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Thomas Hardy: The World of his Novels
Thomas Hardy’s Wessex is one of the great literary evocations of place, populated with colourful and dramatic characters. As lovers of his novels and poetry know, this ‘partly real, partly dream-country’ was firmly rooted in the Dorset into which he had been born.
J. B. Bullen explores the relationship between reality and the dream, identifying the places and the settings for Hardy’s writing, and showing how and why he shaped them to serve the needs of his characters and plots. The locations may be natural or man-made, but they are rarely fantastic or imaginary. A few have been destroyed and some moved from their original site, but all of them actually existed, and we can still trace most of them on the ground today.
Thomas The World of his Novels is essential reading for students of literature and for all Hardy enthusiasts who want to gain new insights into his work.
J. B. Bullen explores the relationship between reality and the dream, identifying the places and the settings for Hardy’s writing, and showing how and why he shaped them to serve the needs of his characters and plots. The locations may be natural or man-made, but they are rarely fantastic or imaginary. A few have been destroyed and some moved from their original site, but all of them actually existed, and we can still trace most of them on the ground today.
Thomas The World of his Novels is essential reading for students of literature and for all Hardy enthusiasts who want to gain new insights into his work.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
271 people want to read
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March 26, 2023
This book is an endeavour to gaze at the life of Thomas Hardy through the phantasmagoria of his novels.
Here is a novelist, whose works contain some of the most flamboyant and gorgeous characters in literature, from the towering figure of Michael Henchard to the voluptuous Tess Durbeyfield, from the ‘femme fatale’ Eustacia Vye to the depressed Jude Fawley.
But even more unforgettable is Hardy’s representation of the landscape, the hills, forests and fields of the West Country recorded with amazingly affectionate and comprehensive persuasion.
Why then do some readers find his work dreadfully disheartened?
The villages and towns hum with local activity. The cottages are unpretentious and charming and the grand houses are drawn with subtlety.
But especially Hardy’s stories take us out into the countryside.
The author says: “The sun comes up through the mist on Egdon Heath, or sets in the mysterious depths of the Hintock woods; the wind tears across the open fields of Flintcomb Ash or the north Berkshire Downs. The heat rises in the fertile valley of the Froom and the bitter cold descends on the same river as it passes the outer walls of Casterbridge….”
The tragedies of Hardy’s novels are undeniably dim, but that obscurity is a foil to the illumination and hopefulness of life.
It has been often said that Hardy is a Regional novelist in the sense that he has set all his novels in the socio-cultural and geographical context of Wessex. He limits himself to only one district of England which he calls Wessex (the land of West Saxons). In effect, he gave this name to the district in which he was born and with which he was most familiarly associated.
He resuscitated the old name of the locality, Wessex, which was the land of the West Saxons, which comprises Dorset, Wiltshire, parts of Berkshire and Somerset. There are certain natural and other topographies of the country within this boundary, which differentiate it from the northern and eastern districts. The land abounds with remnants of the past — the antique Roman roads, walls, tumbledown amphitheatres, fortifications, burial vaults, mounds, the stonehenge, and altars of the ancient Britons.
The surface of the earth is diverse and undulant, valleys blinking with uplands, heaths with deep woods, barns with lush vegetation. The soil is chalky and white, and the principal occupation is agriculture.
It is infrequently seen that a man of genius ties himself to his native place as meticulously as Hardy has done.
And what he has lost in variety of scenery, he has gained in accuracy of observation and sureness of touch.
Many writers have been influenced by local xenophobia and antiquarian spirit, but nobody has produced such rare creations of art. Scott, the Wizard of the North, brought to life the romance of the dead past, but Hardy shows intensely how the present grows out of the past.
Like Wordsworth, Hardy has the power of piercing beneath the acquainted surface, and shows that despite his constrained field of observation of human nature, he is not wanting in fruitfulness or diversity
He presented the towns, villages, rivers, hills and valleys of his chosen district in a delicately roundabout nomenclature, which any native of the place can identify with exactness.
Thus, his Casterbridge is Dorchester, his Budmouth is Weymouth; his King's Bere is Bere Regis; his Wintoncester is Winchester, and so forth. Within this area every road is known to Hardy, every legend, every relic of antiquity, together with hosts of family histories and traditions.
