1 The near-contemporary biographies of both men are minutely detailed, recording even the most trivial acquaintances. Hardy does not figure in Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, author of 'Erewhon' (1835-1902) , a Memoir; nor does Butler in Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928. Hereafter cited as Memoir and Life respectively.

2 That The Way of All Flesh is defective as a novel because it fails to absorb its scaffolding is implicit throughout Malcolm Muggeridge's scathing biography of Butler, The Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler. A brief but concentrated defence is made by P.N. Furbank in his Samuel Butler; but most recently William H. Marshall in The World of the Victorian Novel has boldly tried to set the novel up as a truly unified work rather than a 'non-symbolic document' by pointing out the metaphorical transformations of concepts which in fact do not appear in the 'evolution' books. As will be evident, the reading which follows starts from much the same basis as Muggeridge's.

3 'Before Life and After', The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson, p. 277.

4 Probably this phrase is Butlet's own, but it is actually taken from Jones's summary of a letter from Butler to T.W.G. Butler of 18 February 1876: Memoir, Vol. 2, p. 445.

5 Samuel Butler, Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of,all Flesh ed. Daniel F. Howard, p. 77. Howard's edition is certainly not free of its own introduced errors, but it is the only authoritative text and is used here throughout.

6 This phrase is from a letter to Charles Darwin dated 15 April 1873, outlining his plans for what turned into The Way: Memoir, Vol. 1, p. 189. At this time Butler was a minor acquaintance of Darwin's, though on good enough terms to visit him twice in that year. Butler also supplied him with some drawings used in the second edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and ,animals (1873).

7 Letter to E.M.A. Savage of 16 June 1872: Memoir, Vol. 1, p. 160.

8 Life and Habit (IV), p. 43. Unless noted otherwise, all Butler quotations are from the Shrewsbury Edition, ed. H.F. Jones and A.R. Bartholomew. The roman numerals identify the volume number of this collected edition.

9 Letter to E.M.A. Savage, dated by Jones 15 January 1876: Memoir, Vol. 1, p. 233.

10 Claude Thomas Bissell, 'A study of The Way of all Flesh', in Herbert Davis, William C. DeVane and Robert Cecil Bald (eds), Nineteenth Century Studies, p. 288.

11 Letter to E.M.A. Savage of 3 December 1883: Memoir, Vol. 1, p. 400.

12 Appendix D, ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 468-71.

13 'The Deadlock in Darwinism' (XIX), p. 53. The interpolations have been added to make the connection between novel and theory clearer, but it is reasonable to suppose that Butler had his complete but unpublished novel in mind when he wrote this.

14 For such a reading, see for instance R. Balfour Daniels, 'Names in the fiction of Samuel Butler', South CentraIBullettn, vol. 29 (Winter 1969), pp. 129-32, and William H. Marshall, 'The use of symbols in The Way of All Flesh', Tennessee Studies in Literature, vol. 10 (1965), pp. 109-21.

15 Life and Habit (IV), p. 64.

16 In his preface to The Way of All Flesh (XVII) Streatfeild casually remarks without a hint of qualification that the novel 'may be taken as a practical illustration of the theory of heredity embodied in [Life and Habit]' (p. xxxiii).

17 But, also as usual, only superficially. That card-playing and dicing were Butlet's private concretions for the method of what he called 'Charles-Darwinian evolution' is obvious from the several times that he brings these activities and the theory together. Thus 'according to Messrs. Darwin and Wallace, we may have evolution, but are on no account to have it as mainly due to intelligent effort... We are to set it down to the shuttling of cards, or the throwing of dice without the play.' See 'Deadlock in Darwinism' (XIX), pp. 9-10; the same comparison is to be found in Luck, or Cunning? (VIII), p. 67.

18 Life and Habit (IV), p. 50.

19 Nothing in the novel displays more markedly Butler's limitation as a novelist than these scenes in Coldbath Fields which were composed, we are told, after he paid a social call on the Governor (Memoir, Vol. 2, p. 11). Only official publicity could account for these kindly warders, so deferentially anxious for Ernest's recovery so he can start learning a useful trade.

20 This should not carry the implication that Ernest's decisions are all fully conscious ones, or that he believes himself 'free'. David Daiches, in Some Late Victorian Attitudes, mentions Butlerism as a determinist evolutionary theory, but as his section on the novel starts by cutting away the approach being taken here (he calls it 'not a novel about evolution or even heredity': p. 58) he does not follow through with the task of showing exactly how Ernest's path is a pre-selected one. We can concede that Butler's biological work is never perfectly lucid on this subject, but The Way surely is.

