‘High-water Mark of Late-Victorian Fiction'

tess was on the market in London less than a month before Christmas 1891. It was sold out immediately. A second printing, and then a third, and then a fourth, were printed in as many months. No previous Wessex novel had enjoyed any such brisk sale. Before midsummer 1892, Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. were ready for a fifth printing (they called it a Fifth Edition), and Hardy was asked to write a new preface for it. By one of 'life's little ironies' James R. Osgood did not live to see this new edition. He died on May 20, 1892, and was buried in London— in Kensall Green Cemetery, not far from Thackeray's grave. Hardy went up to London to attend the funeral on the twenty-third, and walked in the procession immediately after Osgood's partner, Clarence W. McIlvaine. 'Very sad,' Hardy reported to his wife in a letter he wrote her that evening from the Athenaeum Club. ¹ He had been elected a member of this club in April 1891.