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© Indy Clark 2015
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ISBN 978–1–137–50501–9
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Indy, 1971–
Thomas Hardy’s Pastoral: An Unkindly May / Indy Clark, University Tutor and
Lecturer, Post-Completion Fellow, University of Queensland.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–137–50501–9
1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Pastoral
fiction, English—History and criticism. 3. Rural conditions in
literature. I. Title.
PR4757.P34C57 2015
823'.8—dc23
2015013980
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
viii
Introduction
1
1 Arcadia, Wessex, and the South Country
21
2 Landscape, Nature, and Work
59
3 What About the Workers?
101
4 Pastoral and Modernity
141
Conclusion
184
Notes
196
Works Cited
204
Index
213
vii
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Introduction
In a scene that would not be out of place in the Idylls of Theocritus
or the Eclogues of Virgil, ‘The Ballad-Singer’, from 1909’s Time’s
Laughingstocks, finds the lovesick speaker calling to his muse to sing
a tune that will ease his sorrow; but this is Wessex, not Arcadia, so
rather than to Pierian goddesses, the entreaty is directed at the humble,
earthly ballad-singer:
Sing, Ballad-singer, raise a hearty tune;
Make me forget that there was ever a one
I walked with in the meek light of the moon
When the day’s work was done.
Rhyme, Ballad-rhymer, start a country song;
Make me forget that she whom I loved well
Swore she would love me dearly, love me long,
Then—what I cannot tell!
Sing, Ballad-singer, from your little book;
Make me forget those heart-breaks, achings, fears;
Make me forget her name, her sweet sweet look—
Make me forget her tears. (Hynes 1: 291; 1–12)1
The speaker seeks a ballad to erase the actual difficulties of his present
moment, but as the repetition and increasing desperation of the final
stanza suggest, he cannot forget. The emollient pastoral song is never
heard, it remains idealized and unrealized while Hardy’s poem, having
seemingly set out to ease the speaker’s pain, succeeds only in memorializing it. The unheard bucolic song is not pastoral – that would be too
simple – but the tension between its perceived effect and the speaker’s
1
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situation is. ‘The Ballad-Singer’ reveals and unravels the complexities
of the pastoral, and in so doing, dramatizes the conflict at the heart
of Hardy’s adaptation of the mode; that is, the dialectical relationship
between literary convention and actual experience. The hearty country
songs in the little ballad book are part of an established repertoire that is
disconnected from the speaker. In resorting to their comfort, the speaker
eschews actual experience and a complex situation is in danger of being,
in Raymond Williams’s terms, ‘reduced to a convention’ (Country 261).
In contrast to the absent ballad, Hardy’s poem purports to represent the
speaker’s predicament, but even this utterance is compromised with
the emphasized silence of ‘what I cannot tell’ at line 8, intimating to the
reader the ineffable horrors that conventional pastoral simply cannot
contain. The pastoral was an idealized form and Hardy knew it. As a
result, much of his poetry of the rural challenges what had become the
restrictions of an unrepresentative literary convention.
Well into the nineteenth century and beyond, pastoral ideas and
images upheld bourgeois valorizations of rural life that obscured the
poverty and hardship of the countryside. Indeed, since the eighteenth
century, the pastoral tradition had formed what Roger Sales describes
as ‘an essential part of the counter-revolution’, an ‘idiom’, that ‘always
tended to endorse the status quo’ (21). Hardy’s work did not unquestioningly support a ruling-class agenda, however, because he did not
sit comfortably within the middle class. His pastoral is defined by the
constant conflict between his origin, his aspiration, and ultimately his
position as established writer, a conflict represented in Hardy’s disguised
autobiography, described by Peter Widdowson as a ‘piece of defensive
self-fashioning’ full of ‘extraordinary strategies, suppressions, occlusions, half-truths and evasions’ (Essays 3).2 In this book, I argue that
Hardy’s crisis of social mobility becomes a crisis of form in his poetry as
he represents hitherto obscured relations of class and labour. Yet while
it reveals the actualities of agrarian capitalism, Hardy’s work does not
abandon the literary conventions of the pastoral. As ‘The Ballad-Singer’
demonstrates, it is through the mode itself that Hardy questions its
ideological functions. Despite Paul Alpers’s assertion that ‘the rhetoric and conventions of earlier pastoral have no apparent afterlife’ in
Hardy’s poems (300), the ghosts of Theocritus and Virgil haunt many
of the examples that follow. In fact, so strong is this particular influence that a reconsideration of the nature of classical pastoral forms a
major part of my reading of Hardy’s poetry. This is why I have chosen
to describe Hardy’s approach as an adaptation of the pastoral rather
than as counter-pastoral, or realist, or some other adjective forged from
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Introduction
3
a suitably conflicting literary term. This position demands a considered
definition of the pastoral tradition, which I enact by historicizing the
literary convention before exploring the implications of a tradition in
process. From this point of literary and historical context, I then establish Hardy’s place in that process.
A pastoral tradition
During the time that Hardy was writing, or at least for the first half
of his career, the pastoral was thought to be in crisis. ‘The woods of
Arcady are dead’, wrote Yeats in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’
(1889), ‘And over is their antique joy’ (7: 1–2). ‘The Pastoral has fallen
to a tarnished name’, declared Edmund K. Chambers in his introduction to English Pastorals, ‘It stands for something faded and fantastic’;
a ‘little instrument’ that had once produced such ‘eloquent music’ was
now ‘broken and mute’ (xv). Chambers dismisses eighteenth-century
pastoral as ‘ridiculous’ (xv), favouring Elizabethan and Jacobean
work. Its ‘honourable career had ended in a peaceful grave’, laments
Chambers, ‘long before Pope’ (xvi). C. H. Herford, the general editor of
the series of which English Pastorals is part, agreed with the diagnosis,
announcing that the pastoral had a ‘clearly marked and seemingly
irrevocable … end’ (Chambers vi). By the last decade of the nineteenth
century, critics believed that it was possible for pastoralism to ‘be
reviewed as a whole from a distance’ (Chambers vi). When Hardy’s
first collection of verse was published, it was a widely held view that
the pastoral was pushing up the daisies. It had ceased to be. It was an
ex-literary mode.
At the end of the Victorian age, the main criticism levelled at the
pastoral concerned its artificiality. In an age of humanist realism, when
middle-class commentators wanted texts to reflect their interpretation
of truth and reality, conventional courtiers disguised as shepherds simply would not do. Most critics, however, were able to discern a kind of
realism in the Idylls of Theocritus. Chambers writes that although his
poems were of a ‘delicate artificiality’, they preserved ‘the main outlines
of the actual life from which they sprang’ (xxii); Theocritus’s Idylls ‘were
a poet’s transcript from actuality’ (xxxiii). W. W. Greg, writing in the
first few years of the twentieth century, argues that although Theocritus
‘raised the pastoral life of Sicily into the realms of ideal poetry, he was
careful not to dissociate his version from reality’ (10). Leaving behind
the Greek’s ‘faithful reproduction of the main conditions of actual life’,
it was Virgil who, for Greg and many others, ‘made the bucolic eclogue
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what, with trifling variation, it was to remain for eighteen centuries, a
form based on artificiality and convention’ (13).