21 Life and Habit (IV), p. 202.

22 'Ramblings in Cheapside', Collected Essays, Vol. 2 (XIX). First published unchanged in Universal Review (December 1890).

23 Bissell compares Towneley with the Ancients of Shaw's Back to Methuselah to the detriment of the former, coming to the conclusion that Butler's vision is 'restricted and relatively crude' ('A study', p. 303). But there is surely no evidence in the text for his further claim that the portrayal of Towneley has an element of contempt in it by the end. Towneley is, and is meant to be, an object of unblinking admiration.

24 Athenaeum, 9 January 1892, pp. 49-50.

25 Harvey Curtis Webster, On a Darkling Plain: The An and Thought of Thomas Hardy, p. 17 5.

26 Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel, Vol. 2, pp. 50, 61.

27 John Holloway, 'Hardy's major fiction', in his The Charted Mirror: Literary and Critical Essays, pp. 99, 105.

28 Leo Henkin's Darwinism in the English Novel 1860-1910: The Impact of Evolution on Victorian Fiction restricts his treatment to two minor novels which mention Darwinian concepts in passing, and he therefore quite obscures the subtleties of which Hardy's art is capable. Elliot B. Gose, 'Psychic evolution: Darwinism and initiation in Tess of the d'Urbervilles', Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 18 (December 1963), pp. 261-72, concerns himself with anthropology rather than with biology. Jean R. Brooks, 'Darwinism in Thomas Hardy's major novels', unpublished MA thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London, provides an excellent overview, though her determination to find a biological concept to match each novel - 'environment' in The Woodlanders, 'variability' in Jude, etc. makes her argumentative structure highly inflexible. Her assertion that Hardy read Weismann 'after fmishing his adaptation of Tess for serial publication' (p. 20) is unsupported and, on the evidence of the Life, false. Her Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure abandons the Darwinian approach.

29 Trevor Johnson, Thomas Hardy, pp. 114-16. On the other hand, Raymond Williams in The Country and the City (London, 1973) makes another valuable point, again with reference to Tess, in saying that to write about spring in terms of germs and inorganic particles as well as sights and sounds is Hardy's special gift - 'the native place and experience but also the education, the conscious inquiry' (p. 206) - and this rehabilitation of Hardy as a novelist with a central and not peripheral imaginative debt to his reading in the natural sciences has continued with Bruce Johnson's ' "The perfection of species" and Hardy's Tess', in U.C. Knoepflmacher and G.B. Tennyson (eds), Nature and the Victonan Imagination. It is true that Hardy, at his rare best, does achieve what seemed to be impossible for most other late-Victorian writers: a fully satisfying aesthetic-scientific vision.

30 Webster, On a Darkling Plain, p. 132.

31 In 1911 and again in 1924. For the earlier statement, see Carl J. Weber, Hardy of Wessex: His Life and Literary Career, pp. 246-7. The second, made in a letter of 21 June 1924, is printed by the recipient Ernest Brennecke at the front of his Thomas Hardy's Universe: A Study of a Poet's Mind (first printed 1926).

32 Life, p. 254. Out of eight notables whom Hardy mentions by name, no less than five were, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, professionally involved in the life sciences.

33 Life, p. 259. At the time Hardy knew him Crichton-Browne was Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy and the author of many works on mental disorders. Possibly Henry Drummond's lectures brought the topic of altruism under discussion, although his Ascent of Man appeared in the following year. Petr Kropotkin's articles, later collected as Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, were at the time appearing regularly in Nineteenth Century. Crichton-Browne was not a specialist on heredity, of course, so this is further proof of how common were melioristic interpretations of Darwinism in the late 1880s. Roy Morrell, Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way, grossly distorts Hardy's own feelings about biological altruism by quoting this note as 'his firm belief' (p. 99).

