SOURCE: Rogers, Shannon L. “‘The Historian of Wessex’: Thomas Hardy's Contribution to History.” Rethinking History 5, no. 2 (July 2001): 217-32.

[In the following essay, Rogers examines the influence of Hardy on concepts of the history of rural nineteenth-century England.]

In 1869, J. R. Green wrote that ‘History … we are told by publishers, is the most unpopular of all branches of literature at the present day, but it is only unpopular because it seems more and more to sever itself from all that can touch the heart of a people’ (Green 1888: xi). Green might just as easily have been commenting on our present day, when the notion of a history book produces countless yawns from prospective readers. And yet, the number of films devoted to historical topics—produced by major Hollywood studios as well as by independents—is growing seemingly exponentially, Renaissance Faires have never been more popular, and historical novels such as Patrick O'Brian's Captain Jack Aubrey series enjoy a large and enthusiastic following. Clearly, it is not ‘the past’ as a concept that leaves the average person cold. It is the notion of ‘the past’ as a discipline. With its rigorous attention to veracity and detail, academic history is often stripped of its connection to life, to the land, to the every day—in other words, from the ‘heart of the people’. People want to experience the past, to see how events effected the lives of characters they care about, to forget the present and immerse themselves in an alternative reality, even if it has been distorted or glamourized. It would appear, therefore, that it is the form, and not the content of history's presentation, that makes the real difference.

As we can deduce from Green's comment, this struggle between content and form was one that plagued historians and historical consumers (if we might use that term) during his own day. In many ways, the field of history—and of historiography—as we know it was in its infancy during the Victorian era. Concurrent with its development was that of the historical novel, ‘invented’ by Sir Walter Scott in 1814. Inspired by the overwhelming commercial and popular triumph of Scott and his successors, many historians, such as Green, Carlyle and Macaulay attempted to make their accounts more alive to the reader, ‘reconstructing’ conversations and re-envisioning the scenes of the past in all their colourful details. This blurring of the line between history and fiction appears to have given more authority to pure fiction as historical source. As one venerable historian wryly noted after the turn of the century: ‘After all the history we have ever learned, our first thought of Mediaeval England is quite likely to be a picture of England as the setting for Ivanhoe and Robin Hood, even if our second thought is that this is all wrong’ (Butterfield 1924: 2). For the civilian reader, that second thought was slow in coming, if it ever arrived at all. The visual and descriptive vibrancy of the works of these fiction authors contrived an image of such force—particularly in a literary age in which the novel served the place that television and film does for us—that the historical reality lying behind it came to life. Many historians, including Ranke, the aforementioned Macaulay and John Clive, have admitted that shaking the force of the visual image created by a historical novel is a difficult task indeed. Which provokes us to ask the question of whether such an image should be completely shaken.

Hayden White reminds us that, although based on evidence gathered from various sources, all historical works are ultimately the fictive creations of historians. What might historians today learn from nineteenth century realist writers like Thomas Hardy? With this in mind, it becomes not only valid but obligatory to appreciate the value of alternative sources of history, and approaches and modes of narrative history that tease and challenge the imagination to ponder what life was like in the past. It is also intriguing to consider the works of unconscious historians (but self-conscious writers) who treated topics of historical interest in their fiction and who, while adopting the documentary and factual approach to the study of the past, were driven by the cognitive demands and benefits of placing form before content.

Thanks to the development of the realist school of fiction, many novels of the Victorian period provide deep insight into what life was like during that period. Dickens, for instance, is frequently mined for this sort of evidence, his novels a chronicle of the social ills in the industrializing city, the hazards of the education system, or the pitfalls of the British legal system. George Eliot provides us with a great deal of reliable information on bourgeois and upper class rural life. And Thomas Hardy is an extremely valuable source for the history of life in southwestern England during the nineteenth century. What these authors, among others, achieve is the creation—usually unconscious—of historical documents through the medium of fictionalized social commentary. They are responding to the world around them and remarking upon its shortcomings. What this does is to create a record of those shortcomings for later generations to examine as both a work of deliberate fiction and as a historical creation.