The author has divided his book into the following seven chapters:
1) Far from the Madding Crowd: Articulate Architecture
2) The Return of the Native: Man’s Place in Nature
3) The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Place more Dorchester than Dorchester Itself
4) The Woodlanders: That Wondrous World of Sap and Leaves
5) Tess of the d’Urbervilles: The Return of the Pagan Gods
6) Jude the Obscure: The Descent into Darkness
7) The Poems
One might note that in reviving the old name of the kingdom of Wessex, Hardy suggests a historical permanency from the time of the Britons and Saxons to our own; the march of time has left many trees upon the land while at bottom it is the same land. Historical vision is strong in Hardy.
The whole arc is present before his mind; the Saxons preceded by the Romans and Celts, followed by the Danes and Normans. The succession of races, their synthesis and incorporation is brightly presented before the reader with scientife correctness and creative gorgeousness.
Dorset, the portion of Wessex upon which Hardy concentrates, has a character distinct from its neighbours. Here each influence of history has sunk penetratingly into the land --- the military spirit of the Romans, the ecclesiastical spirit of the Saxons and the feudal spirit of the Normans; whilst the indigenous character reacted to these influences in its own way.
Hardy is fond of tracing ancient racial characteristics in the features of the present inhabitants. The memory of Pagan times still survives in his Wessex, and the men and women of today still mingle their dust with those "who held in their mouths coins of Hadian, Posthumus and Constantines."
A Roman feeling pervades the countryside. Like the echoes of the Roman Empire, those of the Roman church also linger here. Wessex is associated with many saints, whose remains are still preserved in its churches and cemeteries. Many ancient Roman families like the D'Urbervilles and Paridelles, at one time feudal lords, have degenerated into labourers upon the soil of Wessex. The very names of the places proclaim their Saxon, Celtic or Norman origin.
In a land like Wessex no wonder that Hardy should find dominant emotions and potent passions behind the use and want of every day. It is not necessary to take much help from rare accidents of Romance. So wonderful a thing is common life, considered by the artist.
In this simple love for humble, ancient varieties of life, Hardy has the manner of the great classical poets.
Hardy always keeps the spirit of the Wessex alive before our mind in his novels. As we read them, we see before us the pasture valleys, the high downs, the long white roads, the wooded hills, stretches of wood-land, a dreamy cluster of little houses—the villages, the deep meadows, fields full of sheep or cows, the clear rivers, the two kinds of desolate country; the gray, green downlands, and the brown, dark heaths. Lionel Johnson conjures up the followng vision of Wessex:
"A rolling down country, crossed by a Roman Road, here a gray standing stone of what sacrificial or ritual origin, I can but guess; there is a grassy barrow, with its great bones, its red and brown jars, its rude gold ornaments, still safe in the earth; a broad sky burning with stars, and a solitary man."
About the Wessex life and its impact on Hardy, Lord David Cecil writes: "There was plenty of tragedy in the life of the Wessex labourers with its poverty and passion. Life to them was life in the raw. Dependent and ignorant, exposed alike to the oppressions of the social system and the caprices of the weather, at every moment of their existence the people among whom Hardy was brought up, were made conscious of man's helplessness in the fall of circumstances.
Hardy was the man to realize the tragedy implicit in such a life. He had a tender heart usually sensitive to the spectacle of suffering. As a little boy he even hated to see the boughs lopped off the trees; the first time he saw a dead bird, he was struck by an appalling, unforgettable chill of horror.
By the time he was fifteen, a shadow had already fallen across his vision of life. He tells us he remembers lying back in the sun and wishing that he need not grow up. He wanted to stay just as he was, in the same place, with the same few friends. The infinite possibilities the mature life seemed to hold for failure and for suffering appalled him and made him shrink back into such security as he knew already. This shrinking from life embodied itself in the form of spectral fear.
He fancied, he says, that a figure stood in his van, with arm uplifted to knock him back from any pleasant prospect he indulged in as probable. And not only him, it was the enemy of mankind in general. For Hardy's was a speculative mind, instinctively reasoning from particular observation to a general conclusion. Since the world he looked at seemed so full of pain and disappointment, then, he argued, pain and disappointment were outstanding characteristics of human existence."
In the words of Edmund Gosse, "Abandoned by God, treated with scorn by Nature, man lies helplessly at the mercy of those 'purblind Doomsters', accident, chance and time, from which he has to endure injury and insult from the cradle to the doom."
Against such a desolate and uncompromising background of Wessex, Hardy wrote all his great novels.
What do we carry away from this book? The following points:
**Though Hardy’s world and the world of his colleagues seems very different from ours, when we inspect it more carefully we can see that the glitches faced by the Victorians bear a bizarre similarity to our own. For example, 19th century science questioned man’s association with nature while in the 21st century global warming prompts questions about our responsibility for the health of the natural world. In the 19th century, industrial processes necessarily altered the shape of Victorian society no less than the revolution in physics and technology has changed ours.
