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Lot 81

HARDY (THOMAS)

22 November 2011, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £750 inc. premium

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HARDY (THOMAS)

Autograph letter signed ("Thomas Hardy"), to the publisher John Lane ("My dear Sir"), explaining that his father's illness – described by Hardy as "the illness of a relative" – has delayed his arrival and that he is leaving in a day or two; he thinks therefore that the sittings should be postponed for a short time, 2 pages, integral blank, headed paper, lightly dust-marked, 8vo, Savile Club, Piccadilly, [29 June 1892]

Footnotes

Hardy's father was to die on 20 July. Lane had been trying to make arrangements for Hardy to sit for his portrait by William Strang, to be etched as frontispiece to Lionel Johnson's The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894). In the event, Strang managed to get his sitting at Max Gate a few weeks later. In another letter, Hardy was to tell Lane that whatever' its fidelity or otherwise as a portrait', it seemed to him 'an excellent specimen of Mr Strang's work' (16 September 1892). Our letter is published in The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, i, 1978, p. 276; and is from the collection of Frederick B. Adams Jr., Sotheby's, 7 November 2001, lot 471.

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