1 the Conception and Birth of Wessex

Notes The reference wsCh1 etc indicates material on the book’s website; see p.viii above. 1 The Conception and Birth of Wessex 1 Michael Millgate in The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy ed Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 355. 2See wsCh1 for examples. 3 ‘Exploiting the Poor Man: The Genesis of Hardy’s Desperate Remedies’ in JEGP 94:2 (1995) 220–32. 4 For the example of The Three Tranter’s Inn, see wsCh1. 5See wsCh1 for details. 6 See Chapter 11 for a full discussion of dialect. 7 Reviews quoted in this book are taken from Hardy’s own scrapbook in the Dorset County Museum. 8See Under the Greenwood Tree ed S Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 202 for the earliest versions of Budmouth. 9 Evangeline Smith, the sister of Hardy’s friend Bosworth Smith, wrote of Hardy’s mother that ‘she rather bitterly complained of his not having kept his word to her that he would confine his productions to London, and not allow them to penetrate the all-important world of his home’. Michael Rabiger, ‘The Hoffman Papers Discovered’ The Thomas Hardy Year Book 10, p. 49. 10 It is interesting that in these two early examples the power of fate is thoroughly denied. 11 See Desperate Remedies vol. III chIV.i. 12 In Wilkinson Sherren: The Wessex of Romance (new and revised edn) (London: Francis Griffiths, 1908), there is this (p. 20): Concerning marriage, many were the curious customs observed by Wessex maidens desirous of knowing who their future husbands would be. An even ash leaf having been plucked by the love-lorn girl, it was held alternately in the hand, the glove, and the bosom, the following couplets being recited: The even ash leaf in my hand, The first I meet shall be my man The even ash leaf in my glove The first I meet shall be my love. The even ash leaf in my bosom, The first I meet will be my husband. 13 In 1816 a fire destroyed most of the celebrated fair buildings at Makariev, prompting the decision to relocate the fair to Nizhnii-Novgorod, a substantial trading centre some 70 kms upstream on the Volga. The fair operated in its new location from 1817, its duration was extended to a month (15 July to 15 August) in 1822 and by the middle of the nineteenth century an extended site with substantial permanent buildings had been created. Before and after the Crimean War 244 Notes to pp. 18–30 245 there was an unprecedented boom in Western publication about the Russian enemy. This unprecedented level of popularity and publication was subsequently sustained by close interest in Tsar Alexander II’s reform programme of 1861–74, as Western Europe (rather patronisingly) applauded Russia’s shift away from ‘Asiatic barbarity’ towards ‘commitment to European civilisation’. (Information from Professor Raymond Pearson, University of Ulster). 14 The earthwork is so named on nineteenth century Ordnance Survey maps. On modern maps it is called Weatherby Castle. 15 There is another letter in the Dorset County Museum’s Hardy archive which gives proof that Lucy was not alone. It is from the novelist Katharine Macquoid; in a postscript she writes: ‘My Husband wishes much to know in what County Bathsheba’s farm is.’ (H4152 Nov 18 1874) He was reading the November number of Cornhill as she was writing the letter. 16 The Saturday Review made the same point as the Spectator, but with heavy sarcasm: Ordinary men’s notions of the farm labourer of the Southern counties have all been blurred and confused. It has been the habit of an ignorant and unwisely philanthropic age to look upon him as an untaught, unreflecting, badly paid, and badly fed animal, ground down by hard and avaricious farmers, and very little, if at all, raised by intelligence above the brutes and beasts to whom he ministers. These notions are ruthlessly overturned by Mr Hardy’s novel. Under his hand Boetians become Athenians in acuteness, Germans in capacity for philosophic speculation, and Parisians in polish. 17 There is no good reason to think that Lulworth appeared under disguise in The Hand of Ethelberta. 