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THOMAS HARDY was born in a cottage in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, on 2 June 1840. He was educated locally and at sixteen was articled to a Dorchester architect, John Hicks. In 1862 he moved to London and found employment with another architect, Arthur Blomfield. He now began to write poetry and published an essay. By 1867 he had returned to Dorset to work as Hicks’s assistant and began his first (unpublished) novel, The Poor Man and the Lady.

On an architectural visit to St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 he met his first wife, Emma Gifford. Before their marriage in 1874 he had published four novels and was earning his living as a writer. More novels followed and in 1878 the Hardys moved from Dorset to the London literary scene. But in 1885, after building his house at Max Gate near Dorchester, Hardy again returned to Dorset. He then produced most of his major novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895). Amidst the controversy caused by Jude the Obscure, he turned to the poetry he had been writing all his life. In the next thirty years he published over nine hundred poems and his epic drama in verse, The Dynasts.

After a long and bitter estrangement, Emma Hardy died at Max Gate in 1912. Paradoxically, the event triggered some of Hardy’s finest love poetry. In 1914, however, he married Florence Dugdale, a close friend for several years. In 1910 he had been awarded the Order of Merit and was recognized, even revered, as the major literary figure of the time. He died on 11 January 1928. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart at Stinsford in Dorset.

ROSEMARIE MORGAN teaches at Yale University and has also held Visiting Distinguished Professorships at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and Kansai University, Japan. She made her mark on Hardy studies with Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, followed by Cancelled Words: Rediscovering Thomas Hardy. Her extensive publications include articles on Charlotte Brontë, Toni Morrison, Mary Chesnut and women writers of the American frontier. She is currently working on a study of childhood in Victorian literature and culture, and has recently completed articles on ‘women’ and ‘marriage’ for The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy. In 1995 she became Honorary Vice-President of the Thomas Hardy Society, and in 1997 President of the Thomas Hardy Association; she was appointed to the Consulting Board of Victorian Studies in Italy.

SHANNON RUSSELL holds a post doctoral Fellowship specializing in nineteenth and twentieth century literature at Oxford. She has published on the Victorian period and most recently co-edited Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Her current work includes acting as head of research for the Yale edition of Tennessee Williams’s Journals and editing Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens for Penguin Classics.

PATRICIA INGHAM is General Editor of all Hardy’s fiction in the Penguin Classics Edition. She is a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Reader in English and The Ti mes Lecturer in English Language, Oxford University. She has written extensively on the Victorian novel and on Hardy in particular. Her most recent publications include Dickens, Women and Language (1992) and The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel (1996). She has also edited Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Thomas Hardy’s The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved and The Well-Beloved and The Woodlanders, and Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit for Penguin Classics.

Far From the Madding Crowd

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
ROSEMARIE MORGAN
with SHANNON RUSSELL

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 1874
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2000
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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My appreciation and warmest thanks go to the staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University who not only gave me unlimited access to Hardy’s holograph manuscript of Far From the Madding Crowd but also provided a constant flow of friendly assistance and goodwill. To Patricia Ingham I wish to express my gratitude for her unfailing patience in what she rather ruefully called her ‘Leslie Stephen’ role – which was, in truth, never less than excellent editorial advice.

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

This edition uses, with one exception, the first edition in volume form of each of Hardy’s novels and therefore offers something not generally available. Their dates range from 1871 to 1897. The purpose behind this choice is to present each novel as the creation of its own period and without revisions of later times, since these versions have an integrity and value of their own. The outline of textual history that follows is designed to expand on this statement.

All of Hardy’s fourteen novels, except Jude the Obscure (1895) which first appeared as a volume in the Wessex Novels, were published individually as he wrote them (from 1871 onwards). Apart from Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), all were published first as serials in periodicals, where they were subjected to varying degrees of editorial interference and censorship. Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree appeared directly in volume form from Tinsley Brothers. By 1895 ten more novels had been published in volumes by six different publishers.

By 1895 Hardy was sufficiently well-established to negotiate with Osgood, McIlvaine a collected edition of all earlier novels and short story collections plus the volume edition of Jude the Obscure. The Well-Beloved (radically changed from its serialized version) was added in 1897, completing the appearance of all Hardy’s novels in volume form. Significantly this collection was called the ‘Wessex Novels’ and contained a map of ‘The Wessex of the Novels’ and authorial prefaces, as well as frontispieces by Macbeth-Raeburn of a scene from the novel sketched ‘on the spot’. The texts were heavily revised by Hardy, amongst other things, in relation to topography, to strengthen the ‘Wessex’ element so as to suggest that this half-real half-imagined location had been coherently conceived from the beginning, though of course he knew that this was not so. In practice ‘Wessex’ had an uncertain and ambiguous development in the earlier editions. To trace the growth of Wessex in the novels as they appeared it is necessary to read them in their original pre-1895 form, for the 1895–6 edition represents a substantial layer of reworking.

