Comments on and extracts from contemporary reviews of
Hardy’s work, and other Wessex matters
Desperate Remedies
Sat Rev relates Springrove to Barnes. Mentions GE at end.
Morning Post April 13 1871
Like Wilkie Collins, so much that it might be by him.
“there is about the personages and their doings a touch of high-pressure sentiment, which,
however, does not become unduly oppressive.”
“of its special kind, as a work of fiction, it is eminently a success.”
Otherwise plot telling.
Athenaeum
“really almost worthy of GE”
Under the Greenwood Tree
Athenaeum
“rustic life somewhere in the West Country.”
Sat Rev (Moule)
Any one who knows tolerably well the remoter parts of the South-Western counties of
England . . ..
Silas Marner
A Pair of Blue Eyes
Spectator (Hutton) June 28 1873 identifies it as Hardy
“scenes . . . are almost worthy of GE in their marvellous intimacy with the turn of
thought, the ceremonious and quaint courtesy exercised towards each other, the homely
illustration, and the provincial idiom of the peasantry of the far western counties.”
Better than Walter Scott.
Graphic 12 July 1873
“whilst in his descriptions of village folk and their talks and ways, Mr Hardy seems to us
to excel everyone but George Eliot.
Sat Rev
“Bred in the solitudes of the West country”
“Mr Hardy has been unwisely compared with GE. In reality no two writers could be more
unlike in their general methods.”
Pall Mall Gazette
All plot plus “rival the most admirable rustic pieces of GE herself” TH is the best living
except her, has genius.
Examiner on 1vol Oct 13 1877
There are no novelists of out time, not excepting even GE, who put more “brains,” more
intellectual effort, into their novels.
Both novelists are intensely occupied with character, but, while GE studies chiefly the
influence upon human beings of their “environment,” as the philosophers call it, and
chooses the setting of circumstance to illustrate this. Mr Hardy’s object is rather to
illustrate the influence of one human being upon another, the interaction of characters,
without much regard to how those characters came to be what they are. Then too there is
a vast difference in their way of presenting character to their readers. The one is analytic,
the other dramatic—or rather, perhaps, we should say, narrative. GE, finding her hands
full with the exhibition of her various problems, evades the labour of bringing out the
manifold aspects of a character one by one as they appear to the personages of the story.
She takes the reader at once into full confidence as to the nature of an individual as soon
as she introduces him or her. Perhaps this is necessary to enable us to follow her
subsequent keen analysis of the influence of circumstances. At any rate it is an economy
of strength; it saves the artist many anxious considerations of construction. Now, so far as
an outside critic can judge, these considerations form a large part of Mr Hardy’s labours
as a novelist. He labours to make his personages say and do things which mark their
characters so unmistakably as not to need analytic comment to make them clear. He
leaves the discussion of their morality and the philosophic exposition of their motives to
the personages themselves, and to his readers and critics. His analysis is not served up
raw, it is incorporated with the story.
[plot]
Our readers will remember the skill with which GE analyses the changeful impulses that
sway her Gwendoline in ‘Daniel Deronda’ now in one direction, now in another. Mr
Hardy’s analysis is almost more elaborate and not less plausibly true to nature, although
he never appears to be analysing, but lets us see the various impulses at work. All the
time he never lifts the poetic nimbus from the head of his heroine.
[plot]
Every chapter in Mr Hardy’s novels proclaims him a masterly analyst of character, who
does not wield a scalpel, but resembles rather those daring pathologists of the Middle
Ages who saw by direct vision into the interior of the human mechanism. He possesses
the negative quality common to all the greatest masters in out literature—the absence of
cynicism. There is not a trace of cynicism in his novels. He can draw cynical characters,
but his own outlook is from a different standpoint. Even the cynic he draws with the same
unfailing sympathy and tender-hearted consideration with which he regards the rest of the
personages he puts in motion on his well-appointed stage.
Far From the Madding Crowd
The World Dec 2 1874
Abounding in affectations, full of mannerisms, and infected by a vein of mimeticism that
is, in our judgement, anything but a recommendation, Far From the Madding Crowd is a
novel which is almost entitled to be called excellent. . . . Mr Hardy may seek to veil his
own singularly original ability under the cloak of imitation of GE. We are grateful that he
does not succeed, but his imitative aptitudes are still a mistake. We speak, let it be
understood, purely of the matter of style.
Scribner’s Monthly
The first comparison with Dickens:
There is in this novel an intermittent comedy of quaint talk among illiterate personages,
which to our thinking, is quite as laughable as the best things of the kind in Dickens, and
infinitely truer.
