The slightest signs of handling to the binding, but a very good copy indeed, in the secondary binding of tan buckram with “The / Bodley Head“ at foot of spine, and without ads at end. Attractive art nouveau bookplate of one C.W. Allen with on the lower paste-down a larger image by the same unidentified artist quoting Gray’s Elegy with an admirably gruesome scene incorporating skulls and lilies.
This is the most substantial critical work on Hardy to date, and Lane’s bibliography was surely the first such exercise: Johnson had first conceived the book in 1891, and had delivered the text by the summer of 1892, for the project to stall behind Lane’s uncompleted bibliography. Johnson’s letters to Lane on the subject - see the Tragara Press Selected Letters - became increasingly outspoken: in an early letter, before Lane’s dilatoriness became so marked, Johnson complains of his health “I hope the book won’t be posthumous”.
Hardy was extremely courteous to Johnson, writing that “I have not yet thanked you for your thoughtful, generous, & scholarly book on my novels … You seem to be criticizing the stories as I imagined them before I had written them, & not the executed work – so far short of the intention.” (ALS, Winchester College). He was a little less complimentary behind Johnson’s back, though not disrespectful: in a letter to Sir George Douglas he wrote “Both Lionel Johnson’s book & another on my novels by Miss Macdonell were unauthorized by me, as you will suppose - While his is too pedantic, & hers too knowing, & both are too laudatory, they are not in bad taste on the whole, if one concedes that they had to be written, which I do not quite. Indeed I rather dreaded their appearance.”
