Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, Gabriel Oak, Farmer Boldwood and Sergeant Troy
Literature · Novelists
Thomas Hardy
1840–1928 · English
Victorian novel and poetry; naturalism and tragic realism
Thomas Hardy, a Dorset stonemason's son who trained as an architect, set his novels in 'Wessex', his fictional version of south-west England. Novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles portray rural lives crushed by chance, society and an indifferent universe; after the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure (1895) he wrote only poetry, becoming one of the major poets of the early 20th century.
How to spot them
- ▸Wessex: Casterbridge (Dorchester), Christminster (Oxford), Egdon Heath
- ▸Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak; Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare; Michael Henchard; Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead
- ▸Henchard sells his wife and child at a fair
- ▸Poems 'The Darkling Thrush' and 'The Convergence of the Twain' (on the Titanic)
- ▸Max Gate, Dorchester; heart buried at Stinsford, ashes in Westminster Abbey
Key works
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
'A Pure Woman' seduced by Alec d'Urberville and rejected by Angel Clare, arrested at Stonehenge
Jude the Obscure (1895)
Stonemason Jude Fawley longs for Christminster and loves his cousin Sue Bridehead; his last novel
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
Michael Henchard sells his wife at a fair, rises to be mayor, then falls
The Return of the Native (1878)
Clym Yeobright, Eustacia Vye and Diggory Venn the reddleman on Egdon Heath
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
Pastoral comedy of the Mellstock church choir and Fancy Day
The Woodlanders (1887)
Giles Winterborne and Grace Melbury in the woodland village of Little Hintock
The Dynasts (1904–1908)
Vast verse drama of the Napoleonic Wars
Key ideas
- An indifferent or malign cosmos and the tyranny of chance ('Hap') over human hopes
- The decline of traditional rural life under modern change
- Criticism of marriage laws, class and sexual double standards, especially in Tess and Jude
Quick-fire facts
- •Born at Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, Dorset; died at Max Gate, the Dorchester house he designed
- •Far from the Madding Crowd takes its title from Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and was the first novel to use the name Wessex
- •Tess ends: 'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals ... had ended his sport with Tess
- •In Jude the Obscure, Little Father Time leaves the note 'Done because we are too menny'
- •In A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) Henry Knight is left literally hanging from a cliff, often cited as an origin of 'cliffhanger'
- •'The Darkling Thrush' is dated 31 December 1900; 'Poems of 1912–13' mourn his first wife Emma
- •Awarded the Order of Merit in 1910
- •His ashes were buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, and his heart at Stinsford with Emma
- •Married Florence Dugdale in 1914
Drill it — 10 cards
1 / 10new card
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Thomas Hardy
- Claire Tomalin — Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man