Examiner
More on GE; Hardy’s style has not the same freshness, and he is not a preacher.
Pictorial World Feb 6 1875
Mr Hardy is a close imitator of GE
Sat Rev has first accounts of environment-ish
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.
[the last sentence is a give-away]
Athenaeum says decisively “the talk and habits of the Somersetshire rustics”
Spectator (Hutton)
The life of agricultural districts in the South-Western counties—Dorsetshire probably—is
a new field for the novelist, and at least so far as the physical forms of nature and the
external features of the farm-work are concerned, it has been mastered by the author of
this tale. [And it goes on to stress the farm-activities] and from everything he reads he
carries away new images, and as it were, new experience, taken from the life of a region
before almost unknown. [However] And here the reader who has any general
acquaintance with the civilisation of the Wiltshire or Dorsetshire labourer, with his
average wages, and his average intelligence, will be disposed to say at once that a more
incredible picture than that of the group of farm-labourers as a whole which Mr Hardy
Has given us can hardly be conceived.
Academy (Lang)
His scene is laid somewhere in the country of Mr Freeman’s favourite Seaxsaetas, in a
remote agricultural and pastoral district of south-western England.
Says H is patronising The author is telling clever people about unlettered people, and he
adopts a sort of patronising voice . . .
The Hand of Ethelberta
Morning Post Sat Aug 5 1876
He is specially good also when he speaks of village life and the clodhoppers of Knollsea
and Anglebury . . .[!!]
Athenaeum April 15 1876
Is the first to mention Wessex:
Such a piece of talk as this,-“And while I’ve tended . . . forbear,’”
might be the language of an ostler in Shakespeare, but would it be heard nowadays at a
“Wessex” inn? . . . It is said that careful examination failed to detect 200 words in the
vocabulary of a certain village in Cambridgeshire; is it possible that Somerset and Dorset
are so much more eloquent?
The World no date
Excellent too is the dialogue which Mr Hardy places in the mouths of his Somersetshire
and Dorsetshire peasants.
[“The Wessex Labourer” in Examiner 15 July 1876. It blows Wessex wide open.]
London Sept 29 1877 Living Novelists,--No. X. THOMAS HARDY
The writer prefers Blackmore’s handling of the “British Boor” to Hardy’s. Compares him
with Hugo (something others take up in The Return of the Native reviews)
The Hand of Ethelberta, which we take to be, with all its cleverness, about as bad a novel
as one would care to see . . .
The sense of artificiality clings to all he does. His boors, excellent as they are, are not so
truly specimens of the Wessex rustic as so many Hardyisms in smock-frocks. As
automata they are extremely well made . . . they are in fact everything that man can make
them, and all but alive. Beyond this point, however, Mr Hardy does not get. His rustics
talk and think amusingly enough, but we are never sure that Mr Hardy is not whispering
that they shall say in their ear . . .
The fault in him we take to be a certain lack of sympathy. He is one, it seems to
us, of a sort of men of whom Lord Beaconsfield is the highest type. In these the
intelligence is extreme, but the emotional faculty is imperfectly developed. Mr Hardy’s
sympathy, in fact, is less emotional than intellectual; and as his intelligence, acute as it is,
is not of the highest and keenest order, the effect he designs to produce by an appeal to
our emotions, by means of the delineation of character, which is merely a vehicle for the
dramatic expression of emotion, is not altogether a right and true one. . . .[comparison
with Disraeli] if proof is wanting that we are not unjustified in considering this as the
primal flaw in Mr Hardy’s intellectual composition, we have only to revert for an instant
to the consideration of “The Hand of Ethelberta.” Mr Hardy, it may be assumed, knows
the world of boors very well, and the world of society very ill. Even in painting the first
of these, he does not convince us that his pictures are exact [what do you think he’s
writing, a sociological tract?], for his sympathy and his intelligence are ill-matched, and
will not run collar and collar. When, however, he comes to handle the second, his failure
is astonishing. The book is clever enough, and withal it is a series of blunders. Mr Hardy
has done his best to understand his new monde, and to feel with it; and he has obtained
some intelligence of it, and has proved that as to its feelings he knows absolutely nothing
at all. If we add to this imperfect sympathy the stiffness and inelasticity to which we have
already adverted, an unreadiness in taking a peculiar and proper initiative, which obliged
Mr Hardy to begin with what looks very much like an imitation of the manner and style
of Wilkie Collins (“DR”), and the effort after singularity observable here and there in his
books, we shall have said enough of the special characteristics of his mind and of his
work.