Similarly in the last fully revised and collected edition of 1912–13, the Wessex Edition, further alterations were made to topographical detail and photographs of Dorset were included. In the more open climate of opinion then prevailing, sexual and religious references were sometimes (though not always) made bolder. In both collected editions there were also many changes of other kinds. In addition novels and short story volumes were grouped thematically as ‘Novels of Character and Environment’, ‘Romances and Fantasies’ and ‘Novels of Ingenuity’ in a way suggesting a unifying master plan underlying all texts. A few revisions were made for the Mellstock Edition of 1919–20, but to only some texts.

It is various versions of the 1912–13 edition which are generally available today, incorporating these layers of alteration and shaped in part by the critical climate when the alterations were made. Therefore the present edition offers the texts as Hardy’s readers first encountered them, in a form of which he in general approved, the version that his early critics reacted to. It reveals Hardy as he first dawned upon the public and shows how his writing (including the creation of Wessex) developed, partly in response to differing climates of opinion in the 1870s, 1880s and early 1890s. In keeping with these general aims, the edition will reproduce all contemporary illustrations where the originals were line drawings. In addition for all texts which were illustrated, individual volumes will provide an appendix discussing the artist and the illustrations.

The exception to the use of the first volume editions is Far From the Madding Crowd, for which Hardy’s holograph manuscript will be used. That edition will demonstrate in detail just how the text is ‘the creation of its own period’: by relating the manuscript to the serial version and to the first volume edition. The heavy editorial censoring by Leslie Stephen for the serial and the subsequent revision for the volume provide an extreme example of the processes that in many cases precede and produce the first book versions. In addition, the complete serial version (1892) of The Well-Beloved will be printed alongside the volume edition, since it is arguably a different novel from the latter.

To complete the picture of how the texts developed later, editors trace in their Notes on the History of the Text the major changes in 1895–6 and 1912–13. They quote significant alterations in their explanatory notes and include the authorial prefaces of 1895–6 and 1912–13. They also indicate something of the pre-history of the texts in manuscripts where these are available. The editing of the short stories will be separately dealt with in the two volumes containing them.

CHRONOLOGY: HARDY’S LIFE AND WORKS

1840 2 June: Thomas Hardy born, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, eldest child of a builder, Thomas Hardy, and Jemima Hand, who had been married for less than six months. Younger siblings: Mary, Henry, Katharine (Kate), to whom he remained close.

1856 Hardy watched the hanging of Martha Browne for the murder of her husband. (Thought to be remembered in the death of Tess Durbeyfield.)

late 1850s Important friendship with Horace Moule (eight years older, middle-class and well-educated), who became his intellectual mentor and encouraged his self-education.

1862 London architect, Arthur Blomfield, employed him as a draughtsman. Self-education continued.

1867 Returned to Dorset as a jobbing architect. He worked for Hicks on church restoration.

1868 Completed his first novel The Poor Man and the Lady but it was rejected for publication (see 1878).

1869 Worked for the architect Crickmay in Weymouth, again on church restoration.

1870 After many youthful infatuations thought to be referred to in early poems, met his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, on a professional visit to St Juliot in north Cornwall.

1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes (previously serialized in Tinsleys’ Magazine). Horace Moule committed suicide.

1874 Far from the Madding Crowd (previously serialized in the Cornhill Magazine). Hardy married Emma and set up house in London (Surbiton). They had no children, to Hardy’s regret; and she never got on with his family.

1876 The Hand of Ethelberta (previously serialized in the Cornhill Magazine).

1878 The Return of the Native (previously serialized in Belgravia). The Hardys moved back to London (Tooting). Serialized version of part of first unpublished novel appeared in Harper’s Weekly in New York as An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress. It was never included in his collected works.

1880 The Trumpet-Major (previously serialized in Good Words). Hardy ill for many months.

1881 A Laodicean (previously serialized in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine). The Hardys returned to Dorset.

1885 The Hardys moved for the last time to a house, Max Gate, outside Dorchester, designed by Hardy and built by his brother.

1891 A Group of Noble Dames (tales). Tess of the D’Urbervilles (previously serialized in censored form in the Graphic). It simultaneously enhanced his reputation as a novelist and caused a scandal because of its advanced views on sexual conduct.

1892 Hardy’s father, Thomas, died. Serialized version of The Well-Beloved, entitled The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved, in the Illustrated London News. Growing estrangement from Emma.

1892–3 Our Exploits at West Poley, a long tale for boys, published in an American periodical, the Household.

1893 Met Florence Henniker, one of several society women with whom he had intense friendships. Collaborated with her on The Spectre of the Real (published 1894).

