Thomas Hardy Books - Far From the Madding Crowd - The Wessex Nove (1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy Books - Far From the Madding Crowd - The Wessex Nove (1840-1928) Thomas Hardy As A Novelist

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

The Wessex Novel

Since the end of the eighteenth century there has been a heightened sense of locality in English literature. The fact that Milton was a Londoner does not have much effect on our appreciation of Paradise Lost, but the fact that Wordsworth was a salesman of the lake country is very important for the understanding of The Prelude. Sir Walter Scott was the first great novelist to make use of this modern feeling for the character of places. His Waverley novels are not only a series of great and moving stories, but also a complete portraiture of the Scotland that he knew and loved so well. The achievement of Scott in thiss respect has only once been rivalled in Britain since his time. A service similar to that which he performed for the Scottish Lowlands was rendered by Thomas Hardy to certain parts of rural England more than half a century later.

Thomas Hardy's cighteen books of prose fiction deal in the majn with one part of England. For this district he revived the ancient name of Wessex which had long been forgotten by all except historians and antiquaries. The Wessex of Thomas Hardy has no very clearly defined limits. Bounded on the South by the English Channel, it stretches as far West as Cornwell, as far Hardy's art is his native country of Dorset. Dorset is one of the most historic of english countries and in the nineteenth century it was one of the most conservative and backward. When Hardy was a boy it was still hardly touched by the great industrial revolution. It was a country of sleepy old towns and secluded villages, where old customs still survived, and where the social fabric had undergone little change for centuries. Something of "the old age of the world" lingered up to the middle of the reign of Victoria in this sheltered corner of South-Western England.

Thomas Hardy had an intimate knowledge of Wessex. He had studied it with the enthusiasm of a poet and with the scientific precision of a social historian. He knows the Wessex landscape not as a tourist knows it, but as a farmer might know it if he had the sensitiveness of an artist. He shows a knowledge of local history and antiquities that few people could have boasted. He knows every details of the business of the farmer, the shephered, the woodman, and the dairyman, and all the rustic occupations of the Wessex countryside But the true basis on which his art is built is his deep and sympathetic understanding of the life and character of the Wessex people, the farm hands and servants, dairymaids, shepherds and labourers, as well as the farmers, the gentry and the country tradesmen, parsons and doctors.

English country folk have appeared Ages onwards, but generally they have been in the background as they are in Shakespeare s plays. They have been used to provide comic relief to serious plot. Thomas Hardy is The First great English author to choose English Peasant types For His Heroes and Heroines.
 He neither caricatures them nor idealises them He has shown that English village life can provide a gallery of characters that Is truly Shakespearean in its richness and variety. To give only a few examples, it is a gallery that includes the noble and steadfast Gabriel Oak, the unspeakably patient and long-suffering Marthysouth. Michael Iftenchard with his elemental strength and energy. Tess Durbifield with her exquisite spiritual beauty, and Jude Fawley with his tragic and terrible longing. Hardy carried out in prose fiction the programme that Wordsworth proposed for poety: "to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as possible in a selection of the language really used by men, and at the same time to throw over then, a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect."

Another great characteristic of the Wessex novels is their tragic quality Hardy was the first great English novelist who wrote tragic novels comparable to the poetic dramas of the Greeks and the Elizabethans in their profound feeling, their intellectual power, the intensity of their passion, and the austere beauty of their expression. It is true that all Hardy's works are not tragie. But his masterpieces, the series of six great novels which began with Far from the Madding Crowed and ended with Jude the Obscure, are the supreme examples of the tragic novel in English literature. Apart from the tragedies of individual Ivies there are certain fundamental tragic ideas underlying all these works. One is that of a conflict between the old-fashioned simple Wessex folk and the new spirit of the modern world with its complexity of mind, its interest and its scepticism.

The theme of all Hardy's great novels is in some degree the tratic result of the impact of this "new and strange spirit" on the lives of Wessex men and women. Sometimes this conflict is seen in the outward and economics changes as in the pitiful ejection of Tess and her family from their cottage after the death of her father or the intrusion of Farfrae's modern business method- into the sleepy world of Casterbridge commerce. But much more subtle and far- reaching effects are shown to be due to the relations between the old fashioned, simple-minded. Wessex-folk and the more complex characters of modern civilization. This was the theme that seems to have haunted Hardy's imagination again and again he shows us the tragic consequences that ensure from the contract of a Sergeant Troy or a Lucetta Templemen with unsophisticated straightforward country folk like Gabriel Oak and Micheal Henchard. Such relationships reveal a kind of tragic conflict between the spirits of two ages, and it is all the more tragic because the chief actors are often unconscious of it.

 Such are Hardy's Wessex novels. He has used his beloved Wessex in his novels and immortalised it. He has succeeded in raising it to the level of the universal and the ideal.

Thomas Hardy As A Novelist
Thomas Hardy Story
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