SOURCE: "Baring-Gould's Mehalah and Red Spider: Sources for Hardy's Tess?," in English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1981, pp. 91-8.

In the following excerpt, Sutton defends his argument that Baring-Gould's novels Mehalah and Red Spider served as influences for Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Despite the industry of the past two decades, Hardy scholarship still leaves some unanswered questions. One of the most puzzling concerns his reading—not of Homer, Milton, or Shakespeare, complacently cited in his disguised autobiography—but of the minor novelists of his own era. Did the man "who rarely permitted himself a comment upon a contemporary author"¹ (and listed no novelist later than Scott among his readings for 1887)² pay attention to novels written during the peak of his career? Did he notice in particular the work being done in his own field of rural fiction? So far, in letters, notebooks, and biographies Hardy...