1895 Jude the Obscure, a savage attack on marriage which worsened relations with Emma. Serialized previously in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. It received both eulogistic and vitriolic reviews. The latter were a factor in his ceasing to write novels.

1895–6 First Collected Edition of novels: Wessex Novels (16 volumes), published by Osgood, McIlvaine. This included the first book edition of Jude the Obscure.

1897 The Well-Beloved (rewritten) published as a book; added to the Wessex Novels as vol. XVII. From now on he published only the poetry he had been writing since the 1860s. No more novels.

1898 Wessex Poems and Other Verses. Hardy and Emma continued to live at Max Gate but were now estranged and ‘kept separate’.

1904 Part 1 of The Dynasts (epic-drama in verse on Napoleon). Hardy’s mother, Jemima, ‘the single most important influence in his life’, died.

1905 Met Florence Emily Dugdale, his future second wife, then aged 26. Soon a friend and secretary.

1912–13 Major collected edition of novels and verse, revised by Hardy: The Wessex Edition (24 volumes). 27 November: Emma died still estranged. This triggered the writing of Hardy’s finest love-lyrics about their early time in Cornwall.

1914 10 February: married Florence Dugdale (already hurt by his poetic reaction to Emma’s death). Satires of Circumstance. The Dynasts: Prologue and Epilogue.

1915 Mary, Hardy’s sister, died. His distant young cousin, Frank, killed at Gallipoli.

1924 Dramatized Tess performed at Dorchester. Hardy infatuated with the local woman, Gertrude Bugler, who played Tess.

1928 Hardy died on 11 January. His heart was buried in Emma’s grave at Stinsford, his ashes in Westminster Abbey. Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres published posthumously. Hardy’s brother, Henry, died.

1928–30 Hardy’s autobiography published (on his instructions) under his second wife’s name.

This map is from the Wessex Novels Edition, 1895–6

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The following abbreviations are used for texts frequently cited throughout the edition:

INTRODUCTION

Hardy never saw his manuscript version of Far From the Madding Crowd in print. Nor have his readers, until today. This edition brings into publication for the very first time Hardy’s own original words just as they left his pen – just as they appeared on his editor’s desk, prior to alteration and serialization in the Cornhill Magazine in 1874.

Customarily, manuscripts were not returned from publishing houses to such obscure authors as the anonymous creator of Far From the Madding Crowd of 1874. Consequently, it may have been inconvenient for Hardy not to have recovered his original text for making revisions to post-Cornhill editions but it was by no means unusual. What did strike Hardy as extraordinary was that it turned up, many decades later, in 1918, in the London offices of his former Cornhill publishers, Smith, Elder & Co. ‘How surprising that you should have found the MS,’ he wrote to Mrs Reginald Smith, ‘I thought it “pulped” ages ago. And what a good thought of yours, to send it to the Red Cross, if anybody will buy it.’¹

But no such dignity of disinterestedness unhanded the creative act itself. Hardy was still applying revisions to the ‘Wessex’ topography of Far From the Madding Crowd as late as 1912. And despite a certain collapse of vision in re-viewing a world now remote in memory and imagination – a collapse most noticeable in the inconsistency of his revisions to the progressive indirection of Gabriel Oak’s stature and centrality² – and despite the fact that he never had his original work to hand over the years, Hardy did endeavour to restore something of his first intentions, his initial integrity and candour, to volume editions of the novel.

The ‘restoration’ was itself a matter of integrity. The original manuscript version, submitted for serialization in the Cornhill – which subsequently provided the copy-text for all later editions of Far From the Madding Crowd up until the present day – had, after all, been severely compromised. And although he had learned much about publication politics from his editor, Leslie Stephen, in the month-by-month process of editorial criticism and censorship, Hardy never lost his fierce contempt for all forms of ‘tampering with natural truth’, as he put it some fourteen years later in ‘The Profitable Reading of Fiction’.³ Indeed, the focus of his post-Cornhill revisionary work says as much: whereas his late-century topographical revisions were purely pragmatic, now that ‘Wessex’ had begun to emerge, by the 1890s, as a fully unified microcosmic construct, in his earlier revisions he sought, primarily, to recover the ‘natural truth’ of his original text. His later typological revisions were largely what I would call ‘prophylactic’, notably in the case of adjustments to Oak’s loss of authority and stature (manly authority was closely associated with virility in the Victorian mind), which shrinks rather inconveniently towards the end of the novel in line with his diminishing centrality. But Hardy’s very first attempts had been to restore something of Far From the Madding Crowd’s original candour. It was imperative that the ‘things which everybody is thinking but nobody is saying…be taken up and treated frankly’ – and for Hardy this included such unmentionable ‘things’ as female sexuality, illegitimacy and, in the case of Fanny Robbin, the moral innocence of the unmarried mother commonly outcast as a fallen woman in the world of the Victorian reader.

