Imagining Archaeology: Nature and Landscape in the work of Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies Submitted by Rebecca Welshman to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, March 2013. This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other university. Signature: ………..Rebecca Welshman…………………………… 1 Abstract Over the last two decades the potential for the combined study of literature and archaeology has been increasingly recognised. The Victorian era, which gave rise to new literary forms, and to archaeology as a science, offers a fertile area of enquiry. This thesis seeks to bring together the imaginative possibilities of archaeology and literature, conceiving their close association to be rooted in the observance and appreciation of the natural world. Focusing on the work of Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies, who both wrote about Wessex landscapes rich in archaeology, the thesis identifies the processes involved in the authors’ engagement with nature in archaeological settings. In 1851, Sir Daniel Wilson welcomed archaeology into the ‘circle of the sciences’, and the subject rose to popularity in the periodical press alongside rural pursuits; driven by the closing divide between town and country. Literary depictions of nature in ancient settings elevated the imaginative conception of the past, and found a receptive audience in London papers such as the Graphic and the Pall Mall Gazette, to which Hardy and Jefferies contributed. Both authors associate the mysterious qualities of prehistoric times, and the consonant sense of ‘untrodden space’, with the discovery of new subterranean territories in the self. In a society that was ‘adrift on change’, and seeking new meaning, these connections between the literary and archaeological imagination, and between the present and the past, forged at least temporary consolation. Both authors anticipated early Modern approaches to an archaeology of mind. 2 Contents Introduction Part 1: Archaeology and the Landscape Chapter 1: Interdisciplinary archaeology………………………………………...17 Chapter 2: Archaeological Landscapes as Settings…………………………….60 Part 2: Thomas Hardy Chapter 3: “Prehistoric Times”: Hardy and the Bronze Age…………………..110 Chapter 4: Recovering the Primitive: Ecology and Prehistory in The Woodlanders………………………………………………………………………..162 Part 3: Richard Jefferies Chapter 5: Archaeological Settings and the Language of The Story of My Heart………………………………………………………………………………….215 Chapter 6: Jefferies and Civilisation……………………………………………..280 Part 4: Conclusion Chapter 7: Healing Approaches: Towards Modernism………………………...366 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my parents, Maxeen and Malcolm, and my supervisor, Tim Kendall. My thanks also go to the late Hugoe Matthews and to Professor Roger Ebbatson for their support and interest in my subject. I am also very grateful to Bangles, Rufus, and Simon Coleman who have all supported this project in their own valuable and memorable ways. 4 Introduction 5 The systematic study of past human life and culture through excavation and analysis of material evidence has afforded insight into how past cultures lived and died for over two thousand years. The study of knowledge of arche was first identified by the Greek philosopher Anaximander during 611–547 BC and referred to the search for beginnings and sources of things which appeared to have no origins.1 This knowledge was developed by Aristotle, who identified the water of Thales as the arche; ‘the primeval matter, the original state of things’.2 Since archaeology began to develop as a discipline at the end of the eighteenth century, efforts to piece together the human past, in order to understand the present, have become a significant and popular part of human cultures worldwide. Early antiquarianism recognised that the study of the past, through the material evidence that remained, was a way in which the origins of human life might be better understood. The interdisciplinary character of archaeology has since been widely acknowledged. In Theatre Archaeology (2001) Michael Shanks and Mike Pearson define archaeology as a ‘cultural field’ rather than a discipline per se. Writing about their plans for a dynamic new Interdisciplinary Archaeology Centre at Stanford University they state: It will cut across several departments — of Classics, History, Anthropological Sciences, Cultural and Social Anthropology, Earth Sciences, and Art History. While archaeology has always been this interdisciplinary field, divisions and rifts have been the norm, frequently 1 Jaroslav Malina, and Zdenek Vasicek, Archaeology Yesterday and Today, trans. by Marek Zvelebil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 3. 2 Ibid. 6 focusing on that familiar and disabling cultural divide between science and the humanities. We intend something different — a creative intermingling, where the boundaries of the discipline are deliberately blurred, held suspended. Archaeology — truly interdisciplinary [...] means to work upon understanding archaeological things — material traces and material cultures, understanding the creative event that is the construction of archaeological knowledge, and the historical context of such an archaeological project.3 It is this ‘creative intermingling’ that this thesis aims to achieve, recognising that over the last twenty years, as archaeology has become increasingly popular, the potential for its interdisciplinary application has developed into a more visible and attractive avenue of study. In Voices in the Past: English Literature and Archaeology (2004), one of the only books dedicated to the study of both subjects, archaeologist John Hines aims ‘to integrate the two into a broader and deeper form of cultural history’ by combining literary history with material context.4 Hines suggests that the past is still very much ‘alive’, and that there is much to learn from the material remnants of an ostensibly voiceless past. The book aims to ‘read literature in light of the material circumstances of its production and transmission [...] to reinstate evaluation as an essential and explicit feature of critical practice’, and seeks to broaden critical reactions to a series of texts from Old English poetry to Victorian realism.5 3 Michael Shanks and Mike Pearson, Theatre Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2001), p. xiv. 4 John Hines, Voices in the Past (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), preface. 5 Ibid., p. 25. 7 As Hines recognises, the application of this approach is not limited to a particular era of literature. However, the social, cultural and agricultural changes which occurred in Victorian England, in conjunction with the rising popularity of archaeology, highlight the nineteenth century as a fertile and accessible area of enquiry. Hines examines Victorian conceptions of artifacts as exhibits and considers how the strong sense of domestic space in realist literature is in part generated by the appreciation of domestic material objects.6 His book considers the multiplicity of approaches to archaeology in Victorian times — photography, collecting, and construction — but does not attempt to construct a paradigm for the understanding of archaeology and mind in rural Victorian England. Rather, the focus is on presenting a deeper cultural history of a ‘hitherto undeveloped kind’: By reading archaeology and literature together it is possible both to understand and to appreciate the complexity, and what is often the coherency, of a past that is made more open and more richly available to us than if approached in a more selective manner. The conjunction of these two perspectives can be shown to shed particular light on what things meant in the past. The material context can be argued to be genuinely fundamental to linguistic and thus literary semantics, while the literature can reveal much about the value and meanings of objects. The material world does not only impinge on the meaning of literature in the 6 See, for example, ‘Household Words and the Victorian Experience’, pp. 172–204. 8 form of what is referred to, however; it also constitutes a context in which literature is performed.7 Hines ends by noting that ‘the next step would be to redress the urban bias [...] by looking at the particular circumstances of rural life’, and that the ‘novels of Thomas Hardy, exceptional for his desire to explore such experiences in the period of the late nineteenth century agricultural depression, offer tempting prospects’.8 Scholars in other fields have recognised that the imaginative implications of nineteenth-century archaeology have significant research potential. Colin Renfrew’s Towards an Archaeology of Mind considers the deeper psychological implications of archaeology, which lie beyond the material.9 As cultural and science historian, Alex Warwick, wrote in 2006: ‘although the spectacular and commercial aspects of [nineteenth-century] archaeology are clearly important, there is more to be said about the imaginative impact of its processes and discoveries.’10 Hines hints that the relationship between archaeology and literature is best understood by analysing the material circumstances of literary production: ‘literature and material culture [are] directly involved in processes