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THOMAS HARDY AND RURAL Thomas Hardy and Rural England

Merryn Williams

Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-01411-8 ISBN 978-1-349-01409-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-01409-5 © Merryn Williams 1972 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1972 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission.

First published 1972 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in New r ork Toronto Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Madras

SBN 333 13346 3 To Diana Forrest Contents

Preface lX Introduction Xl

Part One Rural England I 840-I goo I 2 Country Writing 184o-1goo 15 3 Richard Jefferies 33 4 The Country before Hardy 51 5 The Theme of Seduction 7g

Part Two I Hardy's 103 2 Economic and Social Relationships in the Wessex I 15 3 123 4 Far from the Madding Crowd 130 5 136 6 The Mayor of Casterbridge 146 7 The W oodlanders 157 8 Tess of the d'Urbervilles 16g g !80

Conclusion Igi Appendix: Population Movements in some Dorsetshire Parishes I 840-I goo 201 Notes 206 Select bibliography 214 Index 222 Oudine map of England, 1852 3 Preface

This book was originally written as a thesis at Cambridge Univer­ sity and I have been given invaluable help by some of the scholars there. I have to record my special thanks to Mr L. G. Salingar, Mrs Gillian Beer and Dr Raymond Williams from the English Faculty, and Mrs J. Howarth from the History Faculty. The late Professor C. B. Joslin also gave me some very kind advice. Miss Phyllis Deane helped me with the population statistics in the first chapter. I also had a long and very helpful talk about nineteenth-century rural life and literature with Mr Adrian Bell. Nobody else, though, is responsible for any errors that I may have made. The book is my own original work, except that in some parts of Chapter I I have consulted and to some extent depended on the historical authorities referred to in the text. M.W. Introduction