Leslie Stephen’s first reaction to Hardy’s work had been one of sheer delight. He knew nothing of Hardy’s experimental if somewhat graceless polemic on class privilege entitled ‘ The Poor Man and the Lady, A Story with no plot: containing some original verses’ (1868: rejected for publication by Macmillan). Nor had he heard of the melodramatic, plot-driven Desperate Remedies (1871) which Hardy had undertaken on the advice of well-meaning publishers who had not overlooked the unquestionable literary promise in The Poor Man and the Lady while deploring its highly questionable disdain of audience, readership and market. But in coming across Hardy’s second published novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Stephen was utterly charmed. Without further ado he sought out the name of its anonymous author and wrote to say he had been filled with ‘great pleasure’ by the ‘admirable’ descriptions of country life – surely such writing would please the readers of the Cornhill Magazine as much as it had pleased him? Hardy was, at that time, in the throes of completing A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), his third published novel. He responded, even so, to Stephen’s invitation to submit a story for serial publication by sketching an outline of a ‘pastoral tale’ comprising ‘a young woman-farmer, a shepherd, and a sergeant of cavalry’⁴ – a rural tale most eminently suitable, in Stephen’s opinion, to a popular periodical of the Cornhill’s high cultural and literary standing. Thus, with but a few rough chapters in hand, Stephen commissioned Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy’s fourth published novel, virtually sight unseen.

Hardy was first and foremost a poet. Coventry Patmore, one of the most popular poets of the Victorian era, genuinely regretted that A Pair of Blue Eyes had not been written in verse, that ‘such unequalled beauty and power should not have assured themselves the immortality which would have been impressed upon them by the form of verse’.⁵ The devices of rhythmical, figurative and metaphorical language, together with the strategies of symbolic action, embodiment, metonymy and so on, all came naturally to Hardy. Equally, his usages were innovative and his ideas nonconformist. Heedful of practicalities he placed himself dutifully in Stephen’s hands fully prepared to meet editorial demands for more generally accepted literary forms. And where the demands related to chapter organization, story-plotting or the special needs of serialization, Hardy was more or less compliant; but where they conflicted with what he called his ‘higher aims’ or his deep-seated iconoclasm he was apt to pay lip service to convention and a considerably heavier debt to repression. Yet, despite this spirit of compromise, his continuing and often unwitting transgression of social and moral boundaries eventually taxed his editor’s patience so sorely that he simply cut and deleted as and when he saw fit, with or without the author’s permission.

The transgressions were sometimes as minor as the naming of an unmentionable item of anatomy (‘buttocks’), or the casual touching of bodies (Bathsheba’s hand on Oak’s waist), or too free a use of the Lord’s name, or even a neologism here and there (‘emotional’, ‘feminality’) – which Hardy’s Victorian critics were to scorn as cheap and nasty and the Oxford English Dictionary was to enter into its lexicon. Less innocuous, and more systematically purged from the manuscript by the slashing editorial pencil, were Hardy’s insouciant references to female sexual desire, whether they were made light heartedly by the rustics or in earnest by Bathsheba – as in discussing her ‘wantonness’ (in modern parlance, sexual playfulness) in conversation with Oak. Without the benefit of hindsight, in these instances, Stephen inferred a simple ignorance of the proprieties in this new and inexperienced novelist.

Certainly Hardy was lax, given the literary conventions of the day which insisted on the presence of a censorious voice, or a moralizing narrator, to assist in the acceptance and preservation of prevailing socio-sexual codes and values. Inclusion of these internal ‘censors’ seems to have been anathema to Hardy. At any rate he included them on occasions too infrequent or too slight for the purposes of the novel’s edification – a moral edification that was still of paramount importance to people in high places in the 1870s. Thus it was that in a final exasperated editorial swoop Stephen excised Far From the Madding Crowd’s most flagrant of all transgressions: Hardy’s poignantly tender delineation in the manuscript of Fanny’s last sleep with her stillborn babe in her arms.

Far From the Madding Crowd is, in many respects, the precursor to Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), with the role of Tess split between the trusting homespun girl (Fanny) seduced by the untrustworthy ‘blue-blood’ (Troy), and the courageous, self-determined girl struggling to make her way in a world made by men for men, played by Bathsheba. Unlike Tess, however, Bathsheba is by birth middle class, by education accomplished, by inclination innovative, daring and adventurous – conversely, vulnerable, unguarded and rash. And unlike Tess, she is a farmer – farming being the province of men, according to Oak and his compeers. Thus she is repeatedly subjected to judgemental views, to public scrutiny of her private life, to superstitious belief and sexual prejudice, as also to the prevailing laws of matrimony which deprive her of her property and the entitlements she had earned in her own right which are now assigned to her (thriftless) husband upon marriage. And in her complexity, in her youthful contradictory impulses, in her self-protective hauteur born of fear and insecurity, in her sexually challenging excitement and self-unseeing recklessness, she is rarely free of male censure both within and beyond the novel.