The mind, we may add, is acute, observant, apprehensive, analytic in no small
degree; that work is remarkably bright and luminous, is rarely picturesque and vigorous
[rarely meaning to a degree only rarely seen?], and is apt, moreover, to impress one as
with a mingled sense of culture and of force, of polish and of power. Neither is altogether
satisfactory, it is true, but both are excellent in their way, and to both we are, with good
reason, most grateful.
The Return of the Native
Evening Standard May 2 1878
In Belgravia the distinguishing feature is still Mr Hardy’s novel of “The Return of the
Native.” It possesses all his great power of developing a plot of absorbing interest from
what seems a restricted basis, his concentrated power of expression, his massive style,
and also his tedious love of tiresome commonplace characters. [Whole note]
The Observer Jan 5 1879
There is a touch of true art, though the touch is from one point of view somewhat risky,
in the manner in which Mr Thomas Hardy opens his new novel, The Return of the Native.
His first chapter introduces us to none of the characters destined to play parts in the story,
unless, indeed, the Heath of Egdon may be considered one of the dramatis personae. The
frontispiece consists of Egdon Heath’s portrait in the form of a sketch-map; passage after
passage throughout the three volumes is taken up with the description of the wide waste
land of what Mr Hardy calls Wessex; and its various conditions, characteristics, and
appearances are carefully studied for their own sake. The subject is handled by the author
as it could only be by one who loves it. The moods and tempers of old Egdon, which may
with probable accuracy be identified by most dwellers in the south western counties of
England, are depicted with the most admirable and sympathetic insight.
[quotes the heather-music passage]
For novel readers, who would feel inclined to skip passages such as this, regarding the
analysis of the “worn whisper” of “mummied heath bells” as tedious and overdone, The
Return of the Native cannot but seem an extremely dull development of original fiction.
They will not care to note how the prominence given to the Heath itself is justified in the
course of the story by the influence which it has upon those who dwell on it and near it;
they will not forgive the occasional absurdity into which the author’s subtleties betray
him for the sake of his bold vigour of conception, and of his success in preserving from
first to last the strange weird neutral tint which he has chosen for his picture. They are
scarcely to be blamed; for The Return of the Native is for the most part written in a style
almost ostentatiously disdainful of any effort to secure popularity.
[The talk of Grandfer Cantle, conception of Christian, portrait of Venn etc] all these are
full of life, and would be worth attention, if only because they deal with a type of
existence fast being improved off the face of the earth by railways, building operations,
compulsory education, and other agencies of destructive as well as creative tendency.
Daily Telegraph Dec 3 78
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 thereon, with all the semblance of precise
truth. [“imaginary” scene!]
Times 5 Dec
On about the unreality of rustic language again; this happens in well over half of all
reviews.
It may be imagined that Mr Hardy, with his talents for word-painting and his turn for
picturesque expression, makes the most of those highly dramatic materials, though his
treatment is in the Grosvenor Galley style.
The Graphic Dec 7 1878
They put him nearly up with GE, admit the doubt whether he is not equal to her in
depicting rural life.
Spectator 8 Feb 79
the strange figures of his Wessex peasantry, though full of picturesque and humorous
elements, are never so presented that the reader is able to accept them as true pictures of
rustic life even on these wild moors
London Nov 23 1878
The same critic as earlier with the same essential complaint—purely intellectual
sympathy inadequate. Also compares him to James (Europeans) and Black (McLeod of
Dare) to Hardy’s advantage—and is good on James. Thinks Elfride and even the girl in
Indiscretion are better than Eustacia, though she is good—that he is as good as Meredith
as a man creating women. Interesting, for he seems to admire Hardy against his whole
personal prejudices, and strives to do him justice while seeing so clearly what he thinks
of as his major defect as expressed earlier on The Hand of Ethelberta. The first I have
read to compare him with Hugo. I have more sympathy with this guy than I did earlier.
See below under Vanity Fair for some extracts. He invents “Hardyism.” [See below also,
under Vanity Fair]
Examiner Nov 30 1878
Cf with Hugo also. Not the same reviewer as before.
Vanity Fair Nov 30 78
“RN” is one of the most remarkable books of the last twenty years. . . . His art is a thing
by itself, and will not stand labelling with the name of school or master.
. . . the great, almost transcendent merits which come every now and again to give
the keenest intellectual pleasure. This last phrase names the keynote of the book. Its
interest is purely intellectual. . . . As a great critic has said, Mr Hardy observes his people
from above.
