/29/00  "NOTES AND QUERIES"
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From: "schweik" <schweik@fredonia.edu>
Subject: Hardy a "Literary Criminal"
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 19:25:51 GMT

Hardy was familiar with some of the writings of "Lucas
Malet" (Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison). On March 18,
1892, he wrote to her thanking her for a copy of her *The
Wages of Sin* pubished in London in 1891 (see the
Purdy/Millgate *Collected Letters*, I, 120, and on April 14,
1892, in a letter to Millicent Fawcett, he commented on how
a work of fiction could show "how the trifling with the
physical element in love leads to corruption" by having "no
mincing of matters." He then added:
     "This I fear the British public would not stand just
now .      . . . The other day I read a story entitled "The
Wages of      Sin" by Lucas Malet, expecting to find
something of the      sort threin.  But the wages are that
the young man falls      over a cliff, & the young woman
dies of consumption--not      very consequent,as I told the
authoress*."
But recently a claim has been published that Hardy
flagarantly plagiarized from Harrison's *The Wages of Sin*.
The claim is made in Talia Schaffer's *The Forgotten Female
Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England*
published by the University Press of Virginia in 2000. I
have not yet seen that book, but it is reviewed under the
title "The First Dandy Dorian" by Sarah Churchwell in *TLS*
of September 15, 2000, p. 25. According to Churchwell, 
       Schaffer pulls no punches in accusing Hardy of       
      plagiarizing Malet's *The Wages of Sin*: "the usual   
  literary history [of *Jude the Obscure*] may not only be  
   factually wrong but may perpetuate a monumental
injustice,      perhaps indeed a literary crime."
Churchwell goes on to say that Schaffer omits thorny
questions of literary merit, but then seems to accept
Schaffer's contention by saying,
     The misogyny of [Hardy's] revision is undoubtedly     
obnoxious,but Hardy was prompted to rewrite Malet's book at 
    least partly because its sentimental ending irritated
him.

I'm not familiar with *The Wages of Sin*, nor have I yet had
the opportunity to read Schaffer's argument about Hardy's
having plagiarized it.  Would anyone on the list who have an
opinion about the strength and persussiveness of Schaffer's
argument?

Bob Schweik

*Hardy had met Harrison in person (see *The Life and Work of
Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy*, ed. Michael Millgate, 1984,
p. 258).

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