Yet, as literary tradition has it, to be put on trial-of-conscience in this manner is the test of a monolithic consciousness. Hardy’s major heroines invariably find themselves up against the trial and judgement of the dominant class in this way – emotionally and psychologically endangered in a representative Victorian world in which the skills of self-preservation (physical, mental, intellectual, political) are devalued in women; in which premarital sexual experience ends in a woman’s ruin or in compulsory marriage; in which class and sexual dominance combine to consolidate a formidable male power-threshold on which man’s superior social status turns – the power that inevitably galvanizes the erotic.

Victorian women did not of course lack sexual power. But in contrast to men, social codes and practices gave recognition either to their sexual power or to their class power but very rarely both in tandem. Culturally speaking, the one was doomed to arrest the other. It is not simply, though, that the male ‘wolf is a creature of superior class in Hardy’s world. It is also that, despite being doubly empowered by virtue of class privilege and masculine authority, he still hungers after the female life-force – the woman’s secret energy and vital intelligence – to the ugly point of feeding upon it and mutilating it.

A Pair of Blue Eyes was the first of the Wessex novels to introduce this dissonant element into a pastoral domain traditionally associated with birth and renewal – the regenerative world of nature. Undoubtedly a vital force and, moreover, a supreme agent of that strange enchantment which inspirits the Wessex universe, Hardy’s pastoral world remains, primarily, a place apart into which characters enter as if by magnetization and depart as if by expulsion, hurt and hurting, angry, injured and sad. Disillusion, deep disturbance and often irretrievable loss follow re-entry into this particular ancestral village. For many returning natives, notably Frank Troy, Clym Yeobright, Grace Melbury, Jocelyn Pierston and even (symbolically) the ‘pretender’ Alec D’Urberville, such re-entry enacts a physical return to the place of origins where, in some way or another, they no longer belong.

This process of relocation and dislocation parallels, in turn, Hardy’s own imaginative ‘return’ over the years, which, in psychoanalytic terms, serves to ‘integrate’ his own belonging, whether it be his own loss of the past, his haunted sense of untraceable origins, or his unconscious yearning for the irrecoverable maternal abode of infancy. The interiorization by ‘covering’ or ‘inwrapping’ of so many of his more significant dwellings in Far From the Madding Crowd reinforces the idea that his Wessex construct, as a reconstruction of the world of his birthplace, imaginatively resurrects the vanished world of natal origins – the maternal space or ‘enwombed’ (his word) abodes from the long-lost distant past. Bathsheba’s own ‘homestead’ (IX), for example, is not only covered by velvety-soft mosses and (architecturally) faced with finely detailed features but is also actually spoken of as a ‘body’ almost in the same breath that it is ‘effaced as a distinct property’. In this sense, Hardy’s unerring imaginative ‘return’ to his reconstructed place of origins renews the attempt to recreate and complete – thus to integrate – the configured original native state. Aesthetically and psychologically this configuration shapes the body-construct of Wessex, which itself undergoes constant expansion and revision continuously throughout the twenty years of Hardy’s growth as a novelist and loss of youth as a man.

But if A Pair of Blue Eyes introduces the first of many variations on the fraught theme of relational inequity and dissonance in Hardy’s novels, Far From the Madding Crowd breaks this ground fully with Wessex and all that it connotes in terms of a ‘partly real, partly dream-country’⁶ – a country abounding with natural harmonies and riven with incongruent, disparate elements. Almost by chance, it seems, and arriving oddly late in the novel’s composition during the penultimate serial instalment for November 1874, Wessex⁷ is invoked for the very first time (derived from ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms), just at the point when all the principal characters are about to converge on the very same prehistoric spot, at Greenhill, but will converge as disparate entities. They will do little more, by way of connection, than graze each other’s consciousnesses. That is to say, what will become the great unifying construct of Wessex is inaugurated in this early novel at the very point when the central characters are most disunited.

Inadvertently or otherwise, the disparities are apposite. At one level Far From the Madding Crowd follows the relatively simple folkloric plot of an unconventional young woman’s struggle as a farmer whose fortunes are complicated by the passions of three very different men: the loyal, dependable, straitlaced Shepherd Oak; the ascetic, repressed, obsessively ardent Farmer Boldwood; and the ‘fallen’ aristocrat turned rogue male, Sergeant Troy. But at another level this multilayered text offers ‘a high intellectual treat’, as R. H. Hutton described it⁸ – albeit, in the context, simply, of the book’s learned wisdom.

