ABSTRACT
And so to the issue of Fanny’s baby and the most extensive bowdlerisations of Hardy’s novel. We are, by now, familiar with Stephen’s editorial method of apologising to Hardy for having, on the one hand, to act censoriously on behalf of the more prudish among his readers, and on the other, for having to act censoriously on Hardy’s own behalf because he has ‘no more consciousness of these things than a child’ (Life, p. 99). We also know that Stephen was making cuts in Far from the Madding Crowd as early as March 1874 (long before the arrival of Fanny’s baby) when, as we have already seen, he wrote to Hardy to say that he had,
ventured to leave out a line or two in the last batch of proofs from an excessive prudery of wh. I am ashamed; but one is forced to be absurdly particular.1