Hardy is not generally considered a novelist of historical fiction by the strict standards of the genre. And yet his similarities to Scott, its father, are striking. Both were concerned with ballad forms, with the preservation of folkways and with the continuing influence of the medieval in society. More importantly, both writers were attempting to document, before all traces were wiped away by modernity, the manners and customs of a particular group of people in a specific place and time. Scott was concerned with Scottish Highland culture (and in many ways can be claimed as its inventor along with the historical novel). Hardy, of course, brought fame and life to rural Wessex. His use of the moniker ‘Wessex’ to describe the area of southwestern England that was home to his 14 novels was both a product of pure fancy and a serious historical reference. Wessex was one of the kingdoms of Britain's Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, the kingdom of Alfred the Great, who, along with the mythical Arthur, was a particular darling of the Gothic Revivalists. The name of Wessex, familiar yet dropped from usage, was a conception both within history and outside of it. It held echoes of a distant past, evoking a simpler time before machinery and modern ways had changed the face of the land. It was both romanticized and realistic, a fact not lost on the British Royal family in their recent decision to revive the Anglo-Saxon title Earl of Wessex for Prince Edward. In fact, Hardy's creation/adoption of Wessex was the very sort of manipulation of the past that Hollywood thrives on today.

However, Hardy's use of the past was in no way intended to be a romanticization or a nostalgic longing to return to a golden world lost. History, for Hardy, represented knowledge. Ties to tradition and to the past were not necessarily tethers, but instead connecting threads symbolizing continuity. Those of his characters who struggle along this long, unbroken chain of human experience, suffer. Tess is haunted by the incongruity of her own situation in juxtaposition to her much-vaunted ancestors. Angel Clare artificially struggles for modernity while romanticizing Tess's imagined past. In A Laodicean (1881), Paula Power similarly forces an incongruous clash of modern and medieval, which ultimately makes her incapable of romantic commitment. The pattern is repeated in Jude the Obscure (1896). Sue Bridehead claims a modernist paganism based on the classical, a rebellious and flimsily-conceived system which eventually gives way to a medieval Christian self-abnegation. At the same time, characters like Gabriel Oak and Richard Phillotson see the changes that are developing around them, but either adapt to them or placidly accept them and, thus, survive. Their lives are not easy, but this is merely the nature of Hardy's world and not an evil inherent in a recognition of history's passage.

It has been noted that ‘The great historical backcloth is seldom absent for long in a Hardy novel’ (White 1974: 64). All of his novels reflect a consciousness of historical change. In fact, with the exceptions of Desperate Remedies (1871), A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) and A Laodicean, the œuvre of novels cover the span of the nineteenth century (Weber 1965: 224).¹ In each novel, Hardy demonstrates the indirect and direct consequences of impersonal historical events and movements upon the life of the individual. In other words, ‘The … novel shows us the microcosm and allows us to draw larger conclusions for the macrocosm’ (Sanders 1978: 234). Although it falls roughly mid-way in Hardy's novel-writing career, The Trumpet-Major (1880) is chronologically his earliest subject from a historical point of view. It is also the novel that most obviously conforms to the ‘historical fiction’ genre, and Hardy conducted a fair amount of research into the background of the tale. Like Scott in Waverley and other novels, Hardy interviewed veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. His employment of oral history through eyewitness reports creates a unique account that is historically accurate. It is so colorful and realistic as to have prompted one contemporary scholar to comment ‘To read it is to live for a while in an English country village of the old style. … It is an admirable realization of rural England in Napoleonic times; all nerves and hatred of Frenchmen underneath the placid habit of her existence, ready to break out into a wild scurry of mingled effort and fear when the bogy of invasion becomes suddenly insupportable’ (Abercrombie 1927: 54, 56).

The Trumpet-Major is indeed a set-piece brought to life. Hardy initially reminds the reader of the tangible flow of history through everyday experience when, in Chapter 3, the cavalry enters Loveday's mill-house for the party. Hardy remarks that the paving in the passage way ‘was worn into a gutter by the ebb and flow of feet that had been going on there ever since Tudor times’ (Hardy 1974 ｛1880｝: 60).² Having set the larger historical scene, Hardy goes on to describe the emotions, excitement and energy attendant on the grand military events taking place in this remote corner of Wessex. He describes at length the Royal procession of King George III, for which the townspeople have prepared for days. The cortège passes quickly, but young Anne Garland ‘was rewarded by seeing a profile reminding her of the current coin of the realm’. Juxtaposed with this image is the profile portrait of Napoleon which Bob Loveday later shows to Anne: ‘The hat represented a maimed French eagle; the face was ingeniously made up of human carcases, knotted and writhing together in such directions as to form a physiognomy; a band, or stock, shaped to resemble the English Channel, encircled his throat, and seemed to choke him’ (Hardy 1974 ｛1880｝: 121, 218). The differences of human perspective are evident both in the propaganda itself and the responses it elicits from the viewers. Bob, the navy man, finds it ‘stirring’. Anne, aware of the very real threat to those she loves, finds it ‘dreadful’.