Hutton was looking for enlightenment, or what Victorians would have called edification. And if Hardy’s dissident moral universe did not always provide this particular philosophical comfort, his abundant array of literary, classical and biblical allusions almost certainly did. These were ‘high intellectual treats’ indeed. Invariably thought-provoking, frequently ironized and often delightfully picturesque, it was not necessarily the aptness of the allusion or the brilliance of the literary analogue so much as its familiarity as part of a shared cultural heritage which excited the interest and pleasure of Victorian readers. The more esoteric the allusion, the more intense the reader’s bright moment of recognition; the more ironic the implications, the greater the reader’s satisfaction and pleasure – even the unschooled were familiar with Bible stories and classical mythology. Therefore, at a very fundamental level of cultural familiarity, when Cainy Ball’s ‘pore mother’ – being neither a ‘Scripture-read woman’ nor a churchgoer – makes a mistake at his christening and wrongly names her infant son ‘Cain’ because she had thought ‘’twas Abel killed Cain’ (from the Genesis story, 4:1–15), Hardy’s readers would have been thoroughly entertained. Humour depends very largely upon an audience’s sense of its own prior knowledge.

Such biblical allusions by unlettered folk would, in life, have been garnered from religious sermons, the rubric of Christian church services, Sunday schools and the (current) popular Bible-reading gatherings that took place in private homes. Within the Weatherbury world, Hardy’s rustics mediate these dialogues at several levels, but primarily by invoking the biblical text in a seemingly knowing and edifying manner while remaining unaware that their allusions are either misbegotten or utterly irrelevant. It follows, not infrequently, that while they provide an unstoppable flow of irony and amusement within and beyond the novel, the humorous implications of these disorderly allusions cannot but help extend into the realms of satire. Cainy Ball’s Genesis story, for example, touches subtly on what will later become an aspect of Hardy’s radical iconoclasm: his satirical attack upon the rituals of organized religion. For just as Cainy’s heretical name ‘could never be got rid of in the parish’, and henceforth enforces its own mythic potency and ‘mother-right’, and just as the village parson, who, try as he might, remains powerless to alter the consequences of his own baptismal rites, and is thus powerless to enforce Christianity’s mythic potency, so a quietly subversive point emerges: it is no longer Cainy Ball’s insouciant ‘heathen’ mother who seems absurd in her beliefs but the self-righteous Christian pastor himself.

The allusion thus works on several levels. There is the ‘recognition’ level: this invites readers familiar with the Genesis myth to participate in the story-telling process, to enjoy a pleasurable moment of shared assumptions, to give a nod and a wink to inside knowledge. Born of this, there is the satisfying experience of cultural fellowship. Then, at the ‘intellectual’ level, there is the ‘treat’, for those who are looking in that direction, of challenging those shared assumptions (notably the manner in which the Genesis story influences church dogma) which are now restored to their original narrative base not in sacred writings but in folk-culture, in oral history: the Cain story is retold as another Cain story and becomes a paradigm of the story-telling process.

This manner of assimilating religious doctrine to folk-culture, of implicitly devaluing the former in favour of the latter, of subverting Christian belief systems to pagan mythologies, and of pointing a critical finger at the Judaeo-Christian God, may be a theme which later develops more forcefully in Hardy’s poetry but it remains, nevertheless, an important philosophical route to such mature Wessex novels as Tess and Jude. In Far From the Madding Crowd Hardy’s allusive approaches to this theme are made, more often, with a quieter irony. A good example is Levi Everdene’s rather unorthodox invocation of the seventh commandment (VIII), which allows him the fantasy and illicit sexual pleasure of committing adultery with his own wife (see also note 16 to VIII). Alternatively, there is Hardy’s direct allusion to Exodus 17:6: here the Lord’s command to Moses to strike a rock on Mount Horeb from which water will stream for the Israelites to drink intersects, narratorially, with the intensely erotic moment of Bathsheba’s first kiss with Troy which brings ‘upon her a stroke resulting, as did that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream – here a stream of tears’ (see note 4 to XXVII).

In both cases, irony is implicit in the misapplication of sac red writings to secular matters, in the misalignment of judgemental moral decree and human sexual passion, in the clash of religious orthodoxy and cultural heterodoxy. And the remedial function of the allusion, in that it may also serve to straitjacket transgressive erotica with the strong arm of ‘The Word of God’, remains no less ironic for the fact that it legitimizes, by means of a palimpsestic reading of sacred script, the very thing it affects to indict. In effect, erotica enters through the (textual) back door, so to speak – yet another high intellectual treat.

