'A Few Crusted Characters'

Thomas Hardy wrote 'A Few Crusted Characters', a sequence of nine linked sketches, in late 1890 and early 1891, at about the same time as the majority of the other short stories which he later collected in Life's Little Ironies. Its textual history is unique among Hardy's work in that a rough first draft, which is occasionally in note form, has survived, providing an opportunity to study the story at a very early stage in its conception. Hardy later revised for publication all of the nine sketches on at least three occasions, and most of them were revised yet again when Hardy was preparing the Wessex edition of 1912. Some of the most interesting changes occurred when Hardy was preparing the collected editions of 'Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk', which was made increasingly explicit about Jane's pregnancy.