Although perceived as artificial and conventional, at least the
pastoral was honest about its distance from actuality. The realism of
the late nineteenth century was as much an artificial convention as the
pastoral, but its selection of a palatable truth made it a reality agreeable
to purveyors of bourgeois taste. Although it was believed that pastoral
poetry had had its day, the dialectic between bucolic artificiality and the
humanist realism desired by the middle-class reading public produced
the ‘recognised although perhaps relatively rarely practised genre’ of the
‘prose idyll’ (Jones 151). Hardy described Under the Greenwood Tree as a
pastoral,3 and as Lawrence Jones has shown, he wrote it to conform to
the conventions of a prose idyll: ‘a reconciliation of the traditional
pastoral idyll and the realistic novel’ (152). The pastoral was not dead;
true to the Darwinian spirit of the age, it was adapting. The resulting work
satisfied the need for psychological realism while providing the escapist
vignettes of rural life that the predominantly urban, middle-class readers
still wanted. Pastoral ideas had found new life in an adapted form, albeit
a relatively minor subgenre. Despite its nod towards realism, however,
the representation of rural society was still largely sublimated, with
actual relations obscured.
The twentieth century saw renewed critical interest in the mode.
Work by Greg, Empson, Kermode, Panofsky, and Poggioli, to name
but a few, all offered different accounts of the diversity and complexity of the pastoral.4 Indeed, such was the critical noise that by 1964,
Robin Magowan summed up the state of the field by announcing that
‘one might claim that there are as many definitions as there are critics of pastoral’ (331), a view shared by Alpers some thirty years later:
‘it sometimes seems as if there are as many versions of pastoral as
there are critics and scholars who write about it’ (8). The one thing
upon which consensus can be reached, however, is that defining the
pastoral is not nearly as easy as it at first might appear. At its most
basic level, it is about shepherds singing of the peaceful rural life, but
as Greg writes, ‘To lay down at starting that the essential quality of
pastoral is the realistic or at least recognizably “natural” presentation
of actual shepherd life would be to rule out of court nine tenths of the
work that comes traditionally under that head’ (1). In fact, so notoriously slippery is the definition of the pastoral that it is very tempting to heed Greg’s advice that ‘little would be gained by attempting
beforehand to give any strict account of what is meant by “pastoral”
in literature’ (2), and move on.
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5
‘Pastoral’ is common in both general and specialist communication,
signifying a dizzying range of sometimes contradictory meanings. Terry
Gifford identifies three ‘types’ of usage: a literary form with its own tradition and conventions; any text that describes favourably the country
in implicit or explicit contrast to the city, within which a ‘delight in the
natural is assumed’ (2); and third, a pejorative adjective that is critical or
dismissive of a simplified or idealized construction of the rural world. So
the pastoral can be pleasing and disturbing; natural and artificial; a literary convention and a way of life. It is a word and a form dependent on
a complex interplay between text and context that borders at times on
contradiction. Owing to the pastoral’s diversity, Annabel Patterson suggests that: ‘It is not what pastoral is that should matter to us’; instead,
critical focus should be on what pastoral ‘can do’, how it can be used for
‘a range of functions and intentions’ (7). Such elasticity and dynamism,
and its ideological implications, are central to more recent interpretations of the pastoral mode. In New Versions of Pastoral (2009), James and
Tew state that ‘Arcadian or bucolic traditions’ are often ‘misunderstood
or misrepresented’ as ‘simply a contraction into conservative nostalgia’
when, in fact, ‘in origin and in practice the dynamics of pastoral texts
are far more adaptable, capable as they are of fluid and complicated
ideological negotiations’ – negotiations that can lead to a ‘variety of
political and aesthetic adaptations’ (13). In their recent work on postcolonial ecocriticism, for example, Huggan and Tiffin are concerned
with the transformation of the pastoral ‘in different cultural and historical contexts’ (15). With a focus on the ‘settler societies’ of Australia,
Canada, and South Africa, they demonstrate how the pastoral can
‘explore the tensions between contradictory forms of social and political allegiance through which the juridical pressures of entitlement clash
with the ontological insistence to belong’ (20). Forty years before the
work of Huggan and Tiffin, or James and Tew, Thomas G. Rosenmeyer
had identified just how ‘extraordinarily rich and flexible’ the pastoral
tradition can be, noting that ‘a tidy definition of what is pastoral about
the pastoral tradition is beyond our reach’ (3). In relation to Hardy,
R. P. Draper proposes that ‘the pastoral tradition … offered a congenially
adaptable form which he could use for the expression of [his] complex
response to country life’ (20). Part of the reason for the mode’s richness
and flexibility, and for what James and Tew identify as the ‘adaptability
and complexity’ of the pastoral tradition (13), lies not in the definition
of the pastoral itself, but of the pastoral as a tradition.
‘All traditions are selective’, observes Raymond Williams in The Country
and the City, ‘the pastoral tradition quite as much as any other’ (18).
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It is this process of selection that informs my reading of the pastoral in
Hardy’s poetry. A ‘tradition is not the past’ writes Williams in Modern
Tragedy, ‘but an interpretation of the past’, an interpretation that
involves ‘valuation’ and, therefore, cannot be ‘neutral’ (38). According
to Williams, any tradition is ‘an intentionally selective version of a
shaping past’, with ‘certain meanings and practices … selected for
emphasis’ while others are ‘neglected or excluded’ (Marxism 115). With
both a vast actual historical record of rural relations and a wide literary
history from which to draw, the material that makes up the pastoral
is necessarily selected, and what is selected for representation and
what is left out shapes the work into a particular ideological product.
Importantly, the ‘present, at any time, is a factor in the selection and
valuation’ of the material (Tragedy 38), with any tradition becoming ‘an
aspect of contemporary social and cultural organization, in the interest
of the dominance of a specific class’ (Marxism 116). Although Williams
is considering tragedy when he argues that ‘what is offered to us as a
single tradition’ is, in fact, a significant ‘tension and variation’ in the
play between actual experience and literary convention (Tragedy 38),
pastoral may similarly be read as a tradition in process. Any definition
of the pastoral tradition, therefore, is complicated by considerations of
both what is signified by the pastoral and what is meant by tradition.
In this context, any work defined as ‘traditional pastoral’ cannot remain
unproblematized. Although a case could be argued for Theocritus’s Idylls
as, at least, foundational, ‘traditional pastoral’ usually refers to just one
example from many in the complex history representative of a particular way of seeing by a particular group of people at a particular time.
As I explore in Chapter 1, and with specific references thereafter, much
of what is considered traditional pastoral comes from the adaptation
of the mode during the Renaissance or from the work of the English
Augustans during the eighteenth century.
It is not just the way that new pastoral is written that is subject to
selection and adaptation; the way that previous versions of pastoral are
read also changes. This process of selective reading is clear when classical pastoral is considered closely. ‘A more flexible yet particularizing
account of pastoral’, write James and Tew, ‘promises to challenge the
misinterpretation and misreading of the classical tradition and its critical and creative legacies’ (14). Central to my discussion of the pastoral
in Hardy’s poetry is that much of what is read as the counter-pastoral
was always already a part of the pastoral in its early forms; only subsequently did the selective preservation of certain aspects mould it into a
particular shape. Using Virgil’s first Eclogue as an example, it is Tityrus’s
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situation – lying beneath a spreading beech tree playing country songs
on his slender pipe – that came to define the mode, and not the tensive
structural opposition generated by the forced eviction and exile of his
interlocutor, Meliboeus.
Despite the simple rural peace and harmony that came to define the
pastoral, the work of both Theocritus and Virgil is rich in its variety.
With this diversity in mind, the chapters that follow look at specific
classical examples of seemingly counter-pastoral themes such as loss,
death, sexuality, and exile, and how they resonate with Hardy’s verse.
The word ‘idyll’ has come to signify a happy or idealized time or place,
although originally its meaning was something closer to ‘poems in
various styles’, with the ‘pastoral connotations’ coming much later
(Kegel-Brinkgreve 3). Selection, however, is at the very heart of Virgil’s
‘Eclogues’, for although the word does not strictly mean ‘selected poems’
it does, at the very least, refer to ‘separate poems’ or ‘excerpts’, shaped
by the author to form a preconceived collection (Kegel-Brinkgreve 80).
