Abstract
Mr John Knightley and Miss Jane Fairfax are exchanging views on the curse or the financial benefits of writing letters. Thomas Hardy was familiar with both the aspects of epistolary activity mentioned in this conversation and, indeed, with a third, the ‘Lettres galantes, I do not mean love letters, to fine women’, which Lord Chesterfield commended in a letter to his godson, Philip Stanhope, in 1768.1
‘Letters are no matters of indifference; they are generally a very positive curse.’
‘You are speaking of letters of business; mine are letters of friendship.’
‘I have often thought them the worst of the two,’ replied he coolly. ‘Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.’
Jane Austen, Emma, ch. 34
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Notes
Quoted in Felix Pryor (ed.), The Faber Book of Letters (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) p. 71.
Quotations from Hardy’s letters are taken from The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, 7 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–88), citing volume and page.
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905) vol. III, pp. 206–7.
James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) pp. 1443–4.
Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London: Macmillan, 1984) p. 458, hereafter referred to as Life with page number.
Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) pp. 214–16.
See F. B. Smith, ‘The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889–1894’, Social History of Medicine, 8:1 (1995) 55–73.
The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976) p. 560.
J. I. M. Stewart, reviewing vol. III of the Collected Letters in the Times Literary Supplement, 10 September 1982, p. 968.
Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) p. 48.
Ralph W. V. Elliott, Thomas Hardy’s English (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) p. 209.
See Ralph W. V. Elliott, ‘Hardy’s One-Plane Dictionary’, Thomas Hardy Journal, 4:3 (1988) 29–48.
See Lovat Dickson, H. G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 195.
A Thomas Hardy Dictionary, ed. Mamoru Osawa and others. The Thomas Hardy Society of Japan (Tokyo: Meicho-Fukyu-Kai, 1984).
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© 1998 Ralph W. V. Elliott
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Elliott, R.W.V. (1998). Thomas Hardy, Epistolarian. In: Pettit, C.P.C. (eds) Reading Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26657-9_10
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