At another level of allusive implication, the absurdity of the comparison, most apparent in Hardy’s use of mock-heroic allusions, often serves to draw the reader into a complicit relationship with the narrator and, in turn, into sympathy and affection for the character currently under scrutiny. When, for instance, the new, young mistress of the Everdene estate rather nervously and a little imperiously begins her payroll activities for the very first time, and when ‘the remarkable coolness of her manner’ takes on the ‘proportionate increase of arrogance and reserve’ shown by ‘Jove and his family’ when they moved from ‘their cramped quarters on the peak of Olympus into the wide sky above it’ (x), so the light mockery of this allusion invites the reader’s indulgent smile. There is something delightfully absurd in the comparison – the young woman-farmer rising up the social scale/the mighty Jove ascending to the stars. And the absurdity amuses, in this instance, because the twinned images fascinate by virtue of being not quite identical. Unlike the purposefully inapt relation set between Moses on Mount Horeb and Bathsheba in the Hollow of Ferns, which possesses no bewitching twinning effect, the Jovian allusion provides a recognizable analogy: the act of exaggeration makes the analogue possible.

Any form of irony which apprises its audience of circumstances, events and situations unknown to the character, tends to empower readers to a sense of omnipotence and, consequently, to an emotional generosity and a compassion for the human struggle in perspective. Thus, where the light mockery invites a smile it also invites complicity – not least because this is a smile Bathsheba might also laughingly share with us, in regarding her self-importance at this moment. The same could also be true of Gabriel Oak, when caught in a similar situation of petty pride. When, for example, he decides never to play the flute in Bathsheba’s presence because it distorts his features – his ‘eyes a-staring out like a strangled man’s’ – he is aligned, at this moment, with ‘the divine Minerva herself’ who, according to mythology, invented the flute but discarded it because it distorted her features (see note 23 to VIII). Although this allusion lacks Hardy’s customary wit in conjuring delightfully absurd comparisons, it does halt the reader for a brief moment to focus upon Oak’s conceit. This, in turn, prompts the recollection that in his first view of Bathsheba, in the looking-glass sequence, Oak had judged vanity to be an innate fault in women. Thus readers are apprised of his sexual double-standard which he could, perhaps, regard in a passing moment of good-humoured self-mockery as an innate fault in men. ‘Perhaps’ is the key word here. And in raising a doubt or two in the reader’s mind, the allusion serves the added purpose of contributing a breadth and depth of understanding to individual human characters and their situations.

Hardy’s allusions, then, operate at several different levels, sometimes leavening the effect of the narrator’s stance in deflating the heroic, some-times reconciling apparent contradictions or conveying, by indirection, an incongruity of meaning, while at other times attracting readers into a complicit relation with the narrator and character in view, or simply adding a new dimension to characterization, and at all times inviting readers into the story-telling process. But there is one further aspect worth mentioning here. This is the pictorial aspect. Very many of Hardy’s allusions are, in fact, quite clearly and simply pictorial enhancers designed specifically to address the interest of the educated reader.

When, for example, in the shears-grinding scene (XIX), Oak is said to stand ‘somewhat as Eros is represented when in the act of sharpening his arrows’, the implications, aside from the sexual symbolism attached to Eros, are purely iconic, in terms of their function as visual intensifiers. It happens thus. Eros (otherwise Cupid), the boy-god of love and young son of Venus, is traditionally depicted with bow and arrow; he is said to wet with blood the grindstone on which he sharpens his arrows. This is the image depicted in a host of art works. And one of the most popular of these, in Hardy’s time, was Raphael’s suite of thirty-two pictures illustrating the adventures of Psyche – the beautiful maiden loved by the boy Eros, but visited by him only at night; forbidden to seek out his identity, Psyche one night steals a look at him while sleeping; he awakens and flees; she is then enslaved by Venus and treated most cruelly; when these trials end the lovers are wed.

So it was that from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (which calls up ‘Cupid’s strongest bow’), to Rafael Mengs’s painting, ‘Cupid Sharpening His Arrows’, to the statue of Cupid stringing his bow (at the Louvre), or sleeping (Rome), or mounted on a tiger (Negroni), to the array of Cupids in literature (Horace, Ovid, Apuleius, Molière), and to the designer-saturation of Cupids on Victorian mantelpieces, drapes, and even tableware, Hardy was, pictorially speaking, drawing upon a shared cultural heritage of unquestionable familiarity, interest and pleasure to his Victorian contemporaries.

The same pictorial effect occurs with his allusion to ‘Flaxman’s…Mercury’ (XXXVII). This invokes the painter John Flaxman, whose engraved line-drawing entitled ‘Mercury Conducting the Souls of the Suitors to the Infernal Region’ depicts a scene from Homer’s Odyssey where Mercury (messenger of the gods) is leading Penelope’s suitors off to Hades. While Odysseus was absent during the Trojan War, Penelope was besieged by many suitors; upon his return, with the help of his son, Odysseus killed them. Flaxman’s drawings, engraved by William Blake, were widely admired in Hardy’s day (equally, Homer), and thus provided him with a source of vivid serial images which could be instantly evoked in the minds of his contemporary readers at the drop of one brief allusion. Precursors of cinematographic images, they had the effect of ‘stills’. In their allusive capacity they rely for their effect upon their imagistic pervasiveness within the culture – just as, say, the Mona Lisa (from Da Vinci’s painting in the Louvre to the lyrics of folk-rock to the cinematography of Monty Python) figures pervasively in twentieth-century Western culture.