**There were questions about gender and sexuality. Though Victorian codes of sexual behaviour were oddly unlike our own, it takes very little fancy to see that the fundamental issues between men and women remain the same.
**But Hardy’s novels are not simply about ‘issues’. He once pointed out that a novel is an ‘impression’ not an ‘argument’, by which he meant his principal focus was not the abstract realm of ideas and concepts. The intellectual challenges of his day were important to him, but his main interest lay in people and their relationship to each other and with their environment.
**Though he was not a realist writer, the ‘impression’ in his novels arose from his ability to create believable characters in believable settings. The Wessex world of his creation is a visionary place charged with stories, legends and myths, enhanced with light, colour, sounds, texture and smells and populated by psychologically credible characters.
**At one point he categorized his most prevalent works as ‘Novels of Character and Environment’ in which the argument or the abstract issues emerged from the amalgam of these two elements. Throughout Hardy’s writing, character, environment and argument are indissolubly linked.
**The environment is not just a milieu for the characters. Instead, the villages, buildings, woods and fields play an energetic part in the plot. Sometimes they set the mood for the drama that unfolds within or around them, sometimes they reflect the disposition, character or nature of one figure or another, but there is always a connection between the dispositions of Hardy’s characters, the scenes in which he places those characters and the underlying issues with which the novels deal.
A greatly recommended book!
Here is a novelist, whose works contain some of the most flamboyant and gorgeous characters in literature, from the towering figure of Michael Henchard to the voluptuous Tess Durbeyfield, from the ‘femme fatale’ Eustacia Vye to the depressed Jude Fawley.
But even more unforgettable is Hardy’s representation of the landscape, the hills, forests and fields of the West Country recorded with amazingly affectionate and comprehensive persuasion.
Why then do some readers find his work dreadfully disheartened?
The villages and towns hum with local activity. The cottages are unpretentious and charming and the grand houses are drawn with subtlety.
But especially Hardy’s stories take us out into the countryside.
The author says: “The sun comes up through the mist on Egdon Heath, or sets in the mysterious depths of the Hintock woods; the wind tears across the open fields of Flintcomb Ash or the north Berkshire Downs. The heat rises in the fertile valley of the Froom and the bitter cold descends on the same river as it passes the outer walls of Casterbridge….”
The tragedies of Hardy’s novels are undeniably dim, but that obscurity is a foil to the illumination and hopefulness of life.
It has been often said that Hardy is a Regional novelist in the sense that he has set all his novels in the socio-cultural and geographical context of Wessex. He limits himself to only one district of England which he calls Wessex (the land of West Saxons). In effect, he gave this name to the district in which he was born and with which he was most familiarly associated.
He resuscitated the old name of the locality, Wessex, which was the land of the West Saxons, which comprises Dorset, Wiltshire, parts of Berkshire and Somerset. There are certain natural and other topographies of the country within this boundary, which differentiate it from the northern and eastern districts. The land abounds with remnants of the past — the antique Roman roads, walls, tumbledown amphitheatres, fortifications, burial vaults, mounds, the stonehenge, and altars of the ancient Britons.
The surface of the earth is diverse and undulant, valleys blinking with uplands, heaths with deep woods, barns with lush vegetation. The soil is chalky and white, and the principal occupation is agriculture.
It is infrequently seen that a man of genius ties himself to his native place as meticulously as Hardy has done.
And what he has lost in variety of scenery, he has gained in accuracy of observation and sureness of touch.
Many writers have been influenced by local xenophobia and antiquarian spirit, but nobody has produced such rare creations of art. Scott, the Wizard of the North, brought to life the romance of the dead past, but Hardy shows intensely how the present grows out of the past.
Like Wordsworth, Hardy has the power of piercing beneath the acquainted surface, and shows that despite his constrained field of observation of human nature, he is not wanting in fruitfulness or diversity
He presented the towns, villages, rivers, hills and valleys of his chosen district in a delicately roundabout nomenclature, which any native of the place can identify with exactness.
Thus, his Casterbridge is Dorchester, his Budmouth is Weymouth; his King's Bere is Bere Regis; his Wintoncester is Winchester, and so forth. Within this area every road is known to Hardy, every legend, every relic of antiquity, together with hosts of family histories and traditions.