Throughout the novel, Hardy balances the historical progress of the military preparations, the alarm raised, and the anticlimactic movement of the troops to another area, with the impact of these activities on the daily lives of those involved. There is romance—too complex to be a mere love triangle—featuring John Loveday (the Trumpet-Major) and Anne Garland. Anne is unfortunately in love with John's brother Bob, who initially has plans to marry the giddy Matilda. Anne is also pursued by the nephew of the local squire, Festus Derriman, a pompous and ridiculous boy who only answers the King's call to arms to impress Anne. To all but Anne and John, the threat of Napoleon is a game, an opportunity for excitement in a dull village. But John's sense of responsibility for his wayward brother leads him to see the deeper repercussions and to make continuous sacrifices for Bob's benefit. In the end, the lighthearted mood occasioned by the antics of most of the characters fades. Anne marries the wrong man and John finds death ‘upon one of the bloody battle-fields of Spain’ (Hardy 1974 ｛1880｝: 344). These very personal details were no doubt inspired by the eyewitness accounts Hardy gathered as part of his research.

Hardy collected a great deal of information from primary, unwritten sources, making vast use of oral history. Like any proper historian, he supplemented this information with published primary and secondary accounts, conducting a great deal of his research at the British Museum. Hardy was initially rather proud of his novel, proud enough ‘to think that there would be some appropriateness in my offering a copy to his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’.³ Many years later, however, in typical Hardyan self-effacement, he wrote: ‘That the T｛rumpet｝ M｛ajor｝ should have any accuracy or any value nowadays, is a wonder; for it was written 30 years ago, from hand to mouth, as it were, for a periodical merely, & I used documents in a much more haphazard way then than I do now’.⁴ This comment might be in response to a charge of plagiarism levelled against him at the time of publication, implying that the offence was true although inadvertent.⁵ Or perhaps it may have instead illustrated Hardy's conscious development as a historical researcher and writer. In a correspondence with a scholar of Napoleonic history, Hardy remarked that in researching The Dynasts, ‘the matter I collected ｛was｝ … 5 times as much as I required for the TM [The Trumpet-Major]’. He also pointed out the critical importance in both works of the oral sources he gathered, the use of which could not be accused of being plagiarized: ‘I collected … what is now very valuable to me (in writing The D.)—oral information on those times from people who lived in them, which now could not be got: e.g., the arrival of the regiments at camp, at the beginning of the story, which was described to me by eyewitnesses’.⁶ Hardy also commented at length in letters upon the research conducted for The Trumpet-Major that was still useful to him and of the various new sources he consulted. What is interesting is the amount of difficulty he faced recreating the chronology of minor events or the progress of battles from his sources, even though the Napoleonic period was ground heavily traversed by historians. For instance, he attempted to determine the exact locations of George III's reviews of artillery. From evidence in the written sources, he placed George III's camp and several major inspections on Bincombe Down. However, he remarks that ‘old people who were present at the reviews, encampments, & c., used to tell me in my boyhood that the camp was on Mayne Down. But as this adjoins Bincombe Down there is no great discrepancy’.⁷ He also experienced great difficulties in arranging the sequence of the Battle of Leipzig. Demonstrating his understanding of a critical approach to history and a need to compare sources as well as a certain confidence in his own abilities in the field, he wrote: ‘I defy any human being to synchronize with any certainty its episodes from descriptions by the historians … My time-table was, I believe, as probable a one as can be drawn up at this date’.⁸

Carl Weber has remarked that Hardy's first role in The Dynasts was as a historian and that he did his best to retain actual speeches in the text (Weber 1965: 338-9). Indeed, Hardy's research was extremely thorough and more careful than it had been for The Trumpet-Major (much of it was in fact conducted for him by Florence Dugdale, the future second Mrs Hardy). So immersed was he in the world of the Napoleonic Wars that by Part III, he wrote to a friend, ‘It is well that the business should be over, for I have been living in Wellington's campaigns so much lately that, like George IV, I am almost positive that I took part in the battle of Waterloo, & have written of it from memory’.⁹ His sources included biographies of Napoleon and Nelson, histories of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars in both English and French, as well as general histories of Europe and more detailed histories of the British navy and individual campaigns. His own copies of Sir Archibald Alison's History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in MDCCLXXXIX to the Restoration of the Bourbons in MDCCCXV (1841-2) seems to have been of particular use to him as he annotated it heavily.¹⁰

Hardy never needed to research any of his other works in this fashion and most of them were instead influenced by his own personal experiences of growing up in Dorset, listening to the stories told by his family, absorbing the folk culture, the music and the agricultural way of life. His vivid descriptions of the countryside and towns of Wessex grew out of a lifetime's observation, as did his characterizations of rustics, and vast knowledge of country legends. So expert was he on the subject of agricultural workers of his region that he wrote the article ‘The Dorsetshire Farm Labourer’ in 1883 and was solicited to write another article on the ‘English rustic’ for the journal Merry England.¹¹ He also very authoritatively gave instructions for proper illustrations for Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), including specific directions for smock frocks, sheep-crooks, gaiters, and malt-houses.¹² Hardy's comparatively brief times spent in London did little more than temporarily sap his creativity, it seems. He remained a Dorset man at heart and it was Dorset that was his creative muse.