By 1922, near the end of his life, Thomas Hardy had given up hoping that literary critics would understand him. He had ceased to write novels years before - he said he had been cured of it by the assaults on Jude the Obscure - and he was convinced by this time that 'critics approached his work with an ignorant pre­ judice against his "pessimism" which they allowed to stand in the way of fair reading and fair judgement' .1 It is very understandable that he should have felt like this, for the great majority of contemporary critics had abused or failed to see the point of his most important works. The Victorians wanted him to go on and on writing novels like Far from the Madding Crowd/ which one critic called a 'picturesque romance of rurallife'.3 in his review of Jude complained, 'We wish he would go back to and listen to the singing in the heather'.4 They continually abused his best and most serious work because they would have liked to reduce him to a mass entertainer, giving support to their own conventional and misleading views of what the English countryside was like. I think that twentieth-century criticism has not got far enough beyond this; Hardy's greatness, and his central significance in the history of the , is not understood even today. I'm not thinking only of T. S. Eliot's really vicious attack on him, or Dr Leavis's exclusion of his work from 'the great tradition', for even the growing number of critics who admire Hardy often fail to understand what he is writing about. It is generally taken for granted that he was a pessimist,* just as it was in his own day. But instead of treating his 'pessimism' as a personal idiosyncracy, several modem critics - and this is where I quarrel with them - have given it a precise definition by relating it to the great *Roy Morrell in Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way argues very convincingly that Hardy was nothing of the sort. His analysis of Far from the Madding Crowd has had some influence on my own. Xll INTRODUCTION events which were transforming English rural society during his life. Douglas Brown calls this 'the contemporary agricultural tragedy',5 and other critics betray a romantic view of the old rural England which is equally distorting. Irving Howe in a recent book illustrates this most clearly: The world of Thomas Hardy's youth ... was another world, an earlier England. It was rural, traditional, fixed in old country ways, rituals and speech. England was then deep into the convulsive transformations of the Industrial Revolution; the reform movement known as Chartism was stirring many people and frightening many more; but in the country­ side . . . one might almost have supposed that human nature was changeless, unaffected by history or technology, flowing through the centuries like a stately procession of verities and recurrences. 6 Nobody would suppose from reading this that Hardy grew up in a locality which was still buzzing with the trial of the Tal­ puddle Martyrs, or that the last labourers' revolt had been sup­ pressed, brutally, in Dorset only ten years before he was born. The deep conflicts which existed within rural society, long before industrialism changed the face of England, are ignored com­ pletely by this kind of criticism. A. J. Guerard sums up what he thinks is Hardy's attitude: One of Hardy's great 'subjects' was of course, the sad passing of the stable rural life, the decay of old customs and of local traditions, the death of ghost stories and the death of village choirs. The agricultural labourers in Under the Greenwood Tree ... belong to that stable and cheerful old England. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 'the farm labourer has lost not only his ancient memories and folk customs but also the reason­ able comforts of life' .1 Guerard himself realises that this was not the true situation in rural England, but many other critics assume that it was. So the critical confusion about both Hardy's inten­ tions and the actual state of things in nineteenth-century rural England persists. This confusion makes it possible for Brown to see the central theme of Hardy's novels as 'the tension between the old rural world and the new urban one',8 and for Arnold Kettle to say INTRODUCTION xiii that 'the subject of Tess is the destruction of the peasantry', and that Hardy is writing with 'the pessimism of the Wessex peasant who sees his world and his values being destroyed'.9 My own discussion of the novels tries to challenge these views. But I think that Brown and Kettle are two of the best Hardy critics, because they relate Hardy to the society he lived in instead of studying him in isolation as most critics do. The version of Hardy which has become established sees him as the novelist of a vanishing way of life, with a nostalgic yearn­ ing for old-fashioned rural simplicity and a deep hostility to the disruptive forces of urbanism, industrialism, even education (Brown thinks that 'he found the "more perfect insight into the conditions of existence", which education brought to bear, to be stunting to life'). Rural society up to about 1870 is seen as essentially good. A few critics question this view, for example John Holloway: They (the novels) suggest not just a growing preoccupation with the rural problem, nor even a growing sense that an earlier way of life was inevitably vanishing. They suggest something more disquieting: a gathering realisation that the earlier way did not possess the inner resources upon which to make a good fight for its existence. The old order was not just a less power­ ful mode of life than the new, but ultimately helpless before it through inner defect.10 The popular version, however, is still firmly established and needs to be examined and refuted in further detail. My purpose is to study Hardy's 'novels of character and environment' in the light of his conception of rural society. It is my argument that when they are read in this way, a very much greater and more complex artist emerges than has been recognised before. Because of the amount of controversy about conditions in rural England between 1840 (the year Hardy was born) and 1goo (after he had stopped writing fiction) it seemed necessary to go back to the beginning and give a brief account in the first chapter of what was happening in the countryside during those years. Not being a historian I had to rely fairly heavily on modern histories of agriculture, as well as my reading from the period itself, and the chapter makes no claim to be original. The same is true of the first chapter of Part Two, which studies the history, XlV INTRODUCTION agriculture and geography of the region which Hardy called Wessex in order to relate it to the novels in a new way. The first half of the book attempts to give a context to Hardy's novels, by studying the work of other writers on the same themes. The primary aim is to find out what their attitudes to change in the countryside were. It was impossible within the limits of this book to go much further back than the year I 840, which meant that writers like Clare, Crabbe and Cobbett had, regretfully, to be left out. Non-fiction is studied in the second chapter; the history of the country novel in Chapter 4 - which tries to show in what ways these novels differed from Hardy's, even when they were dealing with the same material, and how it is possible to see Hardy's work as the culmination of a tradition. Chapter 3 concentrates on Richard Jefferies, a remarkable and unjustly neglected writer who has often been compared with Hardy as a novelist and an observer of country life. Chapter 6 is a special case. The 'theme of seduction', which comes up over and over again in discussions of country life during this period, demanded a chapter to itself, so I have studied the developments of attitudes towards it in a comparison of three novels, Adam Bede, A Village Tragedy, by Margaret Woods (a very interesting book which modem readers are unlikely to know about) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I felt that this comparison showed that Hardy had gone a long way beyond other nineteenth-century writers on the same theme. In the second half, where Hardy's novels are studied in more detail, readers are invited to bear the first half in mind and to keep drawing comparisons between Hardy and the other writers, fictional and non-fictional, who have been discussed here. Per­ haps then we shall be better able to see how much he had in common with these writers and how far he rejected them. My own view is that, although much material of great value had been written on the subject before him, his novels are the first to transform the life of rural England into great and imperishable art.