The author has divided his book into the following seven chapters:
1) Far from the Madding Crowd: Articulate Architecture
2) The Return of the Native: Man’s Place in Nature
3) The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Place more Dorchester than Dorchester Itself
4) The Woodlanders: That Wondrous World of Sap and Leaves
5) Tess of the d’Urbervilles: The Return of the Pagan Gods
6) Jude the Obscure: The Descent into Darkness
7) The Poems
One might note that in reviving the old name of the kingdom of Wessex, Hardy suggests a historical permanency from the time of the Britons and Saxons to our own; the march of time has left many trees upon the land while at bottom it is the same land. Historical vision is strong in Hardy.
The whole arc is present before his mind; the Saxons preceded by the Romans and Celts, followed by the Danes and Normans. The succession of races, their synthesis and incorporation is brightly presented before the reader with scientife correctness and creative gorgeousness.
Dorset, the portion of Wessex upon which Hardy concentrates, has a character distinct from its neighbours. Here each influence of history has sunk penetratingly into the land --- the military spirit of the Romans, the ecclesiastical spirit of the Saxons and the feudal spirit of the Normans; whilst the indigenous character reacted to these influences in its own way.
Hardy is fond of tracing ancient racial characteristics in the features of the present inhabitants. The memory of Pagan times still survives in his Wessex, and the men and women of today still mingle their dust with those "who held in their mouths coins of Hadian, Posthumus and Constantines."
A Roman feeling pervades the countryside. Like the echoes of the Roman Empire, those of the Roman church also linger here. Wessex is associated with many saints, whose remains are still preserved in its churches and cemeteries. Many ancient Roman families like the D'Urbervilles and Paridelles, at one time feudal lords, have degenerated into labourers upon the soil of Wessex. The very names of the places proclaim their Saxon, Celtic or Norman origin.
In a land like Wessex no wonder that Hardy should find dominant emotions and potent passions behind the use and want of every day. It is not necessary to take much help from rare accidents of Romance. So wonderful a thing is common life, considered by the artist.
In this simple love for humble, ancient varieties of life, Hardy has the manner of the great classical poets.
Hardy always keeps the spirit of the Wessex alive before our mind in his novels. As we read them, we see before us the pasture valleys, the high downs, the long white roads, the wooded hills, stretches of wood-land, a dreamy cluster of little houses—the villages, the deep meadows, fields full of sheep or cows, the clear rivers, the two kinds of desolate country; the gray, green downlands, and the brown, dark heaths. Lionel Johnson conjures up the followng vision of Wessex:
"A rolling down country, crossed by a Roman Road, here a gray standing stone of what sacrificial or ritual origin, I can but guess; there is a grassy barrow, with its great bones, its red and brown jars, its rude gold ornaments, still safe in the earth; a broad sky burning with stars, and a solitary man."
About the Wessex life and its impact on Hardy, Lord David Cecil writes: "There was plenty of tragedy in the life of the Wessex labourers with its poverty and passion. Life to them was life in the raw. Dependent and ignorant, exposed alike to the oppressions of the social system and the caprices of the weather, at every moment of their existence the people among whom Hardy was brought up, were made conscious of man's helplessness in the fall of circumstances.
Hardy was the man to realize the tragedy implicit in such a life. He had a tender heart usually sensitive to the spectacle of suffering. As a little boy he even hated to see the boughs lopped off the trees; the first time he saw a dead bird, he was struck by an appalling, unforgettable chill of horror.
By the time he was fifteen, a shadow had already fallen across his vision of life. He tells us he remembers lying back in the sun and wishing that he need not grow up. He wanted to stay just as he was, in the same place, with the same few friends. The infinite possibilities the mature life seemed to hold for failure and for suffering appalled him and made him shrink back into such security as he knew already. This shrinking from life embodied itself in the form of spectral fear.
He fancied, he says, that a figure stood in his van, with arm uplifted to knock him back from any pleasant prospect he indulged in as probable. And not only him, it was the enemy of mankind in general. For Hardy's was a speculative mind, instinctively reasoning from particular observation to a general conclusion. Since the world he looked at seemed so full of pain and disappointment, then, he argued, pain and disappointment were outstanding characteristics of human existence."
In the words of Edmund Gosse, "Abandoned by God, treated with scorn by Nature, man lies helplessly at the mercy of those 'purblind Doomsters', accident, chance and time, from which he has to endure injury and insult from the cradle to the doom."
Against such a desolate and uncompromising background of Wessex, Hardy wrote all his great novels.