What is clear is that both the Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of
Virgil contain a range of moods, styles, situations, and attitudes, a range
that became selectively narrowed into a restrictive convention that
dominated the pastoral of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries. When the full extent of what can be called pastoral is realized, when its many versions, adaptations, and transformations are
considered, the mode reveals the breadth and flexibility of its ideological functions. What Williams describes as ‘selective cultural adaptation’
thus produces the complexity in Hardy’s pastoral (Country 21). The very
process that had restricted what could be written into the mode now
widened it to include a new set of relations and experiences produced
by Hardy’s cultural position.
Hardy and the pastoral
The Life records that during 1887 alone Hardy had consumed a range
of pastoral works including Theocritus, Virgil, ‘Lycidas’, and poems
by Wordsworth and Coleridge (Early Life 267). In his library he held a
copy of Andrew Lang’s Theocritus, Bion and Moschus along with various
editions of the works of Virgil and Horace. The Literary Notebooks also
contain many references to Hesiod, Virgil, and Theocritus, including a
note that Virgil, like Homer, was ‘said to be base born’ (Björk 1: 27), and
another that states: ‘Hesiod has told us what the poor man thought &
felt’ (Björk 1: 55). In a piece gleaned from the Fortnightly Review,
Frederic Harrison suggests that in the work of Theocritus and Hesiod,
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among others, ‘we get glimpses of societies wh. to us are ideal in their
charm’ (Björk 1: 146). Most interesting, perhaps, is the copy of a Times
Literary Supplement review for Greg’s Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama
(Björk 2: 312–18). Despite this wide reading, when Hardy used the word
‘pastoral’ he, along with most of his contemporaries, often meant it as
an adjective for rural peace or simplicity. His work, however, illustrates
a much deeper understanding of the range of creative possibilities that
the tradition allows – an understanding of its breadth and complexity that has not been adequately explored by Hardy scholars. To date,
much of what has been written about Hardy’s pastoral focuses on his
prose rather than his poetry, a pattern that extends throughout Hardy
studies. R. P. Draper’s contribution to the Casebook series, Thomas Hardy:
Three Pastoral Novels (1987), for example, brings together critical writing
on the triumvirate of usual suspects: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from
the Madding Crowd, and The Woodlanders. In addition to selections from
Hardy and criticism contemporary to him, there are some perceptive
pieces from the sixties, seventies, and eighties that explore the complex
nature of Hardy’s pastoral, particularly the dialectic between ‘idealism’
and ‘realism’ that Draper feels the pastoral particularly embraces (20).
This relationship between Hardy’s pastoral and realism dominates most
of the notable critical texts. In Chapter 1, I include a short discussion
of some of these works and consider their implications for the poetry.
All of the criticism under analysis in this chapter identifies certain
examples of Hardy’s prose as pastoral but each reads differently the
operations of realism in his work. With regard to the pastoral in Hardy’s
poetry, the critical attitude is possibly best summed up by the first line
of Robert Langbaum’s article, ‘Hardy: Versions of Pastoral’. ‘The Return
of the Native’, announces Langbaum, ‘is Hardy’s greatest nature poem’
(245). I do not wish to dismiss the article out of hand, yet I take issue
with the designation of one of Hardy’s novels as his greatest nature
poem. Hardy, of course, wrote over nine hundred poems, many of
which could be described as ‘nature poems’. From these, Langbaum
could, I am sure, easily have chosen one he deemed to be the ‘greatest’.
As good a novel as The Return of the Native is, it is not Hardy’s greatest
nature poem simply because it is not a poem.
There are very few critical works on Hardy’s pastoral poetry. In
Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy, and the Subversion of Forms, Owen
Schur states that the ‘principal subject’ of the pastoral ‘is language itself’
(5). In what is largely a formalist reading of some of the poetry, Schur
explores the ways in which Hardy uses the rhetoric of the pastoral to
subvert the tradition as he reads it, although this promising hypothesis
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is not always convincingly propounded through the examples given.
Dennis Taylor’s short epilogue to Hardy’s Poetry, 1860–1928, ‘Indian
Summer: Hardy’s Pastoral Poetry’, relies on too narrow a view of what
is pastoral, reading the 1920s as an idyllic period in Hardy’s writing,
revealing him to be ‘a romantic pastoral poet in approximately a score
of poems’ (139). ‘The story of Hardy’s pastoral poetry before Human
Shows’, he states boldly, ‘is easy to tell because it is almost non-existent’
(145). Yet, as Alpers writes, ‘Almost any type of Hardy poem can be a
pastoral, but none need be’ (304). In light of post-Empsonian interpretations of the mode, this summation is compelling but ultimately too
vague to inform my selection of poems. An attempt at what I discern
to be the pastoral in Hardy’s poetry is necessary in order to justify the
selection of poems I have made.
While I acknowledge Alpers’s statement that ‘modern pastoral lyric
is not a specifiable subgenre, but a modal variant of modern lyric in
many of its forms’ (300), I focus upon Hardy’s poetry of the rural. I am
interested in Hardy’s representation of the country and, in particular,
the working country. Most importantly, I am concerned with the way
in which Hardy’s pastoral does not operate through a simple ‘country versus city’ dialectic; instead, it explores the interrelatedness of
rural and urban society, those relations that Williams describes as the
‘essential connections between town and country’ (Country 98). ‘The
Ballad-Singer’, for example, appears in a group of poems entitled
‘A Set of Country Songs’, a context that establishes the poem’s rural credentials, but this country is no uncomplicated isolated idyll. As part of
‘At Casterbridge Fair’, the poem’s setting is, in fact, a market town, the
commercial and administrative centre of Hardy’s Wessex. This country
setting is not an idealized nook of peace and tranquillity; it is a place of
work. As the speaker of ‘The Ballad-Singer’ reminds his listeners at line
4 of the poem, love and bucolic song can only occur ‘When the day’s
work’ is done. The primacy of work in Hardy’s novels has long been recognized, not least by Williams, but also more recently by Wotton, Dolin,
and Gatrell, so an analysis of the representation of labour in his poetry
is an understandable, if hitherto largely untrodden, path to take. This
does not, however, explain how work fits into the pastoral framework of
my reading. Work is normally associated with the georgic, often seen as
the more pragmatic cousin of the pastoral, but the distinction between
the two is far from clear. There are many examples of the representation
of work in early bucolic poetry. In order to forget Galateia, for example,
Polyphemus gives himself a good talking to in Idyll 11: ‘go and weave
your baskets, and gather tender shoots / To feed your lambs’ (39).5
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In Idyll 10, the reapers Milon and Battos are hard at work as they discuss
the latter’s love life. Milon’s song to Demeter includes reaping advice
and detail in the style of the Georgics or Hesiod’s Works and Days. ‘It’s
songs like that’, Milon tells Battos, ‘that men should sing who labour in
the sun’ (36). Eclogue 2, based on Idyll 11, refers to ‘the reapers, wearied
by the fierce heat’, and Corydon chides himself for allowing his vine to
be left ‘half-pruned on the thick-leaved elm’ and suggests, ‘Why don’t
you do instead a useful piece of work?’ (4: 10, 6: 72–3).