As in the Eros allusion where no apt analogue exists (Oak is not a boy-lover furtively pursuing sensual pleasure in the woods at night), the Flaxman set of ‘stills’ bears only the loosest relation to Hardy’s story which focuses, at this point, upon the abashed workfolk emerging from their night-drinking with Troy. The bathos inherent in the comparison introduces a mildly comic aspect, but ultimately the allusion functions in common with all others as a form of extratextual dialogue conjoining the reader to the actual process of story-making by virtue of recognizing and sharing a common cultural ancestry.

In an important iconoclastic sense, then, Hardy draws upon the disparities between folklore and intellectual history, between oral and literary culture (the two ‘Cain’ stories/the tale of Everdene’s ‘seventh’), in order to accentuate their historical confluence and their mutual ancestry, born not of mortal or divine events in the real world but of the human imagination. When R. H. Hutton spoke of ‘a high intellectual treat’ he was not to know, at that early point in Hardy’s career, quite how intellectually inventive, or quite how iconoclastic the Wessex novels were going to become. Although, in terms of stylistics, he might well have perceived that Hardy’s experimental modes of stylistic incongruity, genre-crossing and indeterminacy – modes now commonly regarded as typical of his intellectual challenge to traditional narrative form – were already taking shape in Far From the Madding Crowd. And among them, the newly invented Wessex construct – itself the embodiment of the clash between the traditional and the experimental – was not only taking shape in this early novel but also proving to be, even in its period of gestation, conspicuously central to Hardy’s pluralistic organization.

Encompassing the fresh and verdant charm so keenly sought by Leslie Stephen, and so rhapsodized as ‘idyllic’ by those contemporary critics looking in the same direction, Wessex provides a dual correspondence not only to the myth and magic of a Golden Age world but also to the ‘strife’ which is absented from Hardy’s title but represented in the story proper. Here, in thematic dislocation from its Golden Age origins in Thomas Gray’s poem, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, which begins: ‘Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife’,⁹ Hardy’s representation of strife shapes his Wessex construct in several ways. For instance, the degree to which the human dilemma of, say, relational discord makes its impact upon the reader depends in part upon its manifestation in non-human (natural world) forms. And if these dissonant non-human forms remain, at first sight, relatively hidden – the lambing season arrives late, the bee-swarming (for honey-making) is irregular and unruly – their ultimate emergency lays bare the symbiosis between human and non-human disorder in no uncertain terms. In the event, the least hidden of these emergencies coincides with the most public of ‘strife’ manifestations in Bathsheba’s personal life: as late summer storms, in the outside world, wreak havoc on her crops, so there is chaos on the inside as her husband wreaks havoc with her work-force, driving them drunk and insensible.

And at a broader symbolic level Hardy also places his Wessex construct at the centre of a purposeful anomaly (or anti-pastoralism), as when the verdant pastures where sheep may safely graze transform into grotesque death-traps. In effect, the deadly temptation to which nature’s creatures are susceptible provides a close correspondence to the grotesque incongruity of conflicting passions in human affairs and humanity’s collisions of desire and self-destruction.

By implication rather than by direct correspondence, ‘ignoble strife’ also shapes the novel’s underlying philosophical forms: the irrationalism underlying human consciousness, the surreal nature of human imagination and the absurdity of the human condition¹⁰ (later to feature importantly in the ontological direction of Hardy’s œuvre). The agency of this implicit correspondence is frequently the ‘rustic chorus’, the working community at the hub of Hardy’s ‘partly real, partly dream-country’. Personifying, at the evolutionary level, the incoherence and indeterminacy of the natural world and, at the existential level, the collision between the meaninglessness

Collected Letters	R. L. Purdy and M. Millgate (eds.), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–88)
Cornhill	The Cornhill Magazine, 1874, edited by Leslie Stephen. (London: Macmillan, 1962)
Life	Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1962)
Literary Notebooks	L. Bjork (ed.), The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1985)
Biography	Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)
Personal Writings	Harold Orel (ed.), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1966)
Purdy	Richard Little Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968)
Seymour-Smith	Martin Seymour-Smith, Hardy (London: Bloomsbury, 1994)
Works	Michael Millgate (ed.), The Life and Works of Thomas Hardy (Athens, Georgia: 1985)

CONTENTS

Far From the Madding Crowd

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

CHRONOLOGY: HARDY’S LIFE AND WORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INTRODUCTION