[This is evidently an allusion to the London review of The Return of the Native that had
appeared a week earlier, the author of which is clearly highly regarded. The reviewer
wrote: “His sympathy is after all an intellectual and not an emotional sympathy; you
never cry over him and you seldom laugh. You read and think; you are neither painfully
affected, nor the reverse. He regards his world from above; his men and women are seen
in bird’s-eye view; and it is not as human beings but as studies that they interest you. And
then that note of unsoundness! Decidedly, Mr Hardy’s cleverness is incalculable, or one
would admire him more discreetly.” I think it is a “note of theatricality” that he finds
unsound: “the introduction of exaggerated circumstances, of an offensive personality, of
an inopportune conceit, the effect aimed at and striven for with all seriousness and all
strength. This note of theatricality is painfully distinct in Mr Hardy’s work, and is
perhaps his greatest defect. He is acute, audacious, sober, excessively intelligent and
gifted with a greater capacity for taking pains than most living writers; but somehow or
other he has moments of Hardyism that go far to ruin him in the eyes of a careful reader.
His writing is very much like Mr Irving’s acting.]
Hardy is a master, just not a “supreme master.”
Sat Rev Jan 4 79
There is a rising school of novelists, of which Mr Hardy is one of the ablest members,
who seem to construct their fictions for themselves rather than for other people.
We are in England all the time, but in a world of which we seem to be absolutely
ignorant; even a vague uncertainty hangs over the chronology.
Egdon Heath is one of the wildest spots in all England, and is situated among some of the
most sequestered of parishes. The people seem to know nothing of high-roads or stagecoaches; there is nothing of a market-town in the immediate vicinity . . . there is not a
good-sized village, and hardly even a hamlet. . . . There must have been landed
proprietors, we presume, and yet we hear nothing of a squire, and there is only incidental
notice of a parson when some of the natives are joined together in matrimony.
Academy Nov 30 78
Hugo again, “Hugoesque insincerity” no less. Prefers A Pair of Blue Eyes, as do others.
Mr Hardy has, I ought to note, been at the pains of making a map of his locality, which
should be consulted attentively, as it is of considerable use.
Liverpool Mercury Dec 79 on 1vol
The six books of which it is composed are full of deep and varied interest, while the
sketch map, though an unusual and even an original feature, makes Egdon Heath,
Shadwater Weir, and the other points of the tale all the more intelligible.
John Bull Nov 30 1878
Mr Hardy’s novels are certainly very unlike those of any other writer . . .
The scene of his story is laid on Egdon Heath, an unenclosed wide stretch of moorland
among the hills of Wessex; and a plan of the heath prefixed to the first volume at the
same time enables the reader to follow the topographical details, and gives an air of
apparent reality to the narrative. It is not, however, a device that we can recommend to an
inferior artist; and our vivid conception of the locality to which the native returned is due,
not so much to this unusual frontispiece as to the descriptive power of the novelist.
On the whole reviewers have so far ranked Hardy very highly; and The Return of the
Native has had very splendid reviews I think
The Trumpet-Major
Daily News nd
On the other hand, the critics who found his style in former works obscure and illusive
will be satisfied with the absence of any such peculiarity in the this one. It is a simple
story, simply told . . .
Academy (Saintsbury) nd
In these volumes Mr Hardy has almost entirely laid aside the exaggerated oddities of
phrase which, if they were, as they very likely were, true to nature, were certainly not true
to art. [He refers to dialogue here, not descriptive prose.]
Mr Hardy is not the man to let his moral bite anyone . . .
Court Circular Nov 20 1880
No eccentricities
Several reviews mention Weymouth and Dorsetshire; but Public Opinion nd has
A good, sound tale, that carries one back to the days when the armies of Napoleon were
so close to the English soil that an invasion was feared at any unforseen point, even on
the coast of Wessex.
Which is very strange. It shows how far Wessex has been imprinted in the reading
public’s consciousness by now.
Compares him with “Bulwer, and never leaves a good thing unsaid”
Whitehall Review Feb 3rd 1881
The scene is laid in a village near the Wessex coast “in the days of high-waisted and
muslin-gowned women” . . .[It is the influence of the first sentence of the book]
Sat Rev Nov 6 188
. . . less of the quaint phrasing, turns of thought, and unexpected similes which
sometimes tended to degenerate into affectation.
. . . two ladies of limited means, living in a village near the Wessex coast.
Vanity Fair Nov 27 1880
Compares to TH’s advantage Anne with Mrs Oliphant’s English girls “something
indefinably delicate, indefinably sexual, which the best of Mrs Oliphant’s types do not
show. As usual with Mr Hardy, he has chosen only to talk about the Wessex folk whom
he knows.”