In addition to representations of labour in classical pastoral, there
are also moments of idealization in Virgil’s Georgics, as in Book 2, when
Virgil muses on the ‘innocence’, ‘peace’, and ‘easy livelihood’, of the
farmer (92: 458–74). Just as the counter-pastoral was always already a
part of the pastoral, so the georgic is not a counter but a complementary
form. Alpers suggests that it was in the Renaissance that the pastoral
and georgic ‘merge in various ways’ (28), but their close association goes
back to much earlier examples. Kegel-Brinkgreve finds ‘“Hesiodic” or
“Georgic” elements … very much in evidence’ in the Idylls of Theocritus
(11), and Haslett notes that ‘early Greek pastoral reflected upon the
working year and seasonal conditions of country life’ (174). Squires
defines Virgil’s Georgics as a ‘semipastoral work’ that has ‘marked similarities’ with pastoral (29). ‘The two traditions’, argues Brian Loughrey,
‘are so closely allied that they frequently impinge on one another’ (11).
As Kegel-Brinkgreve has suggested, ‘a clear-cut contrast may be theoretically valid, but it is too simple to set up idealizing “bucolic” and
down-to-earth “georgic” as diametrically opposed categories’ (176). The
two, she concludes, ‘are not as fundamentally different as is still often
supposed’ (177). Rather than providing a countervailing form, in my
discussion of Hardy’s poetry I argue that the georgic is part of the wider
pastoral tradition, with Virgil’s Georgics and Hesiod’s Works and Days
sitting comfortably within it.
Hardy recognizes the working context of the pastoral in a direct
reference to Theocritus from his Poetical Matter notebook. The quotation begins with what seem like the idealized terms of a dream of rural
childhood: ‘Cf Theocritus & the life at Bockn when I was a boy’. The
rest, rarely quoted in secondary works, fixes the landscape as a place of
labour: ‘in the wheatfield, at the well, cidermaking, wheat weeding, &c’
(Dalziel and Millgate 62). Hardy’s memories of country life are not of
leisure, but of experiences of labour; his rural landscape is Bakhtin’s
idyllic chronotope, particularly the ‘family idyll’ in conjunction with
the ‘agricultural idyll’, in which the ‘labor aspect’ is of ‘special importance’. It is ‘the agricultural-labor element’, Bakhtin argues, ‘that creates
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a real link and common bond between the phenomena of nature and
the events of human life’ (226–7). At the heart of my reading of Hardy’s
pastoral is the root of the word as a form of farming, a means of making
a living from the land – a way of life.
No life is simple, and this is part of the reason why I choose to
describe Hardy’s pastoral as complex. I have borrowed the description from Leo Marx, who identifies two types of pastoralism: the first
‘popular and sentimental’, a yearning for a simpler life that idealizes
the country, the second ‘imaginative and complex’ (5). For Marx, the
countervailing force defines the pastoral. His example is the train that
runs through Sleepy Hollow recorded in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebook, but any counterforce that produces ‘tension’ rather than ‘repose’
complicates the pastoral scene, creating ‘a sense of dislocation, conflict,
and anxiety’ (16). This ‘noise clashing through harmony’ (17), present
in classical pastoral, can also be heard in Hardy’s poetry; his work is
what Marx identifies as substantial and sophisticated pastoral, that
which can ‘qualify, or call into question, or bring irony to bear against
the illusion of peace and harmony’ (25). Marx accepts that the idyll is
a ‘fantasy’ unmasked by the ‘shocking intruder’ (29), but Hardy makes
clear from the outset that the complicated web of relations in the
country renders an idyllic existence impossible. ‘Although Hawthorne’s
account includes an element of representation’, writes Marx, ‘his chief
concern is the landscape of the psyche’ (28). Hardy’s poetry, however,
is much more closely associated with actual rural communities. What
Hardy brings to the pastoral process, then, in addition to reinstating the
original tensions, is a heightened awareness of complex communities in
a capitalist world, particularly the relations of labour, class, and gender.
Empson’s formula for the pastoral, that it involves ‘putting the complex
into the simple’ does not work with Hardy’s verse because the rural
society that should represent the simple is already complex (23). Rural
society was always full of complications but Hardy’s pastoral ensures
that they are made visible. In Hardy’s work, it is not possible to ‘say
everything about complex people by a complete consideration of simple
people’ because the folk who populate the poetry are not simple; they
are full of glorious emotional and societal complexity (Empson 137).
Despite his recognition of the darker side of rural life, however, Hardy’s
poetry is not a form of realism. Too often, the complex processes that
constitute realist writing are reduced to the simple formula that realism
means ‘including all the rough stuff’. As Richard Nemesvari has noted
in his work on melodrama and sensationalism in Hardy’s novels, ‘reality
is broader than the strictures of realism might wish to recognize’ (11).
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In his pastoral, Hardy recognizes the struggles and conflicts of rural
society but, as I explore, he often represents them in a distorted or disproportionate way.
The pastoral mode was always one of contradiction and tension, but
by making visible the complexity of rural lives, Hardy emphasizes the
element of conflict which becomes manifest not only in the various
stories he tells in his poems, but also in the form those poems take.
‘The Ballad-Singer’, for example, has a song-like structure that calls for
a song that is never heard, which, along with the refrain and musical
touches like the assonance of ‘Make me forget those heart-breaks, achings, fears’ (1: 291; 10), amplifies the absence of the longed-for pastoral
song, increasing the tension that the poem evinces. Williams classifies
form as ‘a visible or outward shape, and an inherent shaping impulse’
(Marxism 186); with regard to poetry, this includes the structure of the
poem as it appears on the page and the various processes that have
produced that particular structure. The ‘literary work’, writes Roger
Ebbatson, ‘is essentially a sublimation of the kinds of conflict which
inhabit language itself’ (Margin 8), with the text becoming ‘a site of that
struggle which permeates all material practice’ (Margin 138). My work
is a cultural materialist reading of Hardy’s poems that recognizes the
importance of close reading within a historicized social and economic
context. I am working towards what Trumpener describes as ‘a mode
of literary-historical analysis in which literary form itself becomes legible as a particularly rich and significant kind of historical evidence, as
a palimpsest of the patterns, transformations, and reversals of literary,
intellectual, and political history’ (xv). As Terry Eagleton writes in How
to Read a Poem, ‘There is a politics of form as well as a politics of content’
(8). In writing The Country and the City, Williams’s intention was ‘to
show simultaneously the literary conventions and the historical relations to which they were a response – to see together the means of
production and the conditions of the means of production’ (Politics and
Letters 304). In so doing, he hoped to ‘dramatize the tension’ that exists
between certain forms of writing and the social processes that produce
them (Politics and Letters 304). In my reading of Hardy’s pastoral, I hope
to do the same.
Writing Wessex
In order to understand fully my reading of Hardy’s pastoral, it is necessary to sketch a short history of Wessex that highlights the imagined
landscape’s Arcadian tendencies, particularly its relationship with
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realism, and its value as a commodity. It is within the context of this
literary world that Hardy’s complex communities exist and his often
resistant relationship with realism takes place. Just as literary Arcadia
has its origins in the geography of southern Greece, so Wessex is
grounded in the actual topography and history of England. The historic kingdom of the West Saxons had occupied very similar territory
to Hardy’s creation, and writing in 1912, Hardy explained that he had,
indeed, ‘disinterred’ the name from Anglo-Saxon history (Orel 9).6
Nemesvari writes that Wessex is both ‘symbolic landscape and realist
device’ (18), and it is the conflict between the two that makes Wessex
a particularly pastoral landscape. Wessex is also a material commodity,
a recognized brand that helped to sell Hardy’s books and, with or without the author’s consent, much more besides. ‘The Ballad-Singer’, for
example, debuted on the first page of the Cornhill in April 1902. Here,
the title is ‘At Casterbridge Fair’, a reminder to his metropolitan readers
of the distant rural world he had started to create some thirty years previously. A timely reminder, as it was in the very same month that this
copy of the Cornhill appeared that Hardy signed a new publishing deal
with Macmillan. With the immediate reissue of Hardy’s novels as the
Uniform Edition, this country song was, perhaps, the single to promote
the album. As I explore, the way in which Wessex can be selectively read
and manipulated in order to shape it into a marketing tool also makes
it ‘a cultural commodity being prepared for ideological consumption’
(Ebbatson, Margin 130–1).