When in 1889 J. M. Barrie called Hardy the ‘Historian of Wessex’, it was with good reason. Barrie wrote that ‘No reader of his Wessex tales would have him shake this influence off, for it is part of his greatness as a novelist’. He recognized, even at that early date, the important role of Hardy in the historic recording of a dying way of life.

The closing years of the nineteenth century see the end of many things in country parts, of the peasantry who never go beyond their own parish, of quaint manners and customs, of local modes of speech and ways of looking at existence. Railways and machinery of various sorts create new trades and professions, and kill old ones … Mr. Hardy has given much of his life to showing who these rustics were and how they lived.

(Barrie 1889: 57)

What Barrie recognized were the very changes Hardy was emphasizing: the double-edged sword of modern progress. The railways opened up new opportunities for travel within the country. Cheap fares, for antiquarian excursions especially, provided the poorer classes with the kind of practical, visual education that might foster an appreciation of history. At the same time, schooling was more widely available and literacy on the increase. All of these were positive social developments and yet the benefits of education and travel carried with them risks and outright losses. Education could give a child unreasonable expectations or create a social gulf within the family, as it so plainly does in The Hand of Ethelberta, The Woodlanders and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Standardized schooling also meant standardized English and the erosion or even extinction of local dialects. Railway travel put people of different regions into more fluid contact with one another, a phenomenon which created greater and more diverse social exposure, eventually breaking down regional differences.

A font of cultural history, Hardy's novels preserved these dialect forms and customs, often only remembered from his own childhood or young adulthood. In his early career, however, he was not always recognized as, much less applauded for, serving this important function. At the time when Hardy began writing, rural labourers were not considered to be fit subjects for art. Hardy not only completely defied this notion but went a step further in making his rustics the voice of reason and salt of the earth wisdom in his world. Thus, Hardy suffered the misfortune of describing the seemingly familiar in an unfamiliar, even threatening, way. His use of Dorset dialect was really no different than Scott's use of Scots. Yet, the very strangeness of Scots placed the earlier novelist above the harm of criticism—reviewers feared they did not know enough about it to critique it intelligently. So revered did Scott become that even his Elizabethan style ‘medieval’ speech in Ivanhoe drew praise from critics for its ‘authenticity’. English peasants, conversely, were familiar. Reviewers seemed to believe that the only quality Hodge should evidence was a lack of intelligence.¹³ Hardy's combination of a coherent and unique dialect with sharp intuition and rustic profundity drew attacks from several critics. An anonymous review of The Return of the Native (1878) in the Athenæum, for instance, maintained that ‘People talk as no people ever talked before, or perhaps we should say as no people ever talk now. The language of his peasants may be Elizabethan, but it can hardly be Victorian’ (Athenæum 1878: 654). The irony of course is that Hardy's ‘Elizabethan’ peasants spoke a form of language he grew up hearing.

Far from the Madding Crowd was Hardy's first real commercial success and featured his first major experiment in faithfully portraying peasants. It drew a now-famous complaint from Henry James who accused Hardy of displaying patronizing attitudes to his rustics by making them too clever, a comment that showed James to be either completely disingenuous or appallingly unaware of his own patronizing attitude (James 1874: 27-8). The Saturday Review responded similarly, remarking ‘we feel either that we have misjudged the unenfranchised agricultural classes, or that Mr. Hardy has put his own thoughts and words into their mouths. And this suspicion necessarily shakes our own confidence in the truthfulness of many of the idyllic incidents of rustic life which are so plentifully narrated throughout these volumes’ (Saturday Review 1875: 57). In other words, because Hardy failed to meet the reviewer's pre-conceived notions of rural labourers, his veracity was in doubt. Had he created stereotypically dim rustics, he would have been judged to be completely realistic. Instead, his innovative realism was greeted with suspicion.