Queen Nov 13 1880
Mr Hardy’s style is much improved by his abandoning that semi-scientific jargon which
disfigured his earlier works for some very telling phrases made up of plain words.
Spectator Dec 18 80
A faculty of seeing more things than the ordinary eye can discern, opens the way to
making mountains out of molehills . . .
Good on women.
Athenaeum 20 Nov 80
Mr Hardy seems to be in the way to do for rural life what Dickens did for that of the
town.
Dorsetshire.
John Bull Nov 13 80
Hardy’s best.
. . . the action passes entirely on the Dorsetshire coast, not far from Weymouth.
. . . the scenes upon the esplanade at Weymouth, where the loyalty and patriotism of the
inhabitants of Wessex were so deeply stirred . . . [He seems to be able to shift from one to
the other without comment, the only one to have both so far.]
Examiner 27 Nov 80
Those who know Dorsetshire well, or even those who may have made a few rambles on
foot in the neighbourhood of Weymouth will, apart form the frequent references to that
royal watering-place, have little difficulty in identifying the scene . . .
. . . but of the real country life of England when the Corsican ogre was preparing to gulp
down our grandfathers and grandmothers we know too little. This is what Mr Hardy
paints for us with so much vraisemblance that it would not be in the least surprising to
hear “The Trumpet-Major” was founded upon a bit of real Dorset family history. But it
could not have been written without a good deal of study of local history, the customs
and the costumes, the lanes and the footpaths, the bye-ways rather than the highways of
the time . . .
Times Feb1 80
. . . less of the incessant straining after quaint effects in language . . . [so good]
St James’s Gazette Nov 23 80
For it is one of the charms of “TM” that it is almost an historical novel, and yet represents
a state of things well-nigh as far off our experience as the great civil war, with a vividness
as of memory. Mr Hardy brings before us the life of the southern counties when they
were one vast camp . . . in a way that suggests a large treasure of stories gathered from
people who had seen these things.
A Laodicean
Sat Rev Jan14 82
Indeed it is a matter for wonder that Mr Hardy should have employed the very odd
incident which serves to make De Stancy wish for an introduction to Paula—an incident
which, if it were not related with such evident unconsciousness, would certainly go near
to being offensive.
Observer April 2 82
Who, for instance, but Mr Hardy would have dared to exhibit his heroine to one of his
heroes as Miss Power is exhibited to Captain De Stancy while practising in her
gymnasium? No harm is intended by the passage, and the writer is clearly unconscious of
its riskiness . . .
The Court Circular Jan 28 1882
Thinks this is the best, the one that puts him up there with Scott, Thackeray and GE.
[Everyone thinks it is different from the rest]
Not so many reviews here.
Two on a Tower
Pall Mall Dec 16 82
. . . everyone admits his wonderful knowledge of the mind and manners of the Western
peasant.
St James’s Gazette
. . . a man who can put before you in a few square inches of print a vivid picture of
natural scenery; who can hit off in a few powerful sentences the outward behaviour and
the inward emotions of human beings under the influence of various impulses or of
singular situations; who with a few strokes of his pen can make you see with your eyes
and hear with your ears the very life and dialogue of a rustic community, with its
irresistibly comic forms and idioms and figures of speech, such a man is almost
independent of the mere story he chooses to tell. It is a pity however, when, as in the
present case, such a man selects his theme with a disregard, apparently, of all moral
purpose, and condescends to string together a series of events which are more likely, on
the whole, to shock than to please the majority of his readers. . . .There is no reason, of
course, why an ecclesiastical dignitary should be ex officio less liable than anybody else
to have untimely paternity thrust upon him; but Mr Hardy’s choice has a suspicion of
burlesque about it, and may even be regarded in certain quarters as a studied and
gratuitous insult aimed at the Church.
Hardy wrote a letter, denies intending such an insult, and points to the parson as St
Cleeve’s friend and “one of the most honourable characters in the novel”!!
Anonymous review of part I of the novel published by Trübner:
We believe that there is much shrewdness, originality, and humour amongst the
peasantry, as amongst any other class, but that it does not come out in the presence of the
gentry. The very ignorance and superstition of the agricultural poor give rise to and foster
much of the amusing quaintness of thought which Mr Hardy describes; indeed there can
be little doubt that education, while it adds so much to knowledge, has a vast tendency to
smooth away originality of thought, and certainly must drain the reservoir of strange
opinion and fancy the sources of whose supply are ignorance and misconception.
Athenaeum Nov 18 82
. . . the way out of her difficulty which she actually takes is little short of revolting . . .
