Thomas Hardy -- Novelist or Poet?, a title which Bill Morgan has quite justly termed "unfortunate," (Morgan) is nonetheless a fascinating book. It is at once rich and thin, expert and amateurish, informed and ignorant. Privately printed in Philadelphia in 1929, the book is clearly a labor of love: large (7.5 in. by 10.5) format, hard covers with cloth spine and glassine wrapper, 19 pages of text and 23 pages of reproductions of Hardy's letters. Although its author at one point refers to it as an "essay," it is something more -- and less.     The author was not a critic, but a bibliophile, A(lfred) Edward Newton of Philadelphia. He owned an electrical business in Philadelphia, but spent most of his adult life collecting first editions, manuscripts, and ephemera. Newton built a huge library of 10,000 volumes, called "Oak Knoll"; after his death in 1940, "his famous 'Oak Knoll' library in Pennsylvania was auctioned and for that purpose an elaborate catalogue of three volumes was printed."(Schweik) One of his possessions, as he describes in the text, was the manuscript of Far From the Madding Crowd.     Newton was more than a collector, however. He was the founder of the Trollope Society and the president of the (Samuel) Johnson Society -- positions which explain references to both of these authors in his book. In 1935-36 he was the Rosenback Lecture Fellow in bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania. Finally, he published several books on book collecting, and was a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly.     For all his bibliographical experience, Newton does not seem endowed with a particularly sophisticated literary palate. Reading Thomas Hardy -- Novelist or Poet?, one is struck by his tastes. He was clearly put off by Hardy's tragic muse. Tess barely makes his list of Hardy's top five novels; on some days Two on a Tower beats out The Mayor for number six; and of Jude, "personally I dislike it exceedingly." Indeed, Newton's eponymous question becomes no question at all when he remarks, "Now the bald fact is that gloom and pessimism, relieved only here and there by flashes of sardonic humor, is not the stuff out of which the finest poetry is made."     Given all his reservations, it is fair to ask why Newton admires Hardy as much as he clearly does. Some of the attraction is probably related to Hardy's stature as "the grand old man" of English letters in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Anyone with any pretension to catholic biblophilia would have to make much of the chronicler of Wessex. Another reason may lie in Newton's affection for Trollope and his explicit comparison to Wessex and Barsetshire. Both Hardy and Trollope "peopled [an 'imaginary county'] with characters which are as real to [their] readers ... as any people of their acquaintance." Certainly this is a logical connection. Hardy corresponded with Trollope, asking advice on matters of the writer's business, (Millgate. 189) and Michael Millgate suggests that he may have modeled his use of the Wessex locale on Trollope's series (249) The Text     The text of this book has been scanned by a text reader from one of the original copies. Scanning is still an imperfect science, expecially when the type is small, but I have tried to proofread carefully. Formatting HTML is also difficult. I have tried to suggest the typography of letters and news articles with font size changes and indentation, but perfect reproduction is not possible in this medium.     On several occasions I have typed material which appears only in a facsimile reproduction. In those cases, I have enclosed the material within brackets, to indicate it is not part of the typeset.     The front matter and the typescript of the final letter (which was not typeset in the book, and which I have linked to the end of the manuscript) appear with "horizontal rule" lines separating the pages. I have not, however, indicated the breaks between pages of text. The book consists of 8 blank pages (4 leaves) at the front and the back. The front matter consists of 8 pages. There are 19 pages of text, interspersed with 23 pages of reproduced letters, all in Hardy's hand. None of these illustrations is numbered, and the pagination is imperfect; as a result the final page of text is numbered 31 (the first is numbered 1). Page 31 is followed by 8 pages of the letter mentioned above.          To proceed to the text, click here.