As Simon Gatrell’s Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex (2003) shows, the
unified, defined Wessex that features on the map of most modern editions of Hardy’s novels did not spring fully formed from the head of
its creator; the landscape of Wessex developed over time, deliberately
manipulated by its author.7 Hardy’s first three published novels make
no mention of ‘Wessex’; however, the process of inventing names for
places known to Hardy was employed from the start, as in his first published novel, Desperate Remedies (1871). As Gatrell states:
At this early stage in his writing … [Hardy] was torn three ways,
between the desire to delineate vividly and precisely, the need to
write places he knew intimately, and a cautious sense that over all a
veil of disguise would be prudent if he did not wish to upset family,
friends and neighbours. (8)
The result of this three-way split can be seen throughout Hardy’s work.
His raw material is selected from personal experience of his actual
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environment, but the result of his imagination can be seen in the
Dorset places being ‘well disguised and manipulated’ (Gatrell xiii). This
manipulation allows Hardy some creative distance and licence. If, in so
doing, he protects family, friends, and, indeed, himself from unwanted
attention, then so much the better.
Hardy uses Casterbridge, his name for Dorchester, and the county
town of his Wessex, as a thread to connect Under the Greenwood Tree
(1872), A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).
It is in the serialization of Far from the Madding Crowd, written in June or
July 1874, and published in the Cornhill in November, that Hardy first
uses the word ‘Wessex’. The reference appears in the pastoral setting of
a sheep fair, ‘Greenhill was the Nijni Novgorod of [South] Wessex’ (396).
Greenhill is Hardy’s name for Woodbury Hill, near Bere Regis in Dorset.
The ‘South’ was added in the revisions made for collected editions, the
significance of which will be seen later, but in 1874 it was just plain old
Wessex, looking almost as alien to the reader, perhaps, as the curious
allusion to the Russian city celebrated for its huge fair. Hardy goes on
to refer to some of the sheep as ‘the old Wessex horned breeds’ (397),
likely to be the Dorset Horn, but having given a name to his literary
landscape, there is no further development of it in this work. It is in
The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) that ‘Wessex was established as a county’,
probably covering parts of south-west Hampshire and south Dorset
(Gatrell xiii).
Hardy’s ‘next four novels, and most of the stories’ written between
1878 and 1884 ‘do not, on the surface’, according to Gatrell, ‘advance
Wessex into greater prominence’ (xiii). During this phase of Wessex,
Hardy was still mixing real place names with others he invented,
as he does in The Trumpet-Major (1880), or ‘The Distracted Young
Preacher’ (1879), for example. It is with the publication of The Mayor
of Casterbridge (1886), that the interconnectedness of Wessex becomes
obvious with its web of place names and characters from previous books
reappearing, as with James Everdene, Bathsheba’s uncle, or Boldwood,
both from Far from the Madding Crowd. As Gatrell suggests: ‘It is a major
step in the creation of a unitary Wessex when one novel involves the
past of another’ (48). In addition to being influenced by the actual
history of Dorset and its surrounding counties, Hardy’s Wessex is making its own history. Another important development is the acknowledgement of Wessex tourists, or pilgrims, possibly. Gatrell notes that
in Chapter 13 of Volume 2 of The Mayor of Casterbridge, following a
description of the area, Hardy writes in the manuscript, ‘This was Mixen
Lane’. By the time the serial version appeared in the Graphic, he had
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added ‘now in great part pulled down’ – a forewarning, offers Gatrell,
to those readers who may have been tempted to go looking for it (49).
Wessex was slowly developing into what Millgate describes as ‘a total
imaginative world with a solid, complex, and comprehensively realized
existence in space and time’ (176).8
Wessex was enthusiastically taken up by other writers – George Eliot
in Daniel Deronda (1876), for example – so Hardy, never slow to seize
upon a marketing opportunity, wrote to his publisher, Edward Marston,
in order to secure the rights to his creation:
Could you, whenever advertising my books, use the words “Wessex
novels” at the head of the list? I mean, instead of “By T.H.”, “T.H’s
Wessex novels”, or something of the sort? I find that the name
Wessex, wh. I was the first to use in fiction, is getting to be taken
up everywhere: & it would be a pity for us to lose the right to it for
want of asserting it. It might also be used on the paper covers of the
novels.
(Purdy 1: 171)9
The title of Hardy’s first collection of short stories, Wessex Tales, published in 1888, is further proof that he was well aware of the brand
implications of his literary landscape. It was around this time, probably
following the publication of The Woodlanders (1887), that Wessex ceased
to be contained within a single county’s borders. From 1890, during
the writing of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and the stories that became
A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Wessex was developing into a much
larger region. By the completion of Tess, what had been Wessex was
now South Wessex, as Hardy’s imagined landscape was transformed into
a series of counties whose borders were coterminous with the English
counties of the south-west.
The first published map of Wessex accompanied the article ‘Thomas
Hardy’s Wessex’ in the debut edition of the Bookman from October
1891. Hardy had declined to produce a map, but correspondence
between him and William Robertson Nicoll, the Bookman’s editor and
probably the author of the anonymous article, suggests that he was
instrumental in its making. According to Gatrell, ‘Hardy was evidently
not disinclined for the map to appear, though in a subsequent letter he
made what would become his usual stipulation about identifications
not being said to be authorized by him’ (94). The map gives the actual
names for the English counties involved, and many other features have
their real names, the Bristol Channel, or Salisbury Plain, for example.
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Where Hardy’s invented names for places are included, they often have
their actual equivalent in parentheses beneath. This first map of Wessex
fixes the imagined region firmly into an actual England.
The changes Hardy made to his work for the collected editions published between 1895 and 1920 include a great many that continue to
shape Wessex in two specific ways. First, Hardy makes various textual
changes, particularly to places and landmarks, in order to unify his
literary landscape, to make consistent the geography and history of his
Wessex. Second, Hardy made more explicit the relationship between
his landscape of the mind and the exterior world that influenced it. In
the prefaces that were written for the first collected edition of Hardy’s
works, published by Osgood, McIlvaine between 1895 and 1897, Hardy
assumed the role of ‘a local historian … assuring the reader that reality underlies the narrative’ (Gatrell 117). In the preface to Tess, dated
January 1895, Hardy writes:
In the present edition it may be well to state, in response to inquiries from readers interested in landscape, pre-historic antiquities,
and especially old English architecture, that the description of these
backgrounds in this and its companion novels has been done from
the real. (465)10
Hardy goes on to explain that many of the features of the landscape
and prehistoric monuments, ‘have been given under their existing
names’, and there follows a list. In addition, ‘large towns and points
tending to mark the outline of Wessex’ are also ‘named outright’ (465).
‘In respect of places described under fictitious or ancient names – for
reasons that seemed good at the time of writing’, Hardy continues,
‘discerning persons have affirmed in print that they clearly recognize
the originals’ (465). Following a long list of examples Hardy declares,
‘I shall not be the one to contradict them: I accept their statements as
at least an indication of their real and kindly interest in the scenes’
(466). It is curious that Hardy refers to his place names not only as
‘fictitious’, but also ‘ancient’. Just as its very name does, this connects
the fictional Wessex with an actual past. It is also of note that the
renaming of places in south-west England, one of the defining features
of Hardy’s work, is explained by simply having been a good idea at
the time! Most importantly, even as he was making textual changes
to reinforce the connection between fictional Wessex and the exterior
world, he continued to deny – or at the very least publicly obscure –
that connection.