Spectator Feb 3 83
. . . a story as unpleasant as it is practically impossible.
Sat Rev 18 Nov 82
In A Laodicean the author showed us very queer people doing very queer things . . .
“The Dorsetshire Labourer”
The Newcastle Courant 29 June 83
Uses the essay to show that (in contradiction to Mr Bright)
Mr Hardy’s statements, however, go to show that the intervention of Parliament on behalf
of the labourer is not needed, seeing that in a time of agricultural depression it is
demonstrated he can more than hold his own.
[selective quotation of course]
PMG June 27 83 paraphrases.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Vanity Fair 4 Sept 1886
Mr Hardy draws from life. That is in some part the secret of his success. What he writes
he knows of, as well as daily communion with it can make him know it. From the
window of Mr Hardy’s study in Dorsetshire you may see the Galbury (sic) Woods of
“The Greenwood Tree” and Bathsheba Everdene’s farm, as well as one or two other bits
of country which have been “adopted” into other novels. This one is once more
descriptive of its author’s surroundings, as anyone who knows them will perceive.
PMG nd
The quaint old Wessex town of Casterbridge (it is no secret to say that it has been
recognised as Dorchester) nestling among its wolds, seems to live before us, or to
vegetate, as we in these railroad times would rather say.
Still about half don’t like his rustics, hinds, boors.
The State May 27 86
In many essentials as well as in minor points, Casterbridge is very like Dorchester.
[Quote butterflies and thistledown] Casterbridge, like Dorchester, is, indeed, the
continuation, not the end, of the country life around.
The Woodlanders
Leeds Mercury 25.May 87
[describes the painterly account of the development of the seasons in woodland] This
strong flavour of nature is in exquisite harmony with the humanity in its midst. We feel
that the railway, with its bustle and distractions, is miles away, that no great town is near
with its brightness and animation, to make the life of the villages appear petty and
uninteresting; and that the strong passions and ambitions which move the outer world are
not felt in this calm, remote woodland region. [hah!]
Daily News May 28 87
Mr Hardy lingers in the Dorsetshire copses which know his footsteps so well and is less
impressed with the luxuriant growth of shrub and tree than with the dubious strife and
abortive effort which mark the eternal struggle for the supremacy of “the fittest.”
Dublin Evening Mail 30 March 87
Suffice to say, in conclusion, that re-united, husband and wife proceed on a second
honeymoon with a dispatch which is narrated by the author with an amusing
unconsciousness of indelicacy, peculiarly his own.
Warrington Guardian Nov 24 87
In the opening chapters of this story the reader is conducted to a woodland district called
Great Hintock on the South coast . . .
World Apr 20 87
There is a good deal of natural painting of the pre-Raphaelite kind, where the picture is
rather lost in the elaboration of its details . . .
The book is literature, and very few of our latter-day novels are that; but it is not a good
book nor a pleasant one.
John Bull May 7 87
But in The Woodlanders Mr Hardy has gone out of his way to bring in episodes
calculated to offend. . . . the Susan Dawson incident is gratuitously offensive. . . .This
makes us the more regret that the general tone of the book should be leavened by so large
an infusion of the French novel.
Cambridge Review May 4 87
. . . another phase of the West Country life . . .
Academy 9 April 87
With the possible exception of Two on a Tower, it will be regarded as his most
disagreeable book. [And he explains very acutely why; it is almost the first scholarly
review Hardy has had, and the first to look at a theme rather than at character or morality
as the primary interest.]
Sat Rev Apl 2 87
In The Woodlanders Mr Hardy returns to that region of Wessex in which his early
successes were made. Without attempting too rashly to conjecture the exact scene of the
story, we can plainly enough gather from indications which the author gives that it lies
near the centre of the county of Dorset, not far from the hilly and orchard-covered
confines of the beautiful Vale of Blackmore. This district inspired the most characteristic
pieces of the late Mr Barnes . . .
A more thoughtful than usual criticism of Hardy’s rustic speech.
Daily Telegraph Aprl 12 87
All this and much more goes on in the midst of the Wessex country so often and so well
described by the same author. Again we find ourselves in the midst of the quaint old
Dorset life, familiarised to us in former rural tales.
The Times Apl 27 87
He is a national writer in the especial sense that, Antaeus –like, he derives his vigor from
his native soil. Rooting himself in his favourite south-western counties, he is inspired to
paint faithful idyll after idyll of rustic scenery and rustic life.