Not all voices were dissenting, however, and as the century progressed, more critics came to accept Hardy's revisionist notions of rural life. This is a powerful testimony not only to his believability, but to his knowledge of the Dorset region. The New Quarterly Magazine, surveying Hardy's works to date in 1879, commented that ‘His rustic personages are clearly drawn from nature, and if we were in a position to question their truth, we should have no desire to do so’ (New Quarterly Magazine 1879: 412). A fellow novelist complained that Hardy's rustic scenes and people were too informative, so much so that he felt he was reading ‘a conscientious, well-done report, executed by a thoroughly efficient writer’, a comment demonstrating the ongoing tension between form and content for readers (Moore 1888: 235-6). Edmund Gosse remarked on the evolution in attitudes to Hardy's peasants, from that of ‘gratuitous inventions’ to an acknowledgment ‘that Mr. Hardy was well within the bounds of truthful observation when he reported or arranged these exquisite dialogues of rural humour’ (Gosse 1879: 295).

What helped cause this acceptance was a growing realization of the harsh realities of rural life in the nineteenth century. Political and social awareness of the migration of farm labourers to the cities and the increasing mechanization of farm work—an awareness to which Hardy had himself contributed—created a familiarity with the victims as real people, and a compassion for a lost way of life, one that was inextricably bound to the English myth of the pastoral. This new attitude is revealed in Harold Williams's review of the Wessex Novels, in which he wrote:

The older agricultural life dies hard; and even in England there are still large tracts of country, notably in the southwest, where large cities there are virtually none, almost untouched by the desolating influences of the great industrial centres. Yet, even here, life is not what it was to the middle of last century. The Wessex of Mr. Hardy is ‘a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines’ … In the Wessex novels, the older ways, the older thought, the old wisdom, speech, and humour are reflected by a master mind.

(Williams 1914: 125)

Coming after the close of the century, Williams's comments illustrate the gradual nature of this understanding. This passage also reveals an appreciation of Hardy's authority on rural culture and folk history. His characters are fictional, his works are novels, but their situations clearly demonstrate a historically verifiable milieu. He is describing ‘how things were’ rather than ‘what happened’, a sort of hybridization of what Ranke attempted in his avowal to portray the past ‘as it really was’. If Ranke is still considered by many to be the quintessential social historian, then can Hardy—even as a novelist—fall very far outside this definition?

The Wessex world he evoked was very much alive and vibrant for his readers and its historical associations and contemporary interest were even encouraged by Hardy himself: ‘Outside the novels, Hardy contributed actively to the creation of ‘this physical provincial definition’, not only by public pronouncements on “Wessex” life and language, but also by his willing support of popularizing and commercializing schemes advanced by admirers of the novels’ (Keating 1989: 334). This included his early promotion of the topographical interest of Dorset in a review of the poems of William Barnes (Hardy 1879: 469-73). Seven years later, he responded tetchily to a comment in Saturday Review that the setting of The Mayor of Casterbridge was ‘a remote region—we are unable to localize’. Hardy wrote to Kegan Paul, firmly asserting the reality of his fictional region: ‘I am not disposed to think the review entirely the product of stupidity. That there should be no mistake about the locality I told the editor the real name of the town: so the paragraph about not recognizing it is meant as a civil snub, I suppose’.¹⁴ Of course, in later editions of the novels, Hardy's map included both ‘Wessex’ names and actual names, which only serves to emphasize his purpose of chronicling a cultural history of the region.

Around the time of the publication of Tess [Tess of the d'Urbervilles], Hardy was quite adamant that the name of Wessex be actively connected to his novels. He wrote to Edward Marston, ‘Could you, whenever advertising my books, use the words “Wessex novels” at the head of the list? I mean, instead of “By T. H.”, “T. H.'s Wessex novels”, or something of the sort?’ That this was not only a source of pride, but a commercial interest is clear from his next statement. ‘I find that the name Wessex, wh. I was the first to use in fiction, is getting to be taken up everywhere: & it would be a pity for us to lose the right to it for want of asserting it. It might also be used on the paper covers of the novels’.¹⁵ Fourteen years later he was contemplating the need ‘in self defence as it were, to publish an annotated edn ｛sic｝ giving a really trustworthy account of real places, scenery, & c. (Somewhat as Scott did)’.¹⁶ Despite this apparent complaint, he had already actively encouraged people to associate his novels with country scenes. In 1901, he advised Hermann Lea, who was planning to publish photographs of the West Hill Fair, to emphasize the connection with nostalgia, titling the article ‘in some such words as “A Fair in Old England”’. He also urged Lea to mention Far from the Madding Crowd, implying that the novel and Old English fairs were (or should be) synonymous in the popular imagination.¹⁷

As the twentieth century progressed, Hardy became even more involved in what has been called ‘the romanticisation of his “regionalism”’, which was so much a part of the tourist industry (Keating 1989: 334). In 1902, Hardy made suggestions to the Town Clerk of Dorchester for historical places to be marked in the official Guide to the town and several years later he demonstrated not only his knowledge of the region but his affinity for its history by urging the Town Council to change back the names of recently renamed Dorchester streets.¹⁸

