This week we have added 118,752 new pages to The Archive. We have added more pages to our run of the Liverpool Echo, as well as more twenty-first century pages to the Evening Herald (Dublin), with available titles now spanning the years 1892 to 2008.

We have also added the year 1898 to the Evening Herald (Dublin). This newspaper gives a fascinating insight into literary fashions one hundred and twenty years ago. With Rudyard Kipling profoundly in ascendance, ‘dreaming of empire,’ his fellow poet and novelist Thomas Hardy had split opinion and alienated many.

Evening Herald (Dublin) | 23 June 1898

According to the Evening Herald (Dublin), Hardy’s ‘treatment of a certain phase of English country life is said not to commend itself to the fiction readers of the day.’ Hardy had published what would prove to be his final novel Jude the Obscure  in 1895, and due to the backlash that the gloomy and at times macabre story provoked, he turned his back on prose writing altogether.

As evidenced here in The Archive, Hardy had well and truly fallen out of fashion. Turning to poetry, Hardy published Wessex Poems and Other Verses in 1898. However this collection too was met with a hostile reception. Perhaps Hardy was justified in claiming ‘In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man’s friend’ in his famous poem Wessex Heights. 

But well after his death Hardy’s lure was to negate the hostility leveled at him by his contemporaries. A review in the Liverpool Echo in August 1997 labels Hardy ‘the Wessex dream-weaver,’ and reveals the surge in the Dorset native’s popularity had resulted from the ‘wider availability of well-priced paperbacks – and TV serialisations.’

Ever-divisive, however, Thomas Hardy continues to split opinions. Ulick O’Connor, the Irish writer, historian, and critic, writing in the Evening Herald (Dublin) in 2008, labels Hardy a ‘journeyman poet if ever there was one.’ Not perhaps without some little bias, his preferred poet turns out to be none other than ‘our own Willie Yeats.’

UPDATED TITLES

This week we have updated some of our recently added titles.

You can learn more about each of the titles we have added to this week by clicking on their names. On each paper’s title page, you can read a FREE sample issue, learn more about our current holdings, and our plans for digitisation.

Register now and explore the Archive

You can keep up to date with all the latest additions by visiting the recently added page.  You can even look ahead to see what we’re going to add tomorrow.