The Literary World April 15 87
It is fresh, interesting, powerful, but its moral tone is anything but elevating; and while
the first essential of a novelist is to interest and hold the attention, it is no less his duty to
try, as far as he may, to leave his reader the better for the perusal of his work.
The scene is laid in a Dorsetshire village . . .
Morning Post has no idea where it is set! Apl 6 87
Wessex Tales
Literary World July 27 88
The five short tales which make up the two volumes under notice are concerned with the
simple population of that part of England anciently called Wessex.
Morning Post May 21 88
The legends, superstitions, and local customs a portion of the south-west of “agricultural
England” are woven into a series of tales . . .
Leeds Mercury 2 July 88
Nobody better understands the characteristics of the labouring classes in sleepy
Dorsetshire . . .
Times June 2 88
These idylls of West country life . . .
[Well-received, very well.]
A Group of Noble Dames
Spectator review says that what’s wrong with Hardy is that he never creates a noble or
heroic woman—Marty South is the nearest and she’s in the background. Aug 1 1891.
. . . it is a collection of Wessex tales, supposed to have been told . . .
. . . the moral squalor which pervades the present work.
Anti-Jacobin June 6 91
How much truth is compounded with these tales it is impossible to say, though there may
be people in the county which Mr Hardy calls Wessex who can trace these “noble dames”
...
Mr Hardy has complained of the shackles of convention which prevent the English
novelist from treating certain phases of life with the necessary fulness; the freedom of
these narratives ought to be some compensation for years of irksome restraint.
PMG July 8 1891
Mr Thomas Hardy, if we are not mistaken, was one of the novelists who raised a plaintive
wail, some time ago, over the shackles imposed upon their genius by Anglo-Saxon
prudery. We have never felt any great sympathy with these martyrs to Mudie.
The book might have been called “Scandals of a Southern County, or the Merry Wives of
Wessex.”
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Times Jan 13 92
Mr Hardy’s latest novel is his greatest. Amid his beloved Wessex valleys and uplands . . .
We live and move among the Dorset “work folk” . . .
In Wessex there are bleak uplands as well as rich vales . . .
Daily Chronicle Dec 26 91
A certain shadowy resemblance to “Aurora Leigh” meets us here and there, but MR
HARDY has struck deeper into the mysteries of heredity, the subtle mixtures of blood
and temperament, which fascinate all our truly great moderns, from IBSEN to
MEREDITH.
Interview about Tess in Bookman 1892
They would never have lived happily. Angel was far too fastidious and particular. He
would inevitably have thrown her fall in her face. But indeed I had little to do with it.
When I got to the middle of the story, the characters took their fates into their own hands,
and I literally had no power.
“I hate word-painting. I never try to do it; all I endeavour is to give an impression of a
scene as it strikes me.” . . . “I always go to a place first before attempting to describe it. I
went purposely to Winchester that I might know what to say when I described Angel
Clare and her sister climbing up the hill . . .”
“I knew those three dairymaids as a boy very well. The old clergyman was a much-loved
vicar in this very neighbourhood. Bathsheba Everdene in “FMC” was my own aunt.
Most reviews of the novel well-known.
Life’s Little Ironies
Times March 30 94
Wessex, and Weymouth in Melancholy H. Melchester in Circuit.
the life-tales of his Wessex folk—a race in which we seem to recognise the bed-rock of
our Anglo-Saxon nature, stripped of the artificialities of complex life.
Jude the Obscure
Nothing not in the published collections of reviews
On Bertram Windle’s The Wessex of Thomas Hardy 1902
Outlook Feb 8 02
The revival of the ancient name of Wessex for a series of novels “Mainly of the kind
called local,” which seemed to their author “ to require . . scene,” is certainly one of the
happiest instances of imaginative tact in modern fiction. It has “caught on.” As Mr Hardy
says in the preface to the latest edition of “FMC,” until 1874, the date of the original
publication, Wessex was a name co connote the Norman Conquest.
Weekly Register Jan 17 02
The matter of fact child’s question, “Is it true?” after he has been told a story, must have
been asked over and over again by readers of Mr Hardy’s novels of that “realistic dreamcountry” Wessex . . .
Of Tess of the d'Urbervilles: “For we realised how true, even down to her ancient lineage
with its ghostly memories, is the background, in front of which poor Tess’s figure moves,
while her wandering feet tread no mere stage boards, but real English soil, upon which
successive generations, Celts, Romans, Saxons, Normans, have lived, loved, fought,
worked, and died, leaving their traces behind them.
Of course, the reality of Mr Hardy’s Wessex can hardly be entitled an open secret.