In 1922, a W. G. Bowman proposed a ‘Wessex Magazine’ to be called Wessex Life: A Popular Magazine Devoted to the Wessex Movement of Thomas Hardy. The plan of the magazine was to ‘bring the Wessex Movement into the Homes of the People’. The magazine unfortunately never appeared so that we cannot know precisely what ‘the Wessex Movement’ may have entailed. At Bowman's request, Hardy offered some suggestions for its operation and focus. Most important among Hardy's ideas are his insistence that Somerset and Devon should be included ‘to make it cover all the six counties of the old kingdom (which included a great part of Devon)’, and his preference for the term ‘Southwest’ rather than ‘the South’, which again emphasized the perimeters of the historic kingdom. In opposition to his former wishes to be closely connected to the name Wessex, which he had intimated to be his own rather exclusive provenance, he now suggests that his name not be associated with the magazine because it ‘would certainly prejudice some people against it’.¹⁹

While this dissociation could certainly be another symptom of Hardy's famous over-sensitivity, it implies as well that he was willing to let the interest in Wessex take on a life of its own. His popularization of the term was no longer in danger of dispute and so he still could gain by its use while its independence as a concept would also emphasize its historical reality. He expressed this pulling away explicitly in a letter to Francis Macnamera (dictated to Florence Hardy), concerning the proposed Wessex Review which, unlike Wessex Life, at least lasted for three issues: ‘｛Hardy｝ desires me to say that he has no idea what the prospects of the contemplated “Wessex Review” may be. The development of a utilitarian Wessex is entirely beyond the scope of his past conceptions & writings, which have been merely of a dreamland roughly resembling & conterminous with the six counties that now cover the old kingdom’.²⁰ Of course, this was not really the case—all that Hardy had written previously supports his conception of Wessex as an actual topographical location.

Hardy's latent ambivalence to Wessex-related themes in popular culture aside, it was certainly his familiarity and expertise in the history of the region that gained him a reputation as authority on its language and lore. His letters are full of references to local legends. Hardy mentions the manor house of the Turbervilles, which he recreated as the scene of Tess's ill-fated wedding-night and recounts the legend of the phantom coach, remarking that it is ‘well-known here’. In answer to a question as to the veracity of his legends, Hardy replies, ‘the legendary matter & folk-lore in my books is traditionary, & not invented … this being a point on which I was careful not to falsify local beliefs and customs’.²¹ If he only viewed his work as a ‘dreamland’, then fabrication and fantasy would have been part and parcel of the fictionalization. But again, Hardy is careful to protect the historical content in order to maintain a certain historicism to his fiction.

Hardy's history not only earned him a great deal of respect, but may even have fostered the study of folklore. The Folklore Society was founded in 1878, at which time it was elevated from antiquarian interest to ‘a matter of preserving a vital human resource. The very title “folklore” lent the subject a new dignity, yet emphasized how divorced it was from the people who actually did the studying. It was the “lore”—a deliberately archaic term—of the “folk”’ (Rattue 1995: 133). In spite of anecdotal tales of Hardy's aloofness from actual Dorset peasants, he was not so divorced from the folk as many folklorists were. He had grown up fairly closely among them and his mother had taught him many of the tales he recounted, having learned them herself in her own girlhood. Like Scott, he absorbed this information through a lifetime of association. He noted that his method of acquiring folklore had never been systematic, ‘which a well-known folklorist tells me makes the items I mention the more valuable. They have nearly disappeared, however, from Wessex life’.²² It eventually earned him high praise from the London Folklore Society as well as requests for information from folklore scholars who considered him an expert (Firor 1931: 304). His novels, most importantly, had influenced scholarship to such an extent that books and theses appeared with ‘Wessex Folklore’ as their subjects, such as J. S. Udal's Dorsetshire Folklore (1922).²³

