‘The Withered Arm’ has long been acknowledged as one of Hardy's finest short stories. As Kristin Brady points out, its form is close to the folk tale: ‘There is an oral quality to its prose style, but it has no actual narrator with a personal motive for telling his story’.¹ This is so even though the tale also refers to nineteenth-century developments such as photography and galvanism. Brady deals ably with the curious admixture here, noting Hardy's reluctance to comply with Leslie Stephen's request that the phenomenon of the withered arm itself be more fully explained to the reader. The story's supernatural aspects are held firmly in place by the social realism of the presentation, as instanced in the opening description of the ‘eighty-cow dairy’,² the size and capitalist structure of which Brady comments upon, adding that the simultaneous continuance of old-style practices makes the dairy ‘an emblem of its transitional time’.³

I am interested here, not in adding one more literary-critical interpretation, since Brady's is exemplary along these lines, but in briefly furnishing a more material context for ‘The Withered Arm’. Critics of Hardy have often moved all too readily from the social and historical to the plane of a universalising liberal humanism. In seeking to reverse this tendency, I will focus the reader's attention upon the two crucial incidents of the tale, the phenomenon of the withered arm and its treatment, and the hanging of the illegitimate son of Rhoda Brook and Farmer Lodge.

The voice which transmits the narrative of ‘The Withered Arm’ is that of a sympathetic observer, a kind of literary folklorist. In his magisterial book, Literacy and Popular Culture, David Vincent has noticed how the act of writing places the folklorist ‘on the other side of a divide’ from those studied, who still accepted superstitious ideas.⁴ Certainly, such folklorists uncovered, as one contemporary of Hardy put it, ‘a vast mass of superstition holding its ground most tenaciously’⁵ against the kind of literate, capitalist structures impregnating even a remote countryside. In the preliterate, communal world of which Rhoda is a denizen, ‘the bizarre was commonplace and daily life suffused with the extraordinary’.⁶ Discussion in such communities often centres, as a writer noted of West Yorkshire, on ‘the powers possessed by some of the neighbours who had an “evil eye” and who could produce bad luck among others by simply wishing it to occur’.⁷

The tale recounts how the beautiful Gertrude Lodge ‘visited the supplanted woman in [Rhoda's] dreams’, mockingly thrusting her wedding-ring into the milkmaid's face. ‘Maddened’ and ‘nearly suffocated’, Rhoda grasps the left arm of her rival, and flings her to the floor in a dream action which leaves her still able to ‘feel her antagonist's arm within her grasp’, ‘the very flesh and bone of it’ (WT [Wessex Tales: Strange, Lively, and Commonplace], p. 63). When, next day, Mrs Lodge makes a charitable visit to the cottage Rhoda is alarmed to perceive ‘faint marks of an unhealthy colour’ on the ‘pink round surface’ of the arm (WT, p. 65). As the summer progresses, the arm begins to shrivel, ‘as if some witch, or the devil himself, had taken hold of me there, and blasted the flesh’, as Gertrude pitifully remarks (WT, p. 67). The belief system in which Rhoda is embedded demands an extreme sensitivity to all kinds of social conduct, and to every manifestation of the natural world. The common denominators of her culture are orality and the natural rhythm of the seasons, and it is these factors which come into play in the recommendation to her lucklessly pretty rival, Gertrude Lodge, to seek the advice of the white wizard, Conjuror Trendle, in the recesses of Egdon Heath. Gertrude is rendered increasingly desperate by the withering of her arm, and consequent loss of sexual allure. As Vincent observes, ‘The more a disease resisted a remedy, the more desperate became the search for alternatives’.⁸ Figures such as Conjuror Trendle, or Conjuror Fall whom Henchard consults in The Mayor of Casterbridge, ‘could formulate the demand for their services into a decent livelihood’,⁹ though Hardy stresses Trendle's feigned scepticism in his own powers, and his alternative career as a dealer in furze. The word ‘trendle’ derives from an Anglo-Saxon term for a circle; progressively, in ‘The Withered Arm’ and elsewhere in Hardy's Wessex fiction, we see a repetitive, seasonal conception of time replaced by its linear opposite, in a process which Vincent characterises as ‘the invasion of the circular, immutable rhythms of nature by the progressive, man-made movement of an historically conscious society’.¹⁰ We see this clearly in the distinction drawn between Mrs Durbeyfield, with her faith in the prophetic powers of The Compleat Fortune Teller, and Tess herself, with her schizophrenic ability to speak the ‘two languages’ of village community and metropolis. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, of course, the invasion is registered and focused by the arrival of the steam-threshing machine. Enlightenment, so-called, resided in the Established Church, and the Anglican pastor often sought to challenge and undermine village credulity during the nineteenth century. The increase in literacy was crucial here, but Vincent interestingly notes the caveat that a printed culture also preserved superstition, in the form of fortune-telling, dream books and quack prescriptions of the kind purveyed by Vilbert in Jude the Obscure. The ‘aged friend’ from whom the narrator heard of the curative incident appears to have been Hardy's mother, Jemima. The Dorchester hangman, William Calcraft, was in the habit of selling the rope by the inch after a hanging to customers who believed in its medical efficacy. He was once rebuked by the authorities for allowing a man to come to the scaffold to have a wart touched by the dead man's hand.

The climactic recognition scene, the execution of Rhoda's and Lodge's son for attending a rick-fire, has all too often been read as melodramatic contrivance. I suggest instead that we may contextualise it within a certain historical conjuncture. The serial version of ‘The Withered Arm’, published in Blackwood's Magazine in January 1888, placed the action in 1833; later versions revised this date, pushing the action back to 1825. This confusion on Hardy's part is of some significance in connection with the kinds of agricultural distress and upheaval which are registered in the execution of the anonymous boy, since the 1830s were, of course, notable in the countryside for the Captain Swing riots of 1830 and subsequent violent outbreaks of social protest. The situation of the workfolk in the period following the Nepoleonic War was extreme. Social control was exerted through poor relief, which proved totally inadequate, and the vestries which administered such relief were dominated by the squire, the parson and the farmer. As a result class antagonism increased and led to the formation of the so-called ‘dark’ village, mutinous and discontented. Rocketing food prices and plummeting living standards provoked rural protest and crime in a wave of activity which Hobsbawm and Rudé, in their history of the period, characterise as ‘a defence against hunger’.¹¹ Arson, or letters threatening arson, possessed a long history in the story of struggle and deprivation. As one commentator remarks, ‘arson gave the labouring community the opportunity to transform an individual act of covert protest into a collective and overt display of hatred against the farmers’:¹² the boy thus attends a rick-fire which might be aimed at his own father. The characteristic arsonist was the young labourer responding to his appalling plight, and this response was at its height in the period between 1830 and 1850. Indeed, arson appears to have increased specifically because of the failure of the machine-breaking Swing Riots of 1830. Hardy himself was to recall:

My father saw four men hung for being with some others who had set fire to a rick. Among them was a stripling boy of eighteen … with youth's excitement he had rushed to the scene to see the blaze … Nothing my father ever said to me drove the tragedy of life so deeply into my mind.¹³

Incendiarists believed that dread of fire would induce farmers to increase wages, and men would repeat the threatening motto, ‘Work, money or fire’. Arson peaked in the years 1834-6, 1839-40 and 1843-50. The efflorescence of these activities prompted an Act to amend the law on the burning of farm buildings in 1844, and a concurrently sharp increase in insurance on farming stock. It is possible that, at the age of nineteen, Thomas Hardy attended the hanging in September 1830 in Somerset of the Kenn arsonists. This group of men was convicted on flimsy evidence of setting fire to a corn-rick. Whether or not this was the case, ‘The Withered Arm’ certainly seems to recall the hanging of Sylvester Wilkins of Bridport, who was executed for arson at Dorchester Gaol on 30 March 1833. Wilkins was found guilty of setting fire to a combing shop in Bridport, and the fire spread rapidly to adjacent properties. The governor of the gaol provided two lead weights, which may still be viewed in the Dorset County Museum, each embossed with the word ‘mercy’, to ensure that the lightly built seventeen-year-old youth should be guaranteed a quick end. Hardy utilised this incident fairly directly in a later story, ‘The Winters and the Palmleys’, which appeared in Life's Little Ironies.

If we date the action of ‘The Withered Arm’ as 1833, therefore, we can fit it more securely within the period of social unrest. In particular, the reader of the tale might profitably ponder the fact that it was the introduction and marketing of the lucifer match in 1830 which rendered the job of the incendiarist much easier. As a magistrate observed in 1851, ‘We all know that lucifer matches have become very cheap … they are not only in the cottage, but in the pockets of every labourer’.¹⁴ Stealth and speed now enabled the firing of ricks and farm buildings on a scale hitherto unattempted, and the lucifer match meant that the majority of incendiarists were never caught. Hardy may have subliminally recalled this period when, in his 1874 preface to Far From the Madding Crowd, he referred to

a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who could read and write, and National school children.¹⁵

The appalling punishment meted out to the luckless youth at the end of Hardy's tale is somewhat displaced for the reader by the spectacular effects of Gertrude's shock and subsequent death. But the lugubrious interview with the hangman, and the execution which ensues, endorse for the attentive reader a central contention of Hobsbawm's and Rudé's seminal study of rural protest:

Property was its legitimate object, life was not. The labourers' scale of values was thus the diametrical opposite of their betters', for whom property was more precious to the law than life.¹⁶

It is surely not simply authorial pathos that Farmer Lodge, after the death of his son, gives up his lands and farms, moves to Port-Bredy and declines in ‘solitary lodgings’ (WT, p. 85). He carries with him the guilt of the propertied class. Nor was the boy's punishment exaggerated for the sake of the tale, since every person forming part of the crowd at a rick-fire was liable to punishment. As Hobsbawm and Rudé drily remark, ‘the intention was to inspire terror and make an example’.¹⁷ Of the nineteen executions which followed the Swing Riots in southern England, the majority were for the rural crime of arson. As the writers of Captain Swing conclude:

From no other protest movement of the kind—from neither Luddites nor Chartists, nor trade unionists—was such a bitter price exacted.¹⁸

The supposedly timeless ballad qualities of ‘The Withered Arm’ beloved of so many Hardy commentators need to be balanced by the historical specificity of the ‘bitter price’ which the tale so dramatically embodies in the lives of Rhoda Brook and her son, victims of a carefully rendered moment of class antagonism in rural England.¹⁹

Notes

1. Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 21.

2. ‘The Withered Arm’, in Wessex Tales, ed. Kathryn R. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 57. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

3. Brady, p. 24.

4. David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 57.

5. William Henderson, writing in 1866; cited in Vincent, p. 156.

6. Vincent, p. 159.

7. John Sykes, cited in Vincent, p. 160.

8. Vincent, pp. 162-3.

9. Vincent, p. 172.

10. Vincent, p. 158.

11. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 54.

12. J. E. Archer, ‘A personal comment on arson in Norfolk and Suffolk’, in Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside 1700-1880, ed. Mick Reed and Roger Wells (London: Frank Cass, 1990), p. 85.

13. Cited in Brady, p. 28. Hardy also recalled, ‘My father knew a man who was hanged for saying to a farmer “it will be a light night”—his ricks being set fire to before the morning’. Cited in W. Rothenstein, Man and Memories (New York: Tudor Publishing, n.d.), p. 164.

14. Cited in Reed and Wells, p. 171.

15. Hardy: Personal Writings, ed. H. Orel (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 9.

16. Hobsbawm and Rudé, p. 247.

17. Hobsbawm and Rudé, p. 221.

18. Hobsbawm and Rudé, p. 225.

19. Hardy's interest in hangings and other matters relevant to this article are usefully examined in Charlotte Lindgren's ‘Thomas Hardy: Grim Facts and Local Lore’, The Thomas Hardy Journal, vol. I, no. 3 (October 1985), pp. 18-27.