Pearson Education paperback edition - 1993
Some while back - I haven't checked my Blogs, but it was around the time of the infamous 'lockdown' - I re-read a Thomas Hardy novel. At 'A' level, one of our set books for our English Literature paper entitled 'The Novel' was Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Encouraged to read other works by the chosen authors, I found The Woodlanders in the school library, and remember thinking 'I wish this had been the set book'! Hardy is much more to me than his books; I have had several holidays or short breaks in what is now termed 'Hardy Country' - Dorchester is one of my favourite small country towns; the trail from Stinsford, where his heart lies, to Higher Bockhampton, where he was born, is still by-and-large timeless, with a reading of the author's Under the Greenwood Tree whisking you back nearly two hundred years. Fortuitously, several cinematic versions - of Tess, The Woodlanders, Far from the Madding Crowd and Under the Greenwood Tree - have been pretty faithful to their literary origins.
After purchasing Merryn Williams' little paperback last year in Derby's Oxfam bookshop, I finally got down to reading it. First published in 1976, she brought out this second edition seventeen years' later, as she felt she had originally given too much attention to Hardy's novels at the expense of the rest of his work. This time, Williams has written a new chapter on the short stories and The Dynasts and greatly expanded the one on the poetry. Notwithstanding this, I found the first Part - The Writer and His Setting - the most interesting; but I have always found biography and the 'context' of someone's life more nutritious. There are three chapters in this first Part. Hardy's Life inevitably trod familiar ground for me, but I did find the comments on his time in London (visiting, for instance, the Great Exhibition of 1862 and the Science Museum); his relationship with his cousin Tryphena Sparks; and the influence of Horace Moule, whom Hardy went to see in Cambridge in June 1873; all well worth recalling. I had forgotten that Hardy was struck off the list of the Architectural Association in 1872 for not having paid his subscription! Merryn Williams deals astutely with Hardy's 'middle years', quoting from The Life of Thomas Hardy (although published under his second wife's imprint, actually mainly written by Hardy himself) which got to the nub of a problem which would remain with him until he gave up novel writing - he perceived that he was 'up against' the position of having to carry on his life not as an emotion, but as a scientific game...that hence he would have to look for material [for his fiction] in manners - in ordinary social and fashionable life as other novelists did. Yet he took no interest in manners, but in the substance of life only.
When The Mayor of Casterbridge came out, reviewers complained that it was gloomy. There were hostile reviews when Tess was published, but most critics were enthusiastic. However, Jude the Obscure was banned from public libraries, and a bishop said he had burned it. Review headlines included 'Jude the Obscene' and 'Hardy the Degenerate'. Although attitudes mellowed during the 20th century, Hardy retained a reputation for pessimism. Ironically, having endured the 2020s with its mindless and pernicious 'cancellation' of any literature that does not fit the ghastly mindset of a too-important and noisy section of the 'intelligentsia', one can have a certain empathy with Hardy's increasing disillusionment.
I found the next two chapters on Hardy the Countryman and Hardy the Victorian particularly interesting. His deep respect for Dorset's traditions and culture (and language) infuses nearly all his work, particularly encapsulated in the delightful Under the Greenwood Tree. I think Williams is right to suggest that Hardy's use of dialect was considerably more subtle and varied than William Barnes', whom the much younger man often turned to for advice. Many of Hardy's greatest novels also reflect the social realities of Dorset in the 19th century - hiring fairs, child labour, the extension of the railway system and the abolition of the Corn Laws. He bitterly regretted the destruction of the class to which he and his parents had belonged. The skilled craftsmen, the shopkeepers and others were being gradually squeezed out by the landowners and larger farmers, who hated their independence. Hardy was not the typical Victorian (if there ever was such a person). He was an agnostic; in many ways a man of the left; and someone who hated war. Throughout his life he was haunted by the suffering of the innocent, particularly of animals. He was influenced by the ideas of Keats and Shelley, of John Stuart Mill and Swinburne. Hardy was in the central agnostic tradition when he denied that there was any such thing as Providence - a force which made everything in the world work towards good.
Part Two: Critical Survey, focused on the Hardy hero and his predicament, on The Mayor of Casterbridge, and the Short Stories and The Dynasts. From reading the extracts from the latter (I have never read the full poem), I tend to concur with Williams that it is generally agreed that its language, with a few exceptions, is commonplace and uninspiring and that it also looks as if he had no gift for blank verse. Williams calls it 'the great white elephant of Hardy studies', remarking that the author seemed to have thought it was his finest achievement, yet few people have read it, those who have agree that much of it is poor and it is unlikely ever to become popular. Another reason for Hardy's pessimism! I much prefer Prose to Poetry and often find it difficult to understand what the latter is going on about. The present Spectator's contributions usually leave me cold! I know it's my failing, not the poets'.