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The Osgood, McIlvaine edition marks a watershed in the development of Wessex. Of great importance is the map that appears in each
novel, the first, according to Millgate, to be ‘specifically endorsed by
the author’ (332). It differed from the Bookman version in a number of
significant ways. Although their borders appear to remain, the English
counties have gone, replaced by their invented equivalents. As the
preface to Tess states, some actual place names are included, but the
majority are Hardy’s invented names with no actual equivalent offered.
A few minor developments accepted, the Osgood, McIlvaine map is the
basis of all the Wessex maps that followed.11 Whether unconscious,
intentional, desired, or resented, this confirmation from the author
of the close relationship that the region of his imagination has with
south-west England invites from his readers investigation and comparison between reality and fiction. It is at this point, Gatrell suggests, that
Hardy ‘lost control over Wessex’ (147). A further example of the blurring
of the lines between Hardy’s fictional world and the actual landscape
found in the Osgood, McIlvaine edition are the illustrations by Henry
Macbeth-Raeburn. He was commissioned to produce ‘landscape scenes
from each novel’, but they were not simply the product of MacbethRaeburn’s imagination, as he ‘visited every setting under advice from
Hardy’ (Gatrell 112–13). The results became frontispiece illustrations for
the novels, accompanied on the facing page by Hardy’s invented name
and a curious declaration. The example for Under the Greenwood Tree is
described as ‘THE ‘MELLSTOCK CHURCH’ OF THE STORY Drawn on the
spot’. The picture is of Stinsford church in Dorset; it is, of course, impossible to stand upon the spot of Mellstock church. Similarly, the Wessex
Edition of 1912 includes Hardy-approved frontispiece photographs, the
existence of which, as Millgate has argued, ‘served to demonstrate even
more directly than the Osgood, McIlvaine etchings the correspondences
between fictional locations and their visitable originals’ (Testamentary
119). This confusion between the actual and imagined, and Hardy’s
complicity in causing the confusion, is a crucial element in my reading
of Hardy’s pastoral landscape.12
Despite playing his part in the process, Hardy writes in the 1912 preface to Far from the Madding Crowd of his surprise at having discovered
that ‘the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons
and landscapes of a partly real, partly dream-country, has become more
and more popular as a practical provincial definition’ (Orel 9). Hardy
explains that ‘the dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a
utilitarian region’ (9). Identifying Wessex as ‘partly real, partly dream’
is both useful and complex. Gatrell notes that the phrase ‘partly real,
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partly dream-country’, which has become something of a commonplace
description of Wessex, was not a part of the original Madding Crowd
preface written in February 1895 in which Hardy describes Wessex as
a ‘merely realistic dream-country’ (124). Gatrell rightly points out the
semantic differences between the phrases:
In the original wording [of the preface] Hardy intended readers to
understand his surprise that what was merely a dream-country presented as if it were real, or presented in realistic terms, should have
been taken as absolutely real. (124)
Hardy changed the phrase for the Macmillan Uniform Edition of 1902,
and the result,
is entirely different in effect from the earlier, in that it acknowledges
that part of the ‘horizons and landscapes’ of Wessex are in fact real:
that some towns and cities, and all rivers and heights, are given their
real names. It may go further, and imply also that much described
under fictional names is also real. (124)
Gatrell suggests reasonably that the motivation for this change came
as a result of the revisions Hardy made to his works in the collected
editions, as he made the geography of many of his novels consistent
with the English landscape. There is often a conflict, however, between
the real and the fictive. An example is in the preface to Wessex Tales.
Hardy writes at some length about the authenticity of the source for
the story, ‘The Withered Arm’. He explains that an ‘aged friend’ has
reminded him that the incident in the story when the incubus appears
during the night actually occurred during a hot afternoon. The story
itself remains unaltered, but Hardy asks that readers ‘correct the misrelation’, and laments that ‘forgetfulness has weakened the facts out
of which the tale grew’ (Orel 22). Similar sentiments are found in
the preface to Tess, quoted earlier, although the changes made when
it became the Wessex Edition’s ‘General Preface to the Novels and
Poems’ make the point even more strongly. After the statement that
‘the description of these backgrounds has been done from the real’,
Hardy adds ‘—that is to say, has something real for its basis, however
illusively treated’ (Orel 46). Both of these explanations allow for the
creative process, but making his readers aware of the reality on which
his fiction was based had become increasingly important to Hardy, as
the antiquarian footnotes to the Wessex Edition suggest. By the time
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of the collected editions, Hardy felt obliged to ‘preserve for my own
satisfaction a fairly true record of a vanishing life’ (Orel 46). In the
preface to Madding Crowd, he identifies the ‘recent supplanting of the
class of stationary cottagers’ by a ‘population of more or less migratory labourers’ as the ‘change at the root’ of lost rural customs and
traditions (Orel 10). By 1912, and the ‘General Preface’ to the Wessex
Edition, Hardy declares:
At the dates represented in the various narrations things were like
that in Wessex: the inhabitants lived in certain ways, engaged in certain occupations, kept alive certain customs, just as they are shown
doing in these pages. (Orel 46)
As Gatrell writes, ‘Wessex had become by 1912 a commonplace contemporary regional name requiring no explanation, of which Hardy
was the historian’ (147). Despite this, at the end of the 1912 preface to
Wessex Tales Hardy adds, ‘the stories are but dreams, and not records’
(Orel 23).
Wessex, then, exists partly in real life, and partly in Hardy’s work,
often without a clear distinction. The Wessex of his novels is also ‘partly
real, partly dream’ in that the material used is drawn from life but is,
ultimately, fictive. The first two chapters of this book are concerned
with the implications of this process on the pastoral world of Hardy’s
poetry. As Chapter 1 shows, Arcadian landscapes are not pure idylls;
instead, they are a complex product of the dialectical relationship
between actual and literary space. I will also illustrate other specific
ways in which Hardy’s pastoral is influenced by classical models, and
how the imagined landscape of his poetry and prose acts as a consistent
dramatic setting that reveals the complex relations of labour and class.
Chapter 2 focuses on ways of seeing – how Hardy’s pastoral negotiates
between ideas of landscape, nature, and work, and how the Romantics
and Darwin shape his perception of the rural environment and, therefore, his pastoral. In Chapter 3, I show that it is Hardy’s class position
that determines his pastoral, particularly with regard to the representation of workers, with a detailed account of how the terms ‘peasant’ and
‘Hodge’ connote certain attitudes towards the countryside and those
who work in it. The chapter concludes by arguing that Hardy’s use of
first-person narration disturbs the tranquillity of his rural world, which,
in turn, unsettles his largely urban, middle-class readership. Chapter 4
considers the pastoral of modernity and how Hardy’s poetry is particularly well placed to evoke and question the ideological functions of the
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pastoral impulse under the relations of industrial capitalism. I explore
the operations of the pastoral in the construction of early twentiethcentury English national identity before returning to the fundamental
pastoral signifiers of the shepherd and the contrast between country
and city, a seemingly simple opposition that hides a complex matrix
of relations. It is to these relations and their subsequent tensions that
I now turn.
