THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE #10 Book Fifth, chaps. 1-4 (Belgravia, Oct. 1878)

Dear Serial Readers,

I'm going to leave comments on this particular installment to others, and instead answer the question: why read this 1878 initial serial publication of this novel?

Thanks to the Oxford UP edition, based on the 1878 edition, I can offer some observations. Hardy revised his novels, this one in particular, for the 1895 edition and again for the 1912 edition.  The later versions bear the marks of his more developed sense of Wessex and the parallels between his fictional names and actual places in Dorset and surroundings.  Egdon Heath of the original serial version is much more indistinct and imprecise as a setting; even the map of Wessex Hardy used in the later editions differ from the 1878 edition, although I'm not sure if the map appeared in Belgravia with the installments.  Also, while the divisions into six books appears in the magazine version of the novel, there are no book titles like "The Three Women" or "The Fascination" or "The Discovery." Instead there are abstracts of a few sentences as headnotes and previews for the installment.  You can find these in Simon Gatrell's "Significant Revisions in the Text" section at the back of the Oxford edition.

It might be interesting to consider how the abstracts, along with the illustrations that appeared in the original magazine version, work to frame and guide reading the novel through these punctuated parts separated by a month.  Beyond this, though, I think the earlier haziness of the heath in this 1878 version captures what I'd call Hardy's sense of a serial past and present--how Egdon Heath bears traces of a recorded, historical past (through proper names of people and events), but also to a past that's more inchoate, perhaps like the deep history of the geological record and evolutionary theory.

I'll be posting on the remaining three segments very soon!  Any thoughts about what happens in this installment?

Serially situated,
Susan