He himself has acknowledged . . . [preface to OM Tess of the d'Urbervilles] The old
geographical word he has resuscitated gives the longitude and latitude of the land which
he peoples with the creations of his brain, and he has gone even further and kept the
names of many of its places. His friends and admirers have been able to identify sites,
buildings, and places which he has little more than rechristened before pressing them into
his service, to a degree which leaves the “thin veil” that he casts “over the localities
which he describes,” a very thin veil indeed: little more, in fact, than a haze which,
speaking from our own experience, had become almost a distress to the eyes. This mist
Professor Windle has dispersed . . . We now know that Wessex is not merely “drawn
from the real,” but that, except in a few details, such as the changing of the position of the
house, bringing one village nearer to another than it actually is, it represents the real.
Though peopled by dreams, it is no mere dream-land, but a true bit of England, with
ancient memories and an actual present. The Invention of Wessex is a disclosure of what
those who store their minds with ancient memories and have “eyes to see” can find to
feed their imaginations with in English scenery.
To undertake to write a guide-book to Wessex was a bold intrusion of the real on
the artistic; but the result has more than justified the venture.
Standard nd
Mr Windle’s purpose is to take the reader over the West Country included in the bounds
of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, which the author of “MC” and many other stories
has resuscitated, to make it a world of modern romance . . .
Cambridge Review 2 Feb 1905
‘WESSEX’ BOOKS
The first published key to ‘Wessex’ topography seems to have come from Mr Hardy
himself in the sketch map accompanying the first (1878) edition of ‘RN.’ Though this
map has fictitious names, anyone familiar with Puddletown Heath and the Frome Valley
to the south thereof recognises at once the region of ‘Egdon’ forming the scene of the
most local of all the novels. [Really?!?]
. . . a short sketch in The Bookman in [October]1891, which contained a map of
‘Wessex’ localities, and to the chapter on ‘Wessex’ in Miss Annie MacDonell’s most
pleasing essay on the novels entitled ‘Thomas Hardy,’ published in 1894. This and the
map accompanying it make no pretense to finality in the quest, but are a good guide . . .
In 1902 there appeared Mr Wilkinson Sherren’s ‘The Wessex of Romance’
[on Windle] . . . which house in ‘Corn Street’ was occupied by ‘the Mayor’ in the days of
his prosperity. The latter, a great problem to ‘Wessex’ pilgrims, a previous writer tells us
Mr Hardy has pointed out to him.
‘The Hardy Country’ of Mr C G Harper is a recent volume in Messrs Black’s ‘Pilgrimage
Series.’ [he doesn’t like it much]
On Talbothays: “and above all we have the quotation from Mr Clive Holland in The
Bookman, in 1901, from a letter from Mr Hardy to himself, that no one farm represents
‘Talbothays.’
This mention of ‘Wessex’ books would be incomplete without a reference to the work of
Mr F Whitehead, whose charming pictures and etchings from his caravan studio on
‘Egdon Heath’ have given the beauties of ‘Wessex’ to us from year to year and formed a
large part of ‘Wessex’ paintings in Bond Street in 1895. [Signed H.H.B.]
On Wilkinson Sherren’s The Wessex of Romance 1902.
Queen Sept 13 1902
Has no inverted commas for Wessex—it is accepted as a part of England. Has a nice little
bit on dialect including: A Dorset mother will say to a child ‘Don’t-ee be taffety now.
Finish yer orts” [argues with Sherren over dialect interpretations].
Tablet June 14 1902
Not really a review, but an excuse for commentary.
Of Hardy “we must recognise the exceptional gifts by which he has vivified a people
whom it would otherwise have been difficult to have made interesting. “Unintelligent
apathy” were not their truest, because too charitable, description. “A speck of life against
the dull earth he is tilling, warped and stained by labour, his speech unready, his gait
slow, his intellectual processes tardy.”
Speaker June 7 1902
It is to be hoped, however, that “Wessex” will not become a popular synonym for Dorset:
there need be no additions to the already large stock of such “popular errors.”
Daily Mirror April 7 1906
A letter from Arthur E Kimber: “I was simply astounded when I read that the Worksop
Public Library Committee had ordered the librarian to destroy Hardy’s “Tess of the
d’Urbervilles” and “Jude the Obscure.”
Daily Sketch Feb 24 1914
Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” recently disappeared from the shelves of a provincial
free library, and could only be obtained by kind permission of the librarian, who hid it
from the public in his own room.
TLS 22 June 1906
But Wessex, not Dorset only, is its theme; and Wessex has no special historic unity. It is
a romantic area created by Mr Hardy.