Hardy not only popularized and perhaps helped legitimize folklore studies, but he preserved Dorset dialect and this provided an important resource for linguistic studies. One scholar has remarked, ‘To study Hardy's English closely is to become aware of a thousand years of linguistic history’ (Elliott 1984: 9). Language, in fact, seemed to be the single area in which his usually elegiac tone slipped into outright nostalgia and regret for the changes time brings. He often lamented that dialect words and phrases were lost during his own lifetime, victims of standardized education and social expectations. Time and again he made remarks such as ‘alas, they are old expressions rapidly dying’ or ‘the expression … is dying away hereabout’. Increasingly, words like ‘Ich’ were giving way to the standardized ‘I’: ‘This & kindred words—e.g.—“Ich woll”, “er woll”, &c, are still used by old people in NW Dorset & Somerset … I heard “Ich” only last Sunday; but it is dying rapidly. I know nobody under seventy who speaks so, & those above it use the form only in impulsive moments when they forget themselves’.²⁴ Behind this romantic attachment to the language lay a solid knowledge of Dorset dialect, one which caused linguists to consult him for etymological information. Sir James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, inquired of Hardy the use and meaning of ‘tranter’ (an itinerant peddlar) and John Wesley Hales, Professor of English at King's College, London, asked Hardy about his usage of the expression ‘good-now’. While researching The English Dialect Dictionary (1896-1905), philologist Joseph Wright started an active correspondence with Hardy, inquiring about the meanings of such words and phrases as ‘Trangleys’ and ‘To chaw high’.²⁵

It is clear that Hardy achieved much more than merely creating an escapist world for his readers. Wessex could never truly provide escapism because it was so firmly based on the realities faced in rural life over the course of the century. It was never Hardy's intention either to romanticize this dying world, although some aspects of it—especially the language, legends and sense of community—he was sorry to see pass. In fact, I would argue that he was never consciously chronicling that world. It is only in the hindsight of his letters written decades after his last novels that he realizes what he had accomplished. Like his work in folklore—unsystematic and instinctive—Hardy's work as historian was essentially untrained, sometimes haphazard, but often true because he had no historical point to make. His purpose was social criticism of his present and not documentation for the future. Therefore, the reality of his fiction provides us with a means of interpreting the past (to us) in which he lived.

What emerges in his novels, informed as they are by his own experiences rather than simply by book-knowledge, is an accurate account of rural life through all of the century's developments, one which provides us with an alternative to academic cultural histories. Through the alternative form of his novels, we see the introduction of telegraph, railways and farm machinery to Wessex—the historical content that we are often apt to study for their own sakes with little regard to their ever-expanding cultural influences. Hardy's novels bring vividly to life the incongruity of modern love letters delivered via telegraph and the impact that change has on the individual or the elevation of social expectations education brings and how that shapes the family dynamic. Hardy shows all of these things in living detail, commenting briefly, but mostly allowing the consequences of modernity to reveal themselves. He understood, like Scott before him, not only the futility of fighting the future, but of the ultimate benefits that progress can bring. His novels are elegies, but never idealizations and his solid knowledge of the past he chronicles gained him respect among scholars as an expert on rural Wessex, its culture and its history.

Notes

1. Weber has somewhat controversially proposed that Hardy's coverage of history begins with The Trumpet-Major, which covers the period from 1800 to 1808, and ends with Tess, which takes place between 1884 and 1889. His argument is based upon internal clues, such as revised marriage laws in The Woodlanders (1887) or lack of modern technology in Return of the Native (1878), which certainly implies the importance of historical developments within the texts themselves. According to Weber, the historical chronology runs thus: The Trumpet-Major, 1800-8; Under the Greenwood Tree, 1835-6; Return of the Native, 1842-3; The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1846-9; The Well-Beloved, 1852-92; Jude the Obscure, 1855-74; Two on a Tower, 1858-63; Far from the Madding Crowd, 1869-73; The Woodlanders, 1876-9; and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 1884-89.

2. This image mirrors Hardy's impression of St. Mark's, Venice seven years later: ‘The floor, of every colour and rich device, is worn into undulations by the infinite multitudes of feet that have trodden it’. (see Hardy (1985) [1928-30] The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (ed.) Michael Millgate, Athens: The University of Georgia Press.

3. Thomas Hardy to Francis Knollys, 14 December 1881, Letters 1: 98.

4. Thomas Hardy to A. M. Broadley, 31 December 1907, Letters 3: 286.

5. Hardy had relied heavily on C. H. Gifford's two-volume History of the Wars Occasioned by the French Revolution (1817), the use of which indirectly, but unfortunately, opened him to a curious charge of plagiarism. Gifford's book was the source behind the drill scene in Chapter 23. However, Gifford's drill scene, as Hardy admits in the 1895 Preface, was not original with him. It was in fact a retelling of an anonymous account reprinted in John Lambert's Travels through Lower Canada and the United States in the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808 (1810) according to Carl Weber. Yet, the actual accusation in the American Critic (28 January 1882) has Hardy lifting the details from A. B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, of which Hardy stoutly maintained he had never heard.