34 Lionel Stevenson, Darwin among the Poets, pp. 257-8, suggests that Lamarckism did attract Hardy, and he quotes in support the lines from the poem 'San Sebastian': 'Maybe we shape our offspring's guise/From fancy, or we know not what.' But this is to confuse Hardy's ideas with the speaker's, who is a remorseful old soldier. Another of Hardy's ex-military characters, Granfer Cantle in The Return of the Native, complains that 'all that soldiering and smartness in the world seems to count for nothing in forming the nature of the son'. Should we take that to be Hardy's deliberate anti-Lamarckian sentiment? In fact the ancient folk-belief in telegony goes back as far as Genesis and Hippocrates. In its pseudo-scientific form, the example of the naturally short-foreskinned Jew (i.e. as a result of generations of circumcision) was being peddled by H.J. Voigt at least as early as 1789. None of these has anything to do with the speeding-up of the evolutionary process, which was the cause of the late-Victorian interest in Lamarckism.

35 The censored serial ran in the Graphic from July to December 1891. The excised scene of the baptism of Sorrow was published first in the Fortnightly Review, vol. 49 (May 1891), pp. 695-701.

36 Weber, Hardy of Wessex, pp. 170, 174. If Weber's reconstruction is accurate, the first quotation argues strongly for some restructuring of the sixteen chapters mentioned above, and hence for a possible Weismannian influence on all parts of the novel. This may nowhere have amounted to more than a pointing-up of the imagery.

37 John T. Laird, The Shaping of 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles '.

38 August Wisemann, Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems, trans. Edward B. Poulton, Selmar Schonland and Arthur E. Shipley (Oxford, 1889), p.x. Hardy's copy of this book - if he ever owned one - seems to have vanished. Neither Colby College nor the Dorset County Museum has it among their items from Hardy's own library. It was not one of the 309 items from this library sold in May 1938, although the editor of the reprint of the sales catalogue says that these were only a portion of Hardy's books. See J. Stephens Cox (ed.), The Library of Thomas Hardy, OM, p. 193. In Lennart A. Bjork's two-volume The Literary Notes of Thomas Hardy there is only one mention of Weismann, and that is copied from a review.

39 Complete Poems, p. 434. It was probably written between 1914 and 1918, although an earlier date is possible. J.O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary, argues that the seed of this poem is the diary entry of 19 February 1889 (Life, p. 217) But the poem is hardly 'the story of a face'; and the interpolation that 'this idea was to some extent carried out in. . .the poem entitled "Heredity" ' is almost certainly F.E. Hardy's. The tone of the poem to me suggests a theoretical, not an anecdotal, source.

40 George John Romanes, 'Weismann's theory of heredity', Contemporary Review, vol. 57 (May 1890), p. 698.

41 Although he is not mentioned in the Life, it is certain that Hardy also knew something of the work of Galton, for he copied a passage from Gaiton into his Literary Notebook 1. What is more, this is a clear source for part of the conversation between Tess and Abraham in chapter IV, and shows how Hardy wove quite recondite ideas into his dialogue - in this case, not very successfully. Brooks, Thomas Hardy, p. 216, notes of Tess's impulsive temperament that Galton attributed this trait to full-blood Normans in his Hereditary Genius (1869). However, there is no evidence that Hardy read this before 1889-90. There may have been some influence, but the Gaiton-Hardy link is too tenuous to warrant further consideration.

42 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the Wessex Edition (London, 1920), p. 114. All further references in the text are from this edition.

43 Maurice Maeterlinck, 'The tragical in daily life', The Treasure of the Humble, trans. Alfred Sutro, p. 108.

44 Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, p. 271. F.B. Pinion agrees: 'Hardy's argumentative intrusions had placed him in an illogical position. On the one hand Nature is cruel . . . on the other, the "Innocence" of the natural world is made the basis for attacking the moral code' (A Hardy Companion, p. 173).

45 This identification is noticed, for instance, in Philip Mahone Griffith, 'The image of the trapped animal in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles', Tulane Studies in Enghsh, vol. 13 (1963), pp. 85-94. What is most notable in this essay is that, although Griffith sees that this major strand of imagery illuminates Tess's plight, he does not see its central purpose as being to embed her the more firmly in natural process, but instead says it represents 'the malicious and destructive force of societal, as opposed to natural, laws' (p. 86). But Hardy sets up no such dichotomy: in this novel the inadequacies of society mirror those of nature. And, if any qualities characterise Hardy's Darwinian nature, they are exactly those of malice and destructiveness. Consider the black-humorous treatment of John Durbeyfield's fat round the heart: fat which is closing inexorably like a trap. The medical complaint is, of course, devoid of value in itself. But notice how in the human world Durbeyfield is at last put to death at the very worst moment. The malevolence is passive, not active; but it is still very real.

46 Millgate, Thomas Hardy, p. 272.