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Index
Alpers, Paul, 2, 4, 9, 10, 129–30
Arcadia, 12–13, 19, 34–6, 38–9, 40,
45, 71, 161, 194
Auden, W. H., 29, 166
enclosure, 36, 62, 63, 126, 144
English rural myth, 142–9
Bakhtin, M. M., 10–11, 23, 92–3, 132,
186, 191
Barrell, John, 61, 159, 160
Barringer, Tim
Men at Work, 63, 84, 91, 163
Bellamy, Liz, see Williamson, Tom
Benjamin, Walter, 190
Berger, John
Ways of Seeing, 61
Bermingham, Ann, 62, 63, 71
Blake, William, 68, 145, 150, 201–2
Boer War, 129, 151–4
Brooke, Rupert, 153
‘Grantchester’ (‘The Old Vicarage,
Grantchester’), 150, 165
Bunce, Michael, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147
Cowper, William, 83
Crabbe, George, 83
The Village, 86
cultural evolutionary theory, or
‘survivals’, 117, 167–8, 203
Darwin, Charles, 89, 192, 199, 202
Darwinian pastoral, 72–80
Derrida, Jacques, 64, 68
Dickinson, Emily
‘The Wind Begun to Knead the
Grass’, 25–6
Dolin, Tim, 33–4, 58, 81, 197, 200
Duck, Stephen
‘The Thresher’s Labour’, 83–6,
133, 181
Eagleton, Terry, 12, 34, 81, 107–8
Ebbatson, Roger, 12, 13, 63, 64, 102,
104, 109, 123, 126–7, 133, 200
Empson, William, 4, 11, 132, 196
female speakers, 133–40
First World War, 55, 75, 149–51, 154–60
Flecker, James Elroy
‘Oak and Olive’, 165
Gatrell, Simon
Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex,
13–19, 37, 38, 43–4, 54–5, 58,
67, 81, 107, 119, 120, 124,
132–3, 147, 196–7, 200
Golden Age, 39, 63, 81–2, 160,
164–8, 171
Hardy, Thomas
‘Gothic’ rhythm, 26–30
as internationalist, 153–7
and realism, 8, 11–12, 30–4, 45–6,
52, 86, 190–2, 194, 202
and Romanticism, 65–72, 80, 192–3
poetry:
‘After a Romantic Day’, 65
‘After the Fair’, 184–6, 191
‘At Day-Close in November’, 93
‘At Middle-Field Gate in
February’, 162–3
‘At the Royal Academy’, 191–2
‘At the War Office, London’, 152
‘A Backward Spring’, 95–6
‘The Ballad-Singer’, 1–2, 9, 12, 13
‘The Bedridden Peasant to an
Unknowing God’, 122–3
‘Before and After Summer’, 94
‘Before Marching and After’, 156
‘The Bride-Night Fire’, 53–4, 198
‘By the Earth’s Corpse’, 123
‘A Call to National Service’,
155, 157
‘Childhood Among the Ferns’, 163
‘A Christmas Ghost-Story’, 157
‘The Clasped Skeletons’, 72–3
213
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Index
Hardy, Thomas – continued
‘The Contretemps’, 57
‘The Dark-Eyed Gentleman’, 42
‘The Dead Man Walking’, 93
‘The Dead Quire’, 53
‘Dream of the City Shopwoman’,
172–3
‘Drinking Song’, 73–4
‘Drummer Hodge’, 129–31, 152–3
‘During Wind and Rain’, 113
The Dynasts, 53, 121, 163–4, 200
‘Embarcation’, 151–2, 157
‘The Farm-Woman’s Winter’,
134–5
‘The Fight on Durnover Moor’, 56
‘The Five Students’, 93, 99
‘Four in the Morning’, 89–92
‘Friends Beyond’, 53
‘From Her in the Country’, 175
‘God-Forgotten’, 122–3
‘The Going of the Battery’, 152
‘Great Things’, 55
‘Growth in May’, 166–7
‘His Country’, 155
‘His Immortality’, 93
‘The House of Silence’, 69–71
‘In a Waiting-Room’, 166
‘In a Wood’, 53, 78–80
‘In Front of the Landscape’,
68–9, 70
‘In Tenebris II’, 115
‘In the British Museum’, 108–9
‘In Time of “the Breaking of
Nations”’, 159–60
‘In Weatherbury Stocks’, 56
‘It Never Looks Like Summer’,
96–7
‘Joys of Memory’, 93
‘Jubilate’, 55
‘The Jubilee of a Magazine (To the
Editor)’, 113–16, 152, 192
‘The King’s Experiment’, 128–9
‘A Last Journey’, 56
‘Last Week in October’, 95–6, 99
‘The Later Autumn’, 98–9
‘Lines’, 168–70, 171
‘The Man He Killed’, 153–4
‘The Market-Girl’, 176–7
‘Men Who March Away’, 157
‘Midnight on the Great
Western’, 55
‘The Milkmaid’, 173–5
‘Often When Warring’, 155
‘On an Invitation to the United
States’, 64, 199
‘On Sturminster Foot-Bridge’, 55
‘One Who Married Above Him’, 56
‘The Paphian Ball’, 56
‘The Peasant’s Confession’, 121–2
‘The Pine Planters (Marty South’s
Reverie)’, 53
‘The Pity of It’, 155–6
‘The Puzzled Game-Birds’,
77, 111
‘The Rash Bride’, 53
‘The Reminder’, 76–7, 111
‘The Revisitation’, 198
‘The Ruined Maid’, 42, 175–7
‘The Seasons of Her Year’,
97–8, 128
‘The Sexton at Longpuddle’, 56
‘A Sheep Fair’, 182
‘Shortening Days at the
Homestead’, 56, 87–9, 92, 98
‘Song of the Soldiers’ Wives and
Sweethearts’, 151, 202
‘The Souls of the Slain’, 154
‘A Spot’, 180
‘The Stranger’s Song’, 182–3
‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’,
40–6, 50, 53, 109, 178–80,
197–8
‘Tess’s Lament’, 53
‘The Third Kissing-Gate’, 56
‘To a Tree in London’, 171–2
‘To an Unborn Pauper Child’, 131
‘To Sincerity’, 115
‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, 40,
43–6, 50, 109, 114, 120
‘Transformations’, 78
‘The Tree and the Lady’, 78
‘The Two Rosalinds’, 170–1
‘An Unkindly May’, 21–30, 50,
94, 95, 135, 166, 192
‘The Upper Birch-Leaves’, 96, 99
‘Voices from Things Growing in a
Churchyard’, 78
‘Weathers’, 182
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Index
‘We Field-Women’, 56, 137–40
‘The Well-Beloved’, 53
‘Wessex Heights’, 54, 67–8, 69, 70
‘Where They Lived’, 161–2
‘A Wife in London’, 152
‘The Wind Blew Words’, 74–6
‘Winter in Durnover Field’, 77
‘Winter Night in Woodland’, 56
‘A Woman’s Fancy’, 57
‘The Woman in the Rye’, 136–7
‘The Workbox’, 57
novels:
Far from the Madding Crowd, 8, 14,
17–19, 32, 38, 46, 54, 102, 105,
108, 113, 114, 119, 120, 133,
180–1, 183, 198, 200, 201
The Hand of Ethelberta, 14, 114,
133, 148, 196
Jude the Obscure, 42, 52, 55, 67,
99, 106, 148
The Mayor of Casterbridge, 14–15,
37, 53, 119–20, 182, 197, 203
A Pair of Blue Eyes, 14, 72, 117–18,
172, 197, 199
The Return of the Native, 8, 37,
50–1, 53, 133, 203
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 15, 16,
17, 18, 37, 42, 43–4, 51, 53, 56,
106, 117, 125–6, 134, 137–40,
148, 176, 194, 197
The Trumpet-Major, 14, 65
Two on a Tower, 37, 90, 101,
124–5, 200
Under the Greenwood Tree, 4, 8, 14,
17, 32, 53, 60–1, 81, 92, 104,
133, 196
The Well-Beloved, 52, 197
The Woodlanders, 8, 15, 53, 56,
79, 88–9
short stories:
‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, 37
‘On the Western Circuit’,
119, 192
‘The Three Strangers’, 182
‘The Waiting Supper’, 118, 120
‘The Withered Arm’, 18, 37, 102
other works:
‘The Ancient Cottages of
England’, 139
215
‘Apology’ (Late Lyrics and
Earlier), 109
‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, 41,
85, 126–8, 169, 170, 182, 203
‘General Preface to the Novels
and Poems’, 18, 19, 51, 52, 197
‘The Science of Fiction’, 30, 31
Harvest Time (painting by George
Vicat Cole), 63, 91, 194
Hesiod, 7, 10, 24, 37–8, 90, 91, 92,
142, 164, 177–8
Hodge, 124–32, 191
see also ‘Drummer Hodge’ (poem)
Horace, 7, 142–3
Howkins, Alun, 36, 103, 104, 124,
131, 142, 146, 150, 159, 169,
200, 203
Hutton, Ronald, 92, 149, 164–5,
165–6, 203
James, David, and Philip Tew
New Versions of Pastoral, 5, 6, 173
Jefferies, Richard, 105, 131, 148, 201
Keats, John
‘In drear-nighted December’, 95
‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 68
Kegel-Brinkgreve, E., 7, 10, 34,
35–6, 37–8, 41, 104, 167, 173,
177–8, 179
knowable community, see Williams,
Raymond
landscape, 13, 16–19, 43, 66–72, 83,
88, 125, 126, 199
history and politics of, 59–65
see also Wessex as an Arcadian
landscape
Lea, Hermann, 71
Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, 56,
147, 190
Ledwidge, Francis
‘The Lost Ones’, 158
Lowman, Roger, 31–2, 46, 126
Marx, Karl, 189
Marx, Leo, 11
May, 165–7
see also ‘An Unkindly May’ (poem)
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216
Index
Mitchell, W. J. T., 60, 199
Murry, John Middleton, 153, 188
nature, 8, 22–3, 25–6, 29, 59–64,
65–6, 71–80, 81, 87, 89, 92, 93,
99, 128–9, 172, 174, 175
Nemesvari, Richard, 11, 13
nostalgia, 5, 160–8
Old Country: A Book of Love & Praise of
England, The, 150–1, 202
Orwell, George, 132, 145, 149, 150
Ovid, 43
Metamorphoses, 82
Padian, Kevin, 73, 74, 78, 92
Pan, 35, 164–5
Panofsky, Erwin, 4
‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the
Elegiac Tradition’, 39–40
paradise, 26, 29, 41, 45, 89–90, 92,
134–5, 136, 172
pastoral
adaptation of, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
24, 185
contrasts/conflicts, 1–2, 11–12,
23–30, 35, 40, 41, 44–6, 48–50,
66–7, 80, 102, 130, 135–7,
142–5, 152, 168–77, 185
definition of, 4–7
and Hardy, 7–12
parody, 172–7
relation to counter-pastoral, 6–7,
23, 24, 46, 179
relation to georgic, 9–10
tension, see contrasts/conflicts
as tradition, 5–6
Victorian, 3–4
peasant
definition of, 116–17
in Hardy’s work, 116–23, 127, 132,
133, 190–1, 200
pollarding, 87
Pope, Alexander, 82–3, 181, 185
Regan, Stephen
‘The Darkening Pastoral’, 32–3, 61
Richardson, Angelique, 65, 89
rural working class
attitudes towards, 104–7, 200
representation of, 101–4, 174
see also Hodge; peasant; rustics;
work
Ruskin, John
‘The Nature of Gothic’, 27–8, 135
rustics, 105, 116, 118, 133, 200
Sargant, Edmund Beale
‘The Cuckoo Wood’, 165
Sassoon, Siegfried
‘To Victory’, 157–8
Schama, Simon, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40,
64, 71
seasons, 92–100, 161–2, 172
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 110, 120, 193
‘Men of England’, 112–13
‘Ode to the West Wind’, 75, 113–15
shepherds, 3, 4, 21–3, 40, 50, 83,
177–83, 185, 192, 203
Shires, Linda, 27, 34
Snell, Keith, 42, 102, 103, 106, 197–8,
199, 200
Somerville, Alexander, 102–4,
107, 131
South Country, the, 36–7, 150–1
The South Country (Edward
Thomas), 36–7, 164
‘The South Country’ (Hilaire
Belloc), 36, 132, 150
Squires, Michael
The Pastoral Novel, 10, 32, 38
‘survivals’, see cultural evolutionary
theory
Swinburne, Charles Algernon
‘The Transvaal’, 152
Symons, Arthur, 31
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
In Memoriam, 73
‘Maud’, 79
‘The May Queen’, 165
‘Northern Farmer, Old Style’,
123, 200
Tew, Philip, see James, David
Theocritus, 3, 6, 7, 10, 37, 38, 41,
177, 194, 196
Idyll 1, 37, 38, 40, 135
Idyll 2, 40, 179
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Index
Idyll 3, 136, 173
Idyll 4, 37, 38, 136, 173
Idyll 5, 37, 173
Idyll 7, 167, 178
Idyll 9, 181
Idyll 10, 10, 38, 173
Idyll 11, 9, 10
Idyll 13, 90
Thomas, Edward, 36–7, 164
‘Adlestrop’, 158–9
‘Fifty Faggots’, 81
‘Lob’, 131–2
Toliver, Harold E.
Pastoral Forms and Attitudes, 23–6,
29, 43, 45
tradition, 90, 91
selective, 5–7, 24, 60
see also pastoral: as tradition
Trumpener, Katie, 12
Virgil, 3–4, 7, 38–9, 41, 81, 82, 104,
142, 143, 177, 194
Eclogue 1, 6–7, 23, 39
Eclogue 2, 10, 136
Eclogue 3, 23, 43
Eclogue 4, 23, 81, 167
Eclogue 5, 38
Eclogue 7, 38
Eclogue 8, 38, 41, 136
Eclogue 9, 38, 39
Eclogue 10, 38, 136
Georgics, 10, 98
Wessex, 41–2, 43–4, 120–1, 155–6
as an Arcadian landscape, 34–9,
45–6
as a brand, 13, 15, 53, 147–9
217
development of, 12–19
as a knowable community, 46–50
of the poems, 50–8
Widdowson, Peter, 2, 33, 101–2, 104,
107, 108, 126, 127, 134, 148–9,
155, 187, 195
Williams, Raymond, 2, 5–6, 7, 9, 12,
65–6, 101, 103, 116, 117, 121,
181, 190, 198
The Country and the City, 23–4, 38,
47, 59, 60, 71, 82, 86, 90, 102,
142, 143, 144, 159, 164, 167,
170, 179, 186, 191, 194
The English Novel from Dickens to
Lawrence, 47, 48, 81, 119, 176
the knowable community,
48–50
Williamson, Tom, and Liz Bellamy
Property and Landscape, 62, 63,
88, 146
Wind in the Willows, The, 164
Wordsworth, William, 29, 30, 32, 70,
71, 78, 129, 192–3, 194
‘Lines Written in Early Spring’,
79–80, 175
‘Michael’, 177
The Prelude, 170, 178,
‘The Ruined Cottage’, 161, 130–1
‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’,
89, 175
‘The Solitary Reaper’, 91
work, 9–11, 22, 23, 38, 41, 50, 62–3,
72, 81–92, 95, 99, 101–40, 142,
143, 144, 159, 162–3, 176–7,
180–2, 189–90, 201
Wotton, George, 9, 58, 115, 116,
126, 128
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