As Raymond Williams reminds us in The Country and the City (1973), Hardy was born only a few miles from Tolpuddle, and only six years after the men, who had tried to found a farm labourers’ union there, had been deported to Australia This indicates that the society he was born into, though rural, was not isolated from developments in the cities, but itself subject to change and struggle. His geographical territory, Wessex, first so named in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), has often been mistaken for a timeless backwater, prompting contemporary readers (mainly young women) to write to Hardy asking how they might return to the country life he described. “The series of novels I projected being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed to require a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity to their scene,” he explained in the 1895 Preface to the ‘Wessex edition’ of Far From the Madding Crowd. The novel had early provoked the criticism that it painted too idyllic a picture of farming conditions in Dorset in the 1870s, but the debate as to when the novel is actually set continues, and is one of its aspects to be discussed on this course. While Hardy wrote in a period when there were still local communities, both our texts provide evidence of a powerful network of the society as a whole, manifest in references to the newspapers, the railways, education, the law and the economy.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), concerned with the complications of change and the world’s random cruelty, is unambiguously a contemporary novel. If Bathsheba Everdene, active, independent and strong-willed, challenged Victorian assumptions about young women, Tess, the ‘Pure Woman’, divided not only critics but also families, and broke up friendships. Hardy’s intention had been to “demolish the doll of English fiction”, and while some readers thought him “brave and clear-sighted” and Tess a Shakespearean creation, others called her “vile” and the portrayal of her seasonal countryside activities “Not alive, not true . . . not even honest”. The novel continues to provoke critical debate, not least on the question to what extent Hardy, in dramatising the “ache of modernism” (Chapter 19), questions the foundations of traditional representation and realist character-drawing.
