HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE HO2039 6/15/02 " HARDY ON GENTLEMEN CONTINUED"
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Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 15:55:21 -0700
From: Betty Cortus <hardycor@owl.csusm.edu>
Subject: More "Gentlemen"
 

To add, belatedly, to last month's discussion about the usage of the  term
"gentleman",  the following passage from _A Pair of Blue Eyes_ was cited by
a contributor to the VICTORIA list where a similar thread has been in
progess for some time. This occurs in Chapter XIV, where Elfride reveals
her pleasure at being noticed by  "several ladies and gentlemen"  when
visiting London:

'My dear, you mustn't say "gentlemen" nowadays,' her stepmother answered in
the tones of arch concern that so well became her ugliness. 'We have handed
over "gentlemen" to the lower middle class, where the word is still to be
heard at tradesmen's balls and provincial tea-parties, I believe. It is done
with here.'
'What must I say, then?'[Elfride enquires]
' "Ladies and men" always' [Mrs. S. replies]

I wonder if Mrs. Swancourt's exaggerated fastidiousness about the word's
recent pejoration or democratization is Hardy's sly jab at Emma's family
and its pretensions to gentility.

Betty Cortus
hardycor@owl.csusm.edu

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Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 07:25:19 -0400
From: Rosemarie Morgan <rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu>
Subject: Re: More "Gentlemen"
 

Betty-- coincidentally I've just finished  a piece for publication with
Palgrave in which I touched, very briefly, on Mrs Swancourt's
characterisation,
segments/aspects of which appear to derive from Hardy's first (unpublished )
novel,  *The Poor Man and the Lady.* This doesn't mean to say that the
socially-divisive Giffords didn't somehow infiltrate TH's characterisation of
Elfride's unlovable stepmother (Mrs Swancourt) -- who knows? several
contemporaries lent themselves, unwittingly, to the composition process. The
rather grim picture of Mrs Swancourt's vulgar antagonism to neighbours, peers
and community appears, however, to derive, in part, from Hardy's first novel. 

Rather than go over the same ground I'm appending a small (truncated) piece of
my Palgrave article, here:

Horace Moule...called Hardy’s attention to certain “slips of taste” in the
original version of A Pair of Blue Eyes. These were referred to as “Tinsleyan”
slips by this elite Oxford scholar and pointed to items of etiquette such as
the placement of “Lord” in Luxellian’s nomenclature as also, no doubt, to the
account of the Lords and Ladies in their resplendent carriages on Rotten Row
which, filtered through Mrs Swancourt’s consciousness, rather crudely
insinuates that such a show is nothing less than a display of ostentatious
vulgarity. Predictably, the class-driven Hardy was quick to revise these
“slips
of taste” .... He incorporated these changes into the three-volume edition
that
followed serialisation ... The Rotten Row scene, which Hardy seems to have
lifted from The Poor Man and the Lady, was not actually modified until 1895
despite the fact that it had been one of the scenes criticised, earlier, by
Macmillan (in his reading of *The Poor Man*) as full of "exaggeration and
excess." 
_____

I suppose we can gauge the falsity of Mrs Swancourt's utterances by the first
sentence you quote (given that beauty is truth and truth is beauty). 

Cheers,
Rosemarie
________________________
 about the usage of the  term
>"gentleman"
>
>'My dear, you mustn't say "gentlemen" nowadays,' her stepmother answered in
>the tones of arch concern that so well became her ugliness. '

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