6. Thomas Hardy to A. M. Broadley, 31 December 1907, Letters 3: 286.

7. Thomas Hardy to A. M. Broadley, 7 January 1908, Letters 3: 289.

8. Thomas Hardy to J. H. Morgan, 12 October 1922, Letters 6: 161.

9. Thomas Hardy to Edward Clodd, 31 December 1907, Letters 3: 287.

10. Hardy consulted William Hazlitt's four volume Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1852), a book White describes as ‘full of inaccuracies and hero worship’ but well-loved by Hardy. Curiously, Hardy does not mention reading Scott's Life of Napoleon (1827) despite his admiration for Scott's fiction and poetry. White theorizes that Hardy must have owned a copy of J. Holland Rose's The Life of Napoleon I (1901), although it is not mentioned as being among his books. White also presumes that Hardy might have read at least volume 5 of Albert Sorel's L'Europe et la Révolution Française (1885-1904). Hardy also used Sir Archibald Alison's History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in MDCCLXXXIX to the Restoration of the Bourbons in MDCCCXV (1841-2). Hardy's personal copy of this 20 volume set (7th edn, London, 1847-8), was well-annotated and marked, as was his copy of The Epitome of Alison's History of Europe (1849). Hardy also consulted Adolphe Thiers's 20 volume Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire (1845-84), which he owned in its original French along with a 10 volume translation by D. Forbes Campbell (1845-62), Pierre Coquelle's Napoléon et l'Angleterre, 1803-13 (Paris, 1904), Sir W. F. P. Napier's The History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France (1840), and Philippe-Paul Ségur's Campagnes de Bonaparte: ou, Napoléon et la Grande-Armée Pendant l'Année 1812 (1839), of which last Hardy owned a copy. Hardy read C. H. Gifford's History of the Wars as a child and purchased a copy of the 1876 edition of Pierre Lanfrey's Histoire de Napoléon 1^er, which he annotated and marked. Rounding out Hardy's list of sources were G. R. Gleig's The Leipsic Campaign (1852) and The Story of the Battle of Waterloo (1848), William Beatty's Authentic Narrative of the Death of Nelson (1808), Baron Claude-François de Méneval's Mémoirs Pour Servir a l'Histoire de Napoléon 1^er Depuis 1802 Jusquà 1815 (1894), Edward Pelham Brenton's The Naval History of Great Britain, 1783-1836 (1823-5), and Arthur Lévy's Napoléon Intime (1893) (see Rosenbaum 1990: 197, 222, 219, 211, 212; White 1965: 83, 85, 88, 92, 89, 96, 106).

11. Thomas Hardy to Wilfred Meynell, 2 March 1883, Letters 1: 115-6.

12. Thomas Hardy to Smith, Elder and Co. [mid December 1873], Letters 1: 25.

13. Hodge was a colloquial nickname for an English rustic or agricultural labourer, dating from the late Middle Ages. It developed from either the male first name ‘Roger’ or the surname ‘Rogers’, which was a common name of peasants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

14. Thomas Hardy to C. Kegan Paul, 1 June 1886, Letters 1: 145.

15. Thomas Hardy to Edward Marston, [1888], Letters 1: 171.

16. Thomas Hardy to Frederick Macmillan, 31 March 1902, Letters 3: 16.

17. Thomas Hardy to Hermann Lea, 31 July 1901, Letters 2: 294.

18. Thomas Hardy to the Town Clerk of Dorchester, 28 April 1902, Letters 3: 19-20; Thomas Hardy to John Acland, 24 February 1910, Letters 4: 76.

19. Thomas Hardy to W. G. Bowman, 3 July 1922, Letters 6: 143-4.

20. Thomas Hardy to Francis Macnamara, 20 July 1922, Letters 6: 149-50.

21. Thomas Hardy to Nelson Richardson, 5 June 1906, Letters 3: 209-10; Thomas Hardy to E. Pasco, 10 December 1903, Letters 3: 93.

22. Thomas Hardy to J. S. Udal, 9 June 1915, Letters 5: 111.

23. Thomas Hardy to Ernest Rhys, 10 October 1913, Letters 4: 308; Thomas Hardy to J. S. Udal, 9 June 1915, Letters 5: 111.

24. Thomas Hardy to Madeleine Rolland, 14 March 1921, Letters 6: 74; Thomas Hardy to John Wesley Hales, 19 July 1892, Letters 1: 277; Thomas Hardy to Edmund Gosse, 26 October 1888, Letters 1: 181).

25. Thomas Hardy to Sir James Murray, 24 October 1913, Letters 4: 312-3; Thomas Hardy to John Wesley Hales, 19 July 1892, Letters 1: 277-8; Thomas Hardy to Joseph Wright, 18 December 1902, Letters 3: 42; Thomas Hardy to Joseph Wright, 26 June 1897, Letters 2: 168.

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