Thomas Hardy's 'Facts' Notebook: A Critical Edition (Nineteenth Century Series (Ashgate (Firm)).)

Like many other Victorian authors, Thomas Hardy was a habitual compiler of notebooks of various kinds. Of the dozen which survived his death, the most important of these have been edited and published, with the exception of this, his "Facts" notebook. It was begun, with the help of his wife, Emma, soon after their settling in Dorchester in the summer of 1883. Its immediate purpose was to note source material for the Mayor of Casterbridge. From his intensive study of old newspapers, especially the Dorset County Chronicle for 1826-30, he noted many suggestive "satires of circumstance" but the enterprise represented by "Facts", including his reading in memoirs and local histories, involved him in a wider experience, the recovery and recognition of the unstable culture of the local past in the post-Napoleonic war years before his birth in 1840, and before the impact of the modernising of the Victorian period. What he recorded interacted with his own stock of knowledge gained from family and neighbours. "Facts" is a unique document amongst Hardy's private writings and is here for the first time edited, the text transcribed in "typographical facsimile" form, together with substantial annotation of the entries and critical and textual introductions.