18 In this matter of disguise, a story that neither Lucy nor any reader in England could have seen is of interest. ‘Destiny and a Blue Cloak’ was published in the New York Times in 1874 and not reprinted during Hardy’s life time. Wessex is not mentioned, and in the story Dorset places, Weymouth, Maiden- Newton, Beaminster, Portland, are given their own names. This seems to suggest that it was indeed partly, if not primarily, to prevent embarrassment for his family and friends that he used invented names for all his places in work they were likely to see. It is also interesting that this story provides the first model for a pattern later established in The Trumpet-Major: the village at the centre of the action is given a fictional name, Cloton. The story will be found in An Indiscretion (Oxford World’s Classics, 1994) edited by Pamela Dalziel, who assumes that Hardy must have had a Dorset village in mind for Cloton and fixes on Netherbury near Beaminster. It seems to me just as likely that, at this stage in the gestation of Wessex he would have put the fictional village into a blank space on the map. 19 The best study of this aspect of The Hand of Ethelberta is in Peter Widdowson’s Hardy in History, pp. 155–97. For the importance of Wessex dialect in the novel see below pp. 210–11. 2 Variations on the original theme 1 We know now a little more about the map than Lucy did. Hardy wrote to Smith, Elder, the publishers of the first edition: I enclose for your inspection a Sketch of the supposed scene in which ‘The Return of the Native’ is laid – copied from the one I used in writing the story – & 246 Notes to pp. 30–35 my suggestion is that we place an engraving of it as frontispiece to the first volume. Unity of place is so seldom preserved in novels that a map of the scene of action is as a rule impracticable: but since the present story affords an oppor- tunity of doing so I am of opinion that it would be a desirable novelty, likely to increase a reader’s interest. I may add that a critic once remarked to me that nothing could give such reality to a tale as a map of this sort: & I myself have often felt the same thing. (Letters I.61 Oct 1 1878) The critic, as we have already seen (above p. 22) was John Hutton, the earliest of the seekers after reality. For details of Lucy’s investigations into topography, and some details that she was unaware of, see wsCh2. Flychett figures in one of Fairway’s anecdotes of the past. It is the village to which Thomasin’s now-dead father walked on occasion to play the clari- net and the bass-viol in the church (I.v), but, as with Southerton, Flychett could be anywhere. See wsCh6 for more on Flychett. The reviewer in the Daily Telegraph (3 December 1878), in discussing the map, had not yet caught on to the idea that Hardy’s locations are not imaginary: The author himself had evidently got the imaginary scene well fixed in his own mind before attempting to convey it to the minds of others; and it is curiously worth notice that he has given a sketch-map of the locality by way of frontispiece, the names of villages and the track of a Roman road being marked ther- eon, with all the semblance of precise truth. 2 Cresmouth was probably suggested by the Creston that had stood in for Weymouth in Desperate Remedies. Another factor in Hardy’s reworking of the manuscript was what I have called gentrification, and this also tended to bring Egdon into Wessex (for details see Hardy the Creator pp. 39–44). The only other surviving link to earlier novels is a connection to the initial appearance of Wessex in Far From the Madding Crowd. Timothy Fairway remembers his wife as a young woman running ‘for smocks and gown-pieces at Greenhill Fair’ (I.v). 3 The passage was different in both the manuscript and the serial; see wsCh2. 4 It is of some interest that in the manuscript the passage ended: ‘as we notice now.’ 5 ‘She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directed less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind, the chief of these being Destiny . ’ (I.vii). Lucy might, however, be mistaken in thinking ‘creatures’ implies that Eustacia has created them. 6 If Eustacia had had the letter when it was intended she should, it certainly would have prevented her going. If she had got it when Fairway brought it, Hardy felt impelled to add in 1912 for the Wessex edition, it would not have stopped her going: But having committed herself to this line of action there was no retreating for bad weather, since Wildeve had been communicated with, and was probably even then waiting for her [weather. Even the receipt of Clym’s letter would not have stopped her now W]. (V.vii) 7 For a handful of earlier examples, see wsCh2. 8 For details see The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy ed Richard Taylor (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978) pp. 115ff. 9 Other new fictional names in the novel are: Pitstock, Springham ( both VIII), Duddle Hole, and Muckleford (both IX).

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