Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication

Chapter 1 Introduction: ‘A modern Wessex of the penny post’

Chapter 2 ‘The speaking age is passing away, to make room for the writing age’: From Oral Tradition to Written Culture

Chapter 3 ‘Inconvenient old letters’: Letters and Privacy in Hardy’s Fiction

Chapter 4 ‘A more material existence than her own’: Epistolary Selves in Hardy’s Fiction

Chapter 5 ‘Never so nice in your real presence as you are in your letters’: Letters and Desire in Jude the Obscure

Chapter 6 ‘A Story of To-Day’: Hardy’s Postal Plots

Chapter 7 ‘Unopened and forgotten’: Letters from the Margins

Chapter 8 Epistolary Ghosts: Letters in Hardy’s Poems and Short Stories

Chapter 9 Conclusion, or the Profitable Reading of Letters