What do we carry away from this book? The following points:
**Though Hardy’s world and the world of his colleagues seems very different from ours, when we inspect it more carefully we can see that the glitches faced by the Victorians bear a bizarre similarity to our own. For example, 19th century science questioned man’s association with nature while in the 21st century global warming prompts questions about our responsibility for the health of the natural world. In the 19th century, industrial processes necessarily altered the shape of Victorian society no less than the revolution in physics and technology has changed ours.
**There were questions about gender and sexuality. Though Victorian codes of sexual behaviour were oddly unlike our own, it takes very little fancy to see that the fundamental issues between men and women remain the same.
**But Hardy’s novels are not simply about ‘issues’. He once pointed out that a novel is an ‘impression’ not an ‘argument’, by which he meant his principal focus was not the abstract realm of ideas and concepts. The intellectual challenges of his day were important to him, but his main interest lay in people and their relationship to each other and with their environment.
**Though he was not a realist writer, the ‘impression’ in his novels arose from his ability to create believable characters in believable settings. The Wessex world of his creation is a visionary place charged with stories, legends and myths, enhanced with light, colour, sounds, texture and smells and populated by psychologically credible characters.
**At one point he categorized his most prevalent works as ‘Novels of Character and Environment’ in which the argument or the abstract issues emerged from the amalgam of these two elements. Throughout Hardy’s writing, character, environment and argument are indissolubly linked.
**The environment is not just a milieu for the characters. Instead, the villages, buildings, woods and fields play an energetic part in the plot. Sometimes they set the mood for the drama that unfolds within or around them, sometimes they reflect the disposition, character or nature of one figure or another, but there is always a connection between the dispositions of Hardy’s characters, the scenes in which he places those characters and the underlying issues with which the novels deal.
A greatly recommended book!
October 28, 2020
I would have given this four, or maybe even five stars, but I was expecting something a bit different. The text was well-written and engaging, my only complaint is that it was very heavy on quotes from Hardy. I just really wish there had been many more illustrations, be they photographs, paintings, etchings, anything. The ones that were there added so much life and really transported you.
October 20, 2013
This is one of those books (Hardcover Version) that you are just proud to hold. The binding is beautifully done, the dust cover is lovely, typesetting immaculate and the book feels great in your hands.
Now for the contents:
From the very beginning of this book all the way to the end I had an enjoyable experience. I believe reading this would be a great time for any Thomas Hardy fan or dedicated collector of his works.
There are multiple illustrations and colour photos with explanations for each. I loved that the author gave a history on Hardy himself at the beginning of the book and I learned some things I didn't know previously to reading this.
The way J.B. Bullen approached discussing the life of Thomas first before moving on to other elements made me feel as though I were looking at the world through his eyes. I could see why he would choose certain locales to base his work on and the information was clear and concise, yet still presented in such a manner that it was entertaining.
The conversational approach the author used in writing this book made it flow well and kept me interested throughout the various chapters. I particularly enjoyed chapter six, "the Descent into Darkness." Seeing the outline of Hardy's life events all put together and truly being able to grasp how his writing matured and changed over the years was excellent.
In the end, this is a brilliant and beautiful book with much to love. I would definitely recommend this book to others, even if you are not aware of Hardy's works, you may just take an interest aster this. This would also be a wonderful choice for literary professors.
This review is based on a first reads copy that I won in a goodreads giveaway. My opinions are my own.
Now for the contents:
From the very beginning of this book all the way to the end I had an enjoyable experience. I believe reading this would be a great time for any Thomas Hardy fan or dedicated collector of his works.
There are multiple illustrations and colour photos with explanations for each. I loved that the author gave a history on Hardy himself at the beginning of the book and I learned some things I didn't know previously to reading this.
The way J.B. Bullen approached discussing the life of Thomas first before moving on to other elements made me feel as though I were looking at the world through his eyes. I could see why he would choose certain locales to base his work on and the information was clear and concise, yet still presented in such a manner that it was entertaining.
The conversational approach the author used in writing this book made it flow well and kept me interested throughout the various chapters. I particularly enjoyed chapter six, "the Descent into Darkness." Seeing the outline of Hardy's life events all put together and truly being able to grasp how his writing matured and changed over the years was excellent.
In the end, this is a brilliant and beautiful book with much to love. I would definitely recommend this book to others, even if you are not aware of Hardy's works, you may just take an interest aster this. This would also be a wonderful choice for literary professors.
This review is based on a first reads copy that I won in a goodreads giveaway. My opinions are my own.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews