The Withered Arm and Other Stories 1874-1888

1. Maiden Newton… Weymouth by train: Maiden Newton is a village not far from Hardy’s native Higher Bockhampton, Mellstock in the fiction (though Mellstock does not appear on the 1895-6 map, it is just east of Casterbridge). Weymouth is a seaside town, Budmouth Regis in the fictional Wessex, which appears often in Hardy’s works as a place of excitement and temptation; it had become a well-known resort in the early nineteenth century as a result of frequent visits there by King George III and his court during the summer ‘season’. While living there from summer 1869 to February 1870, Hardy began his first published novel, Desperate Remedies, which features key Weymouth scenes. Train service was extended to Weymouth in 1857 (David St John Thomas, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain, Vol. I: The West Country (1960; rev. edn., Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1966), p. 136).

2. Beaminster. A small town in north-west Dorset, ‘Emminster’ in the fictional Wessex, the home of the Clare family in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (see 1895-6 map).

3. Cloton village: The only fictionally named place in the story; not on the 1895-6 map but thought to be based on Netherbury, just south of Beaminster (see above note). Kay-Robinson notes that Netherbury’s old mill ‘conforms to the description of “Cloton” mill. The stream does form the boundary of a garden, orchard, and paddock, and does separate the property from the “village high-road”. “Heavy-headed” trees still grow near. Only the “little wooden bridge” in its swampy surroundings cannot be found; but there is a stone bridge beside the house’ (p. 115).

4. the true Helen: In Greek myth, the beautiful daughter of Leda by Zeus and wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. One tradition, going back to the sixth century bc and upon which Euripides based one of his tragedies, has Helen residing safely in Egypt while Zeus and Hera send a phantom resembling her with Paris to Troy, thus causing the Trojan War.

5. Portland: A large island, attached to the mainland of Dorset only by a thin causeway, jutting out south-west of Weymouth harbour; Hardy made frequent visits to cousins there during his stay in Weymouth. Fictionalized as the Isle of Slingers, it is the main setting for The Well-Beloved (1897). The 1895-6 map uses the actual name ‘Portland’.

6. She altered her mind about staying at Beaminster. As Pamela Dalziel points out in The Excluded and Collaborative Stories ((Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 372), Hardy probably meant Maiden Newton: Frances Lovill had travelled that morning as far as Maiden Newton with Agatha Pollin, and the van carrying all three back to Beaminster left from there.

7. Macaulay: Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), Member of Parliament, historian, essayist. In his speech supporting the 1833 bill to renew the charter of the East India Company, Macaulay urged that the British Civil Service in India abolish patronage and choose its members by competitive examination, but the idea did not become law until the 1853 Charter Act, which he strongly supported (DNB). Macaulay’s emphasis was not, like Winwood’s, on the issue of equal opportunity for young British men, but on the usefulness for English imperialist interests, in an anticipated relationship of competition with educated Indians, of the elimination of patronage.

8. Such a case occurs sometimes, and it occurred then: Based on Hooper Tolbort, who ‘took first place, nationally, in the Oxford Middle Class (or Local) Examinations of 1859 and, three years later, in the competitive examinations for entry into the Indian Civil Service’ (Biography, 70). He became Deputy Commissioner in the Bengal Civil Service and is mentioned by Hardy as one of his three ‘literary friends in Dorchester’ during his architectural apprenticeship, whose name ‘appeared in The Times at the head of the Indian examination list, a wide proportion of marks separating it from the name following. It was in the early days when these lists excited great interest’ (Life, 37, 168). Tolbort published transliterations of works in Persian and Urdu. Millgate notes that in Winwood’s speech above the ‘optimistic note of the mid-nineteenth-century success ethic… can be heard, although it is perhaps characteristic of Hardy that in the story the passage should be humorously undercut by Winwood’s inability to explain what he means by the word “bureaucratic” ‘. Millgate suggests that this ‘wryness in Hardy’s story’ may have resulted from Hardy’s feeling himself during those early years ‘very much in the shadow of Tolbort’s brilliance’ (Biography, 71).

9. Bess its deary-eary heart! it is going to speak to me: This baby-talk anticipates the sadistic style of address used by Lord Uplandtowers toward his young wife in the 1891 story ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’.

11. Mr Davids: Pamela Dalziel suggests that the parson is ‘appropriately named in view of the biblical David’s unscrupulousness in obtaining Bathsheba’ (‘Hapless “Destiny”: an uncollected story of marginalized lives’, Thomas Hardy Journal 8 (1992), 46). After seeing Bathsheba bathing, David sleeps with her, arranges to have her husband killed in battle and then marries her; he is punished by the death of their child (2 Samuel 11-12).

12. who fears God and keeps the commandments: ‘Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man’ (Ecclesiastes 12.13).

13. Tell him you’ll marry him… before that time: This qualified promise recalls that of Bathsheba Everdene to Boldwood in Far From the Madding Crowd. Lovill is like Boldwood in preparing his house for the impending marriage even before it is definite.

14. a hornpipe: In the early 1860s, a hornpipe was considered an old-fashioned rustic dance. Hardy recalled in the Life that his father ‘was good, too, when young, at hornpipes and jigs, and other folk-dances, performing them with all the old movements of leg-crossing and hop, to the delight of the children, till warned by his wife that this fast perishing style might tend to teach them what it was not quite necessary they should be familiar with, the more genteel “country-dance” having superseded the former’ (p. 18).

‘The Thieves Who Couldn’t Help Sneezing’

1. Vale of Blackmore: ‘Blackmoor Vale’ on 1895-6 map; thickly wooded and secluded area north of High Stoy, the setting for ‘Interlopers at the Knap’ and The Woodlanders; birthplace of Tess Durbeyfield.

3. trick of throwing the voice – called, I believe, ventriloquism: The earliest example of this usage for ‘ventriloquism’ is dated 1737 (which may help to date the story); earlier uses alluded to the phenomenon in witchcraft of speaking from the belly (OED 2).

4. the best scented Scotch: Scotch snuff is a dry and fine powder (OED 2). During the eighteenth century, because the pipe was becoming popular among the lower classes, snuff became the chief choice among the upper classes: see Introduction, p. xxi.

5. which had been occupied by Queen Elizabeth and King Charles successively: Elizabeth I reigned 1558–1603 and Charles I 1625–49 (James I came between them). No actual house is known to fit this description, nor is the story precise about its historical setting, except to suggest, with the detail of ‘snuff-boxes which were then becoming common’, that the time is the eighteenth century (see also note 3 above).

‘The Distracted Preacher’

1. The Distracted Preacher: 1879 HW and 1879 NQM have ‘The Distracted Young Preacher’ (1879 NQM has the title in italics).

3. 183–: 1879 HW has ‘1835’. The time is that of Hardy’s oral sources: in 1889, he wrote that ‘I have known several [persons], now dead, who shared in the adventurous doings along that part of the coast fifty or sixty years ago’ (Collected Letters, I, 204). Martin Ray speculates that James Selby, of Broadmayne, Dorset, was one of Hardy’s sources and that the story’s events are loosely based on the 1830 trial of three smugglers – one of whom was Selby’s brother-in-law, James Hewlett – who had attacked a customs officer at Dagger’s Grave (p. 56). A few years after ‘The Distracted Preacher’ was published, Hardy copied down in his ‘Facts’ Notebook (ff. 163–[166]) the Dorset County Chronicle account of the trial. According to Millgate, Hardy also heard smuggling stories from George Nicholls, who ‘served as a coast-guard until the late 1850s’ and who, with his daughter Eliza, became ‘major sources for Hardy’s interest in the south Dorset coast and its lively smuggling past’ (Biography, 84, 85); see ‘Fellow-Townsmen’, note 13. Small-scale smuggling on the south coast, using luggers rather than armed cutters, was on the increase during the 1830s, just as the Coast Guard was becoming similar to a military force. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the smuggling activity had generally been suppressed.

4. Nether Mynton: Not on the 1895–6 map, but six miles southeast of Casterbridge near the seacoast east of Budmouth. 1896 WT changes the name to ‘Nether Moynton’; the original is Owermoigne, which, according to Lea in 1913, ‘was once the home of many a smuggler, and some of the old people living there now can remember taking part in smuggling enterprises’ (p. 159). According to Kay-Robinson, ‘[t]here was never a Methodist chapel in Owermoigne, but up a narrow gravel track on the other side of Holland’s Mead Avenue stands an ancient stone thatched house, Chilbury Cottage, where Methodist services were held during the last century’ (p. 141).

5. or when there was a tea: The tea-meeting was a trademark of Victorian Dissenters; Cunningham calls it a ‘diluted version of the Methodist Love-Feast’ (Everywhere Spoken Against, p. 13).

6. come: ‘floated’ in 1912 WT, thus increasing Lizzie’s precision and irony.

7. burning strong: 1896 WT has “nation strong”, thus making Lizzy’s language more crude.

9. my cousin Owlett: The words ‘my cousin’ did not appear in 1879 H W or 1879 NQM; this and other changes for 1888 WT make Owlett less of a sexual rival. This trend continued in 1912 WT, where Lizzie calls him ‘Mr Owlett’ instead of ‘Owlett’ (p. 64 and elsewhere). Owlett appears to have been based on James Hewlett (see note 3 and ‘owl’s light’, p. 412). Kathryn King suggests that ‘Owlett’ combines ‘Hewlett’ with ‘owler’, a colloquial term for a smuggler (cited in Ray, 56–7).

10. exciseman: 1912 WT changes to ‘Customs-men’ and thereafter replaces ‘exciseman’ with ‘Customs-man’ or ‘preventive-man’. Hardy wrote to T. H. Tilley in 1911 that these officials ‘were not called excisemen’ (Collected Letters, IV, 186), which is corroborated by OED 2, which has examples for ‘exciseman’ chiefly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while those for ‘preventive-men’ span 1827 to 1884.

11. loud enough to rouse the Seven Sleepers: A Syrian legend popularized in western literature by Gregory of Tours and Edward Gibbon’s third volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1781), according to which seven Christian youths of Ephesus hid in a cave during the Decian persecution of ad 250; almost two hundred years later they awoke to find Christianity openly proclaimed.

12. Already he often said Romans for Corinthians in the pulpit: Paul’s letters to the Romans (on love) and to the Corinthians (on law and punishment).

13. breeches: 1879 HW and 1879 NQM have ‘leggings’; the change from these, which cover the ankle to the knee, to ‘breeches’, which cover the loins and thighs, adds to the sexual connotations of the image and may indirectly invoke the phrase, said of a wife, ‘to wear the breeches’, that is, to assume the authority of the husband, to rule or to be master – an idea already suggested in the previous paragraph. On p. 59, ‘and breeches’ does not appear in 1879 HW and 1879 NQM; 1888 WT also added, in the same paragraph, ‘which is no harm, as he was my own husband’, and ‘it is only tucked in’ – which again emphasize the sexual suggestiveness of Lizzy’s wearing breeches. Hardy also explores the erotic effect of a woman wearing men’s clothes in Jude the Obscure.

15. Ringsworth… Holworth: 1879 HW and 1879 NQM have ‘Ringstead’, an actual place on the sea east of Weymouth from whose summit one can obtain ‘a fine bird’s-eye view of the country to the north, east, and west’ (Lea, 160). Hardy retained the actual name of Holworth. None of these names appears on the 1895–6 map, but they are just east of Budmouth.

17. were always: ‘had been’ in 1879 HW and 1879 NQM; the revision gives the sense of an ongoing rather than a singular plan.

18. Lullstead: ‘Lulworth’ in 1879 HW and 1879 NQM and ‘Lulwind Cove’ in 1912 WT; the actual place, just east of Weymouth, is Lulworth Cove, and the Wessex ‘Lulwind Cove’ (not on the 1895–6 map, but east of Budmouth) is the place where Troy is thought to have drowned in Far From the Madding Crowd. ‘Lulstead Cove’ also appears in Desperate Remedies.

19. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s: Matthew 22.21; Mark 12.17; Luke 20.25; Christ’s answer to the Pharisees about the paying of tax.

20. If I had only stuck to father’s little grocery business, instead of going in for the ministry: This reveals Stockdale’s affiliation with the lower echelons of the merchant class and the difference between a Methodist preacher, who could emerge from the lower-middle classes, and an Anglican minister, who would come from a higher class.

21. Everybody does who tries it: ‘do’ in 1879 NQM, but not 1879 HW; in this and other instances, Lizzie’s use of dialect is strongest in 1879 NQM.

22. Lord’s Barrow… Chaldon Down: ‘Chaldon’ was changed to ‘Shaldon’ in 1912 WT; the original is Chaldon Herring. According to Kay-Robinson, ‘Hardy says that the travellers reached Chaldon Down, and then a ravine on the outskirts of “Chaldon”. In fact, both Chaldons and the ravine linking them lie between Lord’s Barrow and the down, so that Lizzie and the preacher must have come to them in the reverse order’ (p. 141). None of these places appears on the 1895–6 map, but they lie near the coast east of Budmouth.

23. quiet and inoffensive persons: 1912 WT adds ‘even though some held heavy sticks’ and substitutes in the subsequent paragraph ‘Dagger’s Grave, near Lulwind Cove’ for ‘Lullstead’, thus emphasizing the violence that could accompany the smuggling, as well as the story’s connection with the history of James Hewlett (see note 3).

24. masons: ‘shoemakers’ in 1896 WT, perhaps to remove a reference to Hardy’s father and to suggest his uncle (see note 31).

25. an iron bar, which he drove firmly into the soil: Kay-Robinson notes that by ‘the foot of a coomb between White Nothe and Durdle Door there is still to be seen an old wire rope, put in place by fishermen or smugglers, no one knows when, to give access to the beach’ (p. 141).

26. carrying a pair of tubs, one on his back and one on his chest: Hardy’s preface to 1896 WT, revised and supplemented in 1912, describes this practice and others; it is worth quoting at length:

Among the many devices for concealing smuggled goods in caves and pits of the earth, that of planting an apple-tree in a tray or box which was placed over the mouth of the pit is, I believe, unique, and it is detailed in ‘The Distracted Preacher’ precisely as described by an old carrier of ‘tubs’ – a man who was afterwards in my father’s employ for over thirty years. I never gathered from his reminiscences what means were adopted for lifting the tree, which, with its roots, earth, and receptacle, must have been of considerable weight. There is no doubt, however, that the thing was done through many years. My informant often spoke, too, of the horribly suffocating sensation produced by the pair of spirit-tubs slung upon the chest and back, after stumbling with the burden of them for several miles inland over a rough country and in darkness. He said that though years of his youth and young manhood were spent in this irregular business, his profits from the same, taken all together, did not average the wages he might have earned in a steady employment, whilst the fatigues and risks were excessive.

I may add that the action of this story is founded on certain smuggling exploits that occurred between 1825 and 1830, and were brought to a close in the latter year by the trial of the chief actors at the Assizes before Baron Bolland for their desperate armed resistance to the Custom-house officers during the landing of a cargo of spirits. This happened only a little time after the doings recorded in the narrative, in which some incidents that came out at the trial are also embodied.

In the culminating affray the character called Owlett was badly wounded, and several of the Preventive-men would have lost their lives through being overpowered by the far more numerous body of smugglers, but for the forbearance and manly conduct of the latter. This served them in good stead at their trial, in which the younger Erskine prosecuted, their defence being entrusted to Erle. Baron Bolland’s summing up was strongly in their favour, they were merely ordered to enter into their own recognizances for good behaviour and discharged.

This account repeats what Hardy had copied into his ‘Facts’ Notebook; the carrier of the tubs was presumably James Selby (see notes 3, 9 and 23).

27. seed: ‘zeed’ in 1896 WT, thus further emphasizing Owlett’s rural roots.

29. consecrated bells: Protestant dissenters did not believe in the blessing of objects and did not use church bells to adorn their services.

30. Warm’ll: Presumably ‘Warmwell Cross’ or ‘the Cross’, featured in Part VII; not on the 1895–6 map, but a point west of Nether Mynton where the roads to Budmouth and Casterbridge part; Lea shows a picture of the ‘clumps of trees’ at Warmwell Cross, where ‘it does not require a very vivid imagination… to see in fancy the disappointed excisemen bound to the trees and shouting for help, a performance said to have been really enacted in the eighteen-thirties’ (p. 162).

31. Ballam’s: ‘Artnell’s’ in 1912 WT; cf. Hardy’s uncle by marriage, John Antell, a shoemaker with intellectual aspirations who may have served as an original for the characterization of Jude Fawley (Biography, 347–8). Antell had died in December 1878, not long before Hardy wrote ‘The Distracted Preacher’. Ray surmises that ‘Hardy made a private association between smuggling liquor and his uncle’s alcoholism’ (64).

32. curls a foot long, dangling down the sides of her face, in the fashion of the time. After 1794, according to the Countess of Wilton in 1846, ‘the hair was worn in curls, which were sometimes short, at others long and straggling, falling completely over the face, so that the bright orbs beneath could with difficulty peep out from the ringlets which almost entirely concealed them’ (The Book of Costume: Or Annals of Fashion (1846) by A Lady of Rank, ed. Pieter Bach (Mendocino, CA: R. L. Shep, 1987), p. 173).

36. with his elbow on the mantelpiece: Hardy appears to have associated this posture with a person who feels misled or betrayed. His poem ‘Standing by the Mantelpiece (H. M. M., 1873)’ (1928) – presumably spoken by Horace Moule, his friend who committed suicide in 1873 – is addressed to a lover who has broken off a sexual relationship (see Biography, 156).

37. Come and hear my last sermon on the day before I go: Possibly an ironic reference to the Rev. Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), another fastidious clergyman who has a forbidden sexual alliance; Dimmesdale gives a final sermon before revealing his identity as an adulterer and the father of an illegitimate child. Hardy had read Hawthorne and made several references to his work.

38. a midland town: Signifies that Stockdale has returned ‘inland’ to the Midlands, an industrial centre.

39. Bere. 1896 WT has ‘Kingsbere’ (see 1895–6 map), the Wessex name for Bere Regis, perhaps an oblique allusion to the notorious Tolpuddle martyrs, some of whom came from Bere Regis, who were transported for attempting in 1834 to form a trade union.

40. able to get about: 1912 WT adds ‘Then he was caught, and tried with the others at the assizes; but they all got off.’

41. their married life: 1912 WT adds the following note:

The ending of this story with the marriage of Lizzy and the minister was almost de rigueur in an English magazine at the time of writing. But at this late date, thirty years after, it may not be amiss to give the ending that would have been preferred by the writer to the convention used above. Moreover it corresponds more closely with the true incidents of which the tale is a vague and flickering shadow. Lizzy did not, in fact, marry the minister, but – much to her credit in the author’s opinion – stuck to Jim the smuggler, and emigrated with him after their marriage, an expatrial step rather forced upon him by his adventurous antecedents. They both died in Wisconsin between 1850 and 1860.

‘Fellow-Townsmen’

1. But the community… and a staple manufacture: Hardy wrote to Walter Tyndale in 1904, ‘Bridport (town & harbour both) is the entire scene of “Fellow Townsmen”’ (Collected Letters, III, 147). The town of Bridport (Port Bredy on the 1895–6 map) is west of Weymouth (‘Budmouth’) on the Dorset coast and has been known since the thirteenth century for its manufacture of rope, twine and nets, originally made with flax grown in the area nearby (Barnet’s father was a flax-merchant). Under Henry VIII, according to Lea, ‘it was prescribed by royal edict that all the cordage used in the royal navy should be of Bridport manufacture’, and the town was later known for its production of hangmen’s ropes, from which came the saying ‘that So-and-So had been “stabbed with a Bridport dagger” – a polite way of intimating that he had been hanged’ (p. 155).

2. five-and-thirty years ago: Since first publication was in 1880, the setting for the opening presumably would be about 1845.

4. Château Ringdale: In 1880 HW and 1880 NQM this is ‘Château Kingdale’; Kay-Robinson notes that ‘“Château Ringdale” certainly never existed, but its site is real, and on it there was once a mansion of comparable importance. This was Wanderwell, and it stood on a rise just as did Château Ringdale; even the elm-trees really existed, and the only discrepancy is the Bridport road passes to the west of the rise, not the east’ (p. 118). Ray speculates that ‘Ringdale’ and ‘Kingdale’ are ‘partly’ based on ‘Knapdale’, Alexander Macmillan’s house (p. 48 n). The Hardys visited the publisher in 1878, when they also lived in Upper Tooting (Life, 124–5), and ‘Fellow-Townsmen’ was probably written there in 1880.

5. Black-Bull Hotel: 1880 HW and 1880 NQM call it ‘Black Swan Hotel’; it is based on Bridport’s Bull Hotel (Kay-Robinson, 120).

6. To preserve peace in the household. I do anything for that; but I don’t succeed: In his relationship with his wife, Barnet has affinities with the speaker of Robert Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto’ (1855).

7. If you only knew everything: 1880 HW and 1880 NQM read ‘If you had only witnessed what I witnessed this evening’. The revisions make the unhappiness in Barnet’s marriage an ongoing process rather than the result of a single discovery.

8. and he fell upon his knees in the gutter: 1880 HW and 1880 NQM locate this scene inside Downe’s house and show the lawyer reopening a wound in his infected thumb.

9. presently sat down to his lonely meal: 1880 HW and 1880 NQM do not include this scene.

10. the Raffaelesque oval of its contour: In the style of the Renaissance painter Raphael (1483–1520), many of whose portraits feature women with oval faces; since Raphael often painted the Madonna, the image might also be seen to suggest Lucy’s virtue.

11. seeing how often I have held it in past days: 1880 HW and 1880 NQM have ‘as an old acquaintance’ and Lucy’s reply is ‘I have no right to look upon you in that light.’ Similarly Lucy’s reproach to Barnet in 1880 NQM was for ‘ask[ing] such a thing’ as to hold her hand. Four paragraphs later, Barnet’s reply to the enquiry about Mrs Barnet had been ‘For God’s sake, don’t let us talk of her – for a few minutes at least.’

12. not to mince matters, to visit a woman I loved. Don’t be angry: Added for 1888 WT, as was the phrase, a few sentences later, ‘and thought what might have been in my case’.

14. Everything was so indefinite… said nothing: This passage had read in 1880 HW and 1880 NQM: ‘You had made me no promises, and I did not feel that you had broken any, nor have I ever accused you of doing so to anybody. I should, indeed, be weak and foolish if I were to accuse you of doing wrong because you saw some woman more after your own heart than I was, and, feeling her more capable than myself of making you happy, married her.’ Another speech by Lucy, deleted after the serializations, emphasizes the class differences between the two women, but makes Lucy uncharacteristically bold and insinuating: ‘Don’t you think you may have offered provocation on your side? Perhaps you may have said in a moment of haste that you married her only for what she possessed, or some such thing? – and nothing would exasperate a woman more than that.’

15. It is a very common folly of human nature, you know, to think the course you did not adopt must have been the best: Lennart A. Björk links this passage to a quotation in the literary notes from William Shenstone’s Essays on Men and Manners, printed in Sir Arthur Helps’s Essays Written in the Intervals of Business (1841): ‘We find the scheme which we have chosen answers our expectations but indifferently… We therefore repent of our choice, & immediately fancy happiness in the paths which we decline… It is not improbable we had been more unhappy… had we made a different decision’ (Literary Notebooks, I, 101).

16. But I shall never again meet with such a dear girl as you: 1880 HW and 1880 NQM have ‘Heaven bless you for a dear girl!’

17. Not poppy nor mandragora: From Shakespeare’s Othello; Iago has planted the seeds of jealousy in Othello’s mind:

Not poppy, nor mandragora,

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world

Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep

Which thou ow’dst yesterday. (III.iii.330–33)

19. that politesse du coeur which was so natural to her having possibly begun already to work results: Emily Downe’s gestures of kindness are reminiscent of those of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), especially her attempts to help the cold-hearted and worldly Rosamond Lydgate. See also note 23 below.

20. like the Libyan bay which sheltered the ship-wrecked Trojans: In Book I of the Aeneid, Aeneas and his comrades escape from a storm to a safe harbour on the Libyan coast, where they are welcomed by Dido, Queen of Carthage; he becomes her lover, but then abandons her for his epic mission.

21. Her complexion was that seen in the numerous faded portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds: Reynolds (1723–92) was President of the Royal Academy from its founding in 1768; typical of paintings from the eighteenth century when women wore powder, the women in his portraits have pale complexions; the images may also be faded because the paint has lost some colour.

22. an octavo volume of Domestic Medicine: There are several books entitled Domestic Medicine, the best known of which was William Buchan’s (1769), which ran to scores of editions and many translations. Buchan emphasized the need for persistence in the treatment of drowning victims, but the quoted passage has not been found; it is possible that Hardy composed it to fit his story, including its ironic parallel with Shakespeare’s Pericles, in which Thaisa, a beloved wife, is restored to life after being washed ashore in a coffin; Cerimon, the doctor who revives her, observes:

Death may usurp on nature many hours,

And yet the fire of life kindle again

The o’erpressed spirits. (III.ii.84–6)

23. by merely doing nothing… a deliverance for himself as he had never hoped for: Barnet’s situation parallels that of Nicholas Bulstrode in Eliot’s Middlemarch when the Charlson-like Raffles, who has been blackmailing him, lies ill in his house; Bulstrode succumbs to the temptation of allowing a servant to give Raffles an amount of liquor that he knows might kill him.

25. something like an inherited instinct: As his reading of Darwin, Huxley and others makes clear, Hardy had an ongoing interest in ideas about biological inheritance.

26. there being at this date no railway within a distance of eighty miles: The train did not come as far as Bridport until 1857, when it was also extended to Weymouth (‘Budmouth’), presumably the ‘junction’ in section IX (Thomas, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain, Vol. I: The West Country, pp. 148, 141).

27. Lucy’s new silk dress sweeping with a smart rustle round the base-mouldings of the ancient font: Recalls Hardy’s memory of Julia Augusta Martin as ‘the lady he had so admired as a child, when she was the grand dame of the parish in which he was born’: ‘she revived throbs of tender feeling in him, and brought back to his memory the thrilling “frou-frou” of her four grey silk flounces when she had used to bend over him, and when they brushed against the font as she entered church on Sundays’ (Life, 104–5). A similar image is used in ‘The Withered Arm’. All three instances describe erotic desire for an inaccessible woman.

28. Barnet’s old house was bought by the trustees of the Congregational Baptist body in that town, who pulled down the time-honoured dwelling and built a new chapel on its site. Kay-Robinson notes that this house was not on South Street, ‘but where the Congregational church, built in 1860, stands today, in East Street’ (p. 119).

29. while the church had had such a tremendous practical joke played upon it by some facetious restorer or other as to be scarce recognizable by its dearest old friends: According to Kay-Robinson, the architect ‘whose restoration work in 1860 drew [Hardy’s] acid comment was Talbot Bury; and it must be admitted that he left precious little of the original fabric except the “ancient font”’ (p. 119).

‘The Three Strangers’

2. a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar: Based on sources in Plutarch, Lucian and Shakespeare, Timon of Athens was a notorious misanthrope who exiled himself in the desert; Nebuchadnezzar was a tyrannical king of Babylon during the fifth century bc, described in the Book of Daniel as punished by being ‘driven from men’, after which he ‘did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws’ (4.33).

3. conceive and meditate of pleasant things: I have not found a source for this quotation.

4. Higher Crowstairs: ‘Higher Polenhill’ at its first appearance in the manuscript (Ray, 10). Not on the 1895–6 map, presumably a few miles north or northeast of Casterbridge. According to Kay-Robinson, the ‘likely site’ is

[h]igh on the downs in the broad fork by Charminster… It is doubtful whether this cottage ever existed, but the ‘hog’s-back elevation which dominated this part of the down’ can be pinpointed as Hog Hill, south-east of Grimstone Down… The lynchets over which the search-party stumbled are on the eastern or Stratton Bottom side; the Bottom itself is the ‘grassy, briery, moist defile’ where they searched; and there are still several small areas of woodland. Another school of thought places ‘Higher Crowstairs’ farther east, on Waterston Ridge, where all Hardy’s ‘requirements’ – except the cottage – are also to be found (p. 105).

5. like the clothyard shafts of Senlac and Crecy: Senlac is the Sussex hill where the Battle of Hastings (1066) took place; Crécy is a town in Northern France where in 1346 the outnumbered English, under Edward III, won a victory over the French army of King Philip of Valois. In both battles, the British used long-bows with arrows the length of a clothier’s yard (36 inches).

6. like the laughter of the fool: ‘For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity’ (Ecclesiastes 7.6).

7. The fiddler was a boy of those parts: Possibly an allusion to a young Hardy playing the fiddle for ‘country-dances, reels, and hornpipes at an agricultural ist’s wedding, christening, or Christmas party in a remote dwelling among the fallow fields’ (Life, 36).

13. Belshazzar’s Feast: The son of Nebuchadnezzar who was unable to read the cryptic handwriting on the wall at his elaborate feast; only Daniel could decipher the message, a prophecy of the imminent end of Belshazzar’s rule (Daniel 5).

14. Shottsford: Wessex name for Blandford; 1883 LM and 1883a HW have Anglebury, further south, the Wessex name for Wareham; Shottsford and Anglebury are both on the 1895–6 map.

15. cottage under the prison wall: The Hangman’s Cottage, setting for an important scene in ‘The Withered Arm’, still standing outside Dorchester; Hardy used a photograph of it as the frontispiece of 1912 WT.

16. circulus, cujus centrum diabolus: Latin for ‘a circle, the centre of which is the devil’, presumably part of a magic ritual: at a witch’s sabbath, the devil remains inside a magic circle dug into the turf; conjurors, when raising spirits, protect themselves by keeping the spirit within a circle (see John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1623), I.i.411–14; Thomas Dekker and Webster, Westward Hoe (1607), IV.ii.7–10). This visual effect was reproduced by the stage directions in the 1911 revision to The Three Wayfarers, Hardy’s dramatic adaptation: ‘They form again for the six-hands round. College Hornpipe. HANGMAN tries to get each woman severally as partner: all refuse. At last HANGMAN dances in the figure by himself, with an imaginary partner, and pulls out rope’ (quoted in Wilson, 32).

17. his friend: 1883 LM and 1883a HW have ‘the stranger’; several paragraphs later, as Sommers and the Hangman shake hands, the word ‘heartily’ was added for 1888 WT, again ironizing their supposed friendship. Revisions in the manuscript had made Sommers (‘Summers’ after 1896 WT) more appealing and the hangman more sinister (see Ray, 9).

18. in the name of the Father – the Crown, I mane: The constable begins to utter the Lord’s Prayer before shifting to the formula for arresting someone; his ineptitude recalls Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.

19. a matron in the sere and yellow leaf: Shakespeare’s Macbeth soliloquizes about his intimations of futility and decline:

I have liv’d long enough: my way of life

Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf… (V.iii.22–3)

This final framing of the narrative in the distant past recalls the conclusion of John Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820), also set inside a warm dwelling on a stormy night.

‘The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid’

1. Where are you going… she said: Omitted after 1883 G and 1883b HW, the opening lines of a well-known anonymous poem that appears in James Orchard Halliwell’s The Nursery Rhymes of England, published in seven editions between 1842 and 1870. The remaining lines of this version (1870; London: Bodley Head, 1970) ironically summarize some of the ambivalences in the sexual attraction across class lines between the baron and Margery:

May I go with you, my pretty maid?

You’re kindly welcome, sir, she said.

What is your father, my pretty maid?

My father’s a farmer, sir, she said.

Say, will you marry me, my pretty maid?

Yes, if you please, kind sir, she said.

Will you be constant, my pretty maid?

That I can’t promise you, sir, she said.

Then I won’t marry you, my pretty maid!

Nobody asked you, sir! she said.

2. the valley of the Swenn: The first of many topographical references changed for 1913 CM when the setting was moved from Dorset to Devon (‘South’ to ‘Lower’ Wessex on the 1895–6 map): the Swenn (in some works the Froom, based on the Frome) became the Exe; Casterbridge (Dorchester) became Exonbury (Exeter); Anglebury (Wareham) became ‘the town’; Budmouth (Weymouth) became Tivworthy (Tiverton) and, at a later stage, Plymouth; and ‘a little cove’ with features like those of Lulworth became Idmouth (Sidmouth). Purdy speculates that the shift was made ‘possibly to remove the story from the scene of Tess’, published eight years later (p. 49); and Ray (p. 330) suggests that the shift to Plymouth conforms with the setting of ‘The Daemon Lover’ (see notes 33 and 61); Simon Gatrell has argued that the pervasive topographical inconsistency in 1883 G, which was written before Hardy defined Wessex as a mappable place analogous to the five counties of southern England and linking all of his fictional texts, made too difficult the job of re-organizing the existing topography; instead, Hardy ‘threw up his hands and moved [‘Romantic Adventures’] off to a part of Wessex uninhabited by other stories’ (‘Topography in “The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid”’, Thomas Hardy Journal 3 (1987), 45). The first paragraph in 1913 CM explicitly dates the story ‘in the eighteen forties’ (this is implicit in 1883 G and 1883b HW when the narrator refers to a forty-year time gap and in the manuscript, which makes it thirty-five years (Ray, 333); see also note 18 below) and parenthetically introduces an ironizing source, the ‘testimony’ of a land-surveyor described as ‘a gentleman with the faintest curve of humour on his lips’.

3. On her arm she carried a withy basket: This and other details connected with Margery’s visit to her grandmother suggest ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, while Margery’s transformation for the ball recalls ‘Cinderella’; both fairy-tales had been well known to British readers since the eighteenth century (Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 93, 117–21).

4. She carefully avoided treading on the innumerable earthworms that lay in couples across the path: 1913 CM removes this detail, perhaps to avoid comparison with a similar scene in Jude the Obscure. The allusion to the earthworm couples implies, not only a capacity in Margery for sympathy, but also a Darwinian comparison between her situation and that of these small animals.

5. of the Italian elevation made familiar by the works of Inigo Jones: Inigo Jones (1573–1652), who twice visited Italy to study its architecture, the founder of the English classical tradition of architecture.

6. He was quite a different being from any of the men to whom her eyes were accustomed: 1913 CM inserts a sentence to illustrate: ‘She had never seen mustachios before, for they were not worn by civilians in Lower Wessex at this date.’ The mustache, a sign of the baron’s class and cultural differences, provides a contrast with Jim Hayward, who has ‘scarcely any beard’. Revisions that emphasize the foreign accent of the baron, including the exclamation ‘My Gott’, were also added in 1913.

7. and slipped something into the pocket of his dressing-gown: 1913 CM adds the first of several references to a gun: ‘She was almost certain that it was a pistol.’ The manuscript had originally been explicit about the baron’s suicidal intentions (Ray, 331).

8. Stickleford Dairy-house: Stickleford, also the setting of Hardy’s 1893 story ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, is Tincleton, a village between Dorchester and Wareham (Casterbridge and Anglebury on the 1895–6 map); the topographical shift of 1913 put the dairy-house in ‘Silverthorn’, based on Silverton, a dairying area in Devon (Kay-Robinson, 205).

9. I do hope you be not ill, sir: 1913 CM alters ‘be’ to the grammatically correct ‘are’, the first of several changes that remove Dorset dialect usage from Margery’s speech, perhaps to make her more acceptable to the baron, but also possibly to make her a more credible inhabitant of Devon (Jim’s ‘do’ is revised to ‘dew’, a dialect pronunciation of Devon). In section XIII, however, when Margery is alone with Jim, 1913 CM replaces ‘cruel conspiracy’ and ‘ensnare’ with ‘footy plot’ and ‘snare’.

10. I suffer from sleeplessness. Probably you don’t: The baron’s attitude toward Margery, which presumes her natural simplicity in contrast to his sophisticated depression, anticipates Angel Clare with Tess Durbeyfield, but the latter has an intellectual complexity that makes Clare appear imperceptive in a way that the baron does not.

11. guardian angel: 1913 CM substitutes ‘child’, emphasizing the emotionalism of the baron. In the subsequent dialogue, ‘indescribable folly’ becomes ‘an act of madness’ and the ‘peculiar conditions’ in which Margery found him become ‘ghastly conditions’. She is also made to seem more aware that the baron has been on the brink of suicide. For example, when she says that she will tell no one about what has happened, she is described as ‘a little puzzled’, but this was deleted for 1913 CM, and ‘Margery did not know’ becomes ‘Margery could guess that he had meditated death at his own hand.’

12. Mount Lodge: Kay-Robinson believes this is an imaginary place (p. 231), but Gatrell associates it with the ‘Cliff Mount’, north-east of Tincleton on nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps, called Clyffe House in more recent maps (‘Topography’, p. 39).

13. I can’t interpret no more than Pharoah: Pharoah cannot interpret his strange dreams and sends for all the wise men and magicians of Egypt to do so; when they fail, Pharoah discovers that the imprisoned Hebrew, Joseph, is the only one who can (Genesis 41).

14. moved Margery deeply: 1913 CM has ‘excited Margery’, making her responses to the baron more superficial and adolescent, and he is made more indifferent to Margery’s identity, while drawn to her image of rural innocence: when he is surprised to see her, in 1883 G he says, ‘Ah – Margery!’, while 1913 CM has him say, in confusion and hesitation, ‘Ah my maiden – what is your name – Margery!’ The baron of the manuscript is unambiguously virtuous (Ray, 332–3).

15. proh pudor: ‘for shame’ in Latin, used as an exclamation and common in classical texts.

16. You will promise not to tell, sir. This question and the baron’s answer were deleted for 1913 CM, perhaps because the baron does later tell.

17. Lord Blakemore’s: 1913 CM has ‘Lord Toneborough’s’; the change removes the implicit reference to the ‘Vale of Blackmoor’, an important setting in Tess, and the new name adds to the satirical treatment of the people at the ball.

18. there is a new dance at Almack’s and everywhere else, over which the world has gone crazy: When Hardy lived in London in 1862, he danced at Willis’s Rooms, previously called Almack’s Assembly Rooms, in King Street. Built in 1765, Almack’s, according to Philip J. S. Richardson, became after 1800 an exclusive place whose dances ‘were copied everywhere’ (The Social Dances of the Nineteenth Century in England (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1960), pp. 30–31). Hardy claimed that in 1862 ‘dances had not… degenerated to a waltzing step, to be followed by galloping romps to uproarious pieces’ (Life, 45), but the waltz had been introduced to England by 1812, and the polka was first performed at Almack’s in 1844 (Richardson, Social Dances, pp. 35, 88). The latter was thought to be of Bohemian origin, but the baron’s more general reference to ‘an ancient Scythian dance’ indicates East European roots and suggests wildness – an idea reinforced by the baron’s trendy comment on a world ‘gone crazy’. See also Hardy’s poem ‘Reminiscences of a Dancing Man’ (1909), which refers to dancing in ‘those crowded rooms’,

Where to the deep Drum-polka’s booms

We hopped in standard style.

(Poetical Works, I, 266, 23–4)

19. It was a Rubicon in more ways than one: The stile, as the class barrier between Margery and the baron, is compared to the Rubicon, the stream that limited Caesar’s province and which he crossed before his war with Pompey, and thus any boundary by passing which one becomes committed to an enterprise (OED 2).

20. to whose recollections the writer is indebted for the details of this interview: Deleted for 1913 CM, perhaps because it conflicts with the addition of the gentleman surveyor (see note 2).

21. the lapse of many many years: 1913 CM has ‘lingering emotions’, which conforms with its emphasis on Margery’s continuing fascination with the baron. Similarly, two paragraphs later, 1913 inserts ‘at this date’ just before ‘distinctly’ in the assertion that Margery ‘was not distinctly in love with the stranger’.

22. whether the gentleman were a wild olive tree, or not: In Romans 11.17, the Romans, addressed as pagans who have converted to Christianity, are imaged as the branches of ‘a wild olive tree’ that were ‘grafted in among [the other branches], and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree’.

23. A fleeting romance and a possible calamity: I cannot find a source for this passage, which could be read as a quotation or a cliché.

24. a cricket-ball: 1913 CM substitutes ‘an apple-dumpling’, perhaps to intensify the incongruity of the image; see also note 40 below.

25. Three-Walks-End in Chillington Wood: Kay-Robinson indexes Chillington Wood as ‘imaginary’ (p. 231), but Gatrell speculates that the place is ‘Hardy’s fictional adaptation of the geographical Ilsington Wood a mile and a half or so to the north-west of Cliff Mount along a ridge’. In this case, Three-Walks-End conforms with a 1930 Ordnance Survey map indicating ‘that there were at that time three tracks entering Ilsington Wood, and that they converged near the wood’s centre’ (‘Topography’, p. 40).

26. her eyes became moist: 1913 CM has the more sexually suggestive ‘her lips became close’.

27. She walked to the music of innumerable birds: An ironic variation of Alfred Tennyson’s famous onomatopoeic image, from ‘Come down, O maid’ in The Princess (1847), of ‘the murmuring of innumerable bees’ (VII.207); the song implores the maiden to come down to the valley, where she will find pleasure and love (in contrast to Margery ‘trudging her way up the slopes from the vale’). Among the birds’ songs in Hardy’s story is that of the cuckoo, which is associated with cuckoldry; the implication is that Margery’s actions will somehow, at least in retrospect, make her husband a cuckold. Hardy also uses the image at the end of Under the Greenwood Tree.

28. the wooden shell which enshrouded Margery and all her loveliness: Ironically invokes standard images of the birth of Venus, in which she is seen emerging on a shell from the foam of the sea.

29. their swarthy steeds: 1913 CM adds ‘as they seemed to her’, thus making the Gothic effect originate in Margery’s mind.

30. with romantic mop-heads of raven hair: This detail, among many others, anticipates ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, in which a mysterious Gypsyfiddler, called ‘Mop’ on account of his wild hair, mesmerizes and seduces a country maiden.

31. He watches like the Angel Gabriel, when all the world is asleep: John Milton’s Paradise Lost adapts the Islamic tradition holding that Gabriel presides over Paradise; in Book IV, he sits, ‘Chief of th’ Angelic Guards, awaiting night’, and later rebukes Satan for his ‘bold entrance’ into the garden, which ‘violate[s] sleep’ (II. 550, 882–3). This detail contrasts with other comparisons of the baron to the devil (see note 36).

32. as immoveable as Rhadamanthus: The son of Zeus and Europa and one of the judges of the dead, known for his unflinching adherence to principle.

33. James Hayward: Hayward’s name reflects his role in the story, that of maintaining his right over Margery: according to Barnes, a hayward is a ‘warden of the fences or of a common, whose duty it was to see that it was not stocked by those who had no right of common’ (p. 70). Ray (p. 330) suggests that the name echoes that of James Harris, the baron-like former lover in the traditional ballad of ‘The Daemon Lover’, who lures a married woman from her husband and child to his ship (see notes 2 and 61).

34. All’s well that ends well: An old saying which Shakespeare used as the title of a comedy that ends with a marriage across class boundaries.

36. Anybody would think the d — had showed you the kingdoms of the world since I saw you last!: See Matthew 4.8, in which the devil tempts Christ by showing him ‘all the kingdoms of the world’. 1913 CM prints the word ‘devil’ and inserts a reply by Margery, ‘Perhaps he has!’

37. a Talleyrand: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (1754–1838), a French statesman and diplomat under Napoleon, the restored Bourbon monarchy and King Louis-Philippe, was noted for his capacity to survive changes in the ruling regime.

38. It was a British castle or entrenchment: This is possibly Maiden Castle, a large prehistoric earthwork southwest of Dorchester (‘Casterbridge’ on the 1895–6 map), but if so, as Gatrell notes, Hardy shifted it ‘to a location somewhere to the south of Athelhampton’, which is east of ‘Weatherbury’ (‘Topography’, 44).

39. some of them like Pompeian remains: The ancient Roman city of Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in ad 79, but the volcanic lava and ash preserved the remains of the city; after their discovery, the buildings and the artifacts fostered a neoclassical revival in European taste.

40. the time when God A’mighty christens the little apples: The feast of St Swithin, a ninth-century Wessex saint, is 15 July; according to Firor, ‘Country folk… believe that rain upon this day… means a plentiful apple crop; in such an event they say that the saint is christening the apples’ (p. 130). A dry St Swithin’s Day portends no rain for six weeks. The day when Margery is supposed to marry Hayward turns out to be dry, and ‘rain had not fallen for weeks’.

41. a melancholy, emotional character – the Jacques of this forest and stream: Björk reads this passage as an allusion to Jean Jacques Rousseau (Literary Notebooks, I, 308n), but the more likely source is ‘melancholy Jacques’ in As You Like It, whose cynical comments offer a dark contrast with the pastoral Forest of Arden.

42. down: 1913 CM has the more accurate ‘drawn’, as did the manuscript (Ray, 334).

43. It was that of Prospero over the gentle Ariel: In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ariel is a spirit under the power of the magician Prospero.

44. fiercely: 1913 CM substitutes ‘sternly’, perhaps to conform with the comment a few paragraphs later on the baron’s ‘severity’.

46. Hobbema and his school: Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709), one of the most important landscapists of the Dutch school, favoured idyllic country scenes.

47. the cankered heaps of strange-achieved gold: In Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, King Henry speaks bitterly of the efforts fathers make for their sons:

For this they have engrossed and pil’d up

The cank’red heaps of strange-achieved gold. (IV.v.70–71)

48. to beard the lion in his den: The Earl of Angus to Marmion, after Marmion has dared to speak his mind to the Earl in the Earl’s own hold:

And dar’st thou then

To beard the lion in his den,

the Douglas in his hall?

(Walter Scott, Marmion, VI.xiv.23–5)

49. an extremely pure and romantic feeling: 1913 CM removes ‘pure and’, thus emphasizing ‘romantic’, with all its complicated associations. Hardy may also have wanted to delete any reference to the controversial subtitle of Tess: ‘A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented by Thomas Hardy’.

50. a painless sympathy: In Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), the speaker imagines the dead Hallam addressing him:

How is it? Canst thou feel for me

Some painless sympathy with pain? (LXXXV.88)

51. or seemed to whisper: 1913 CM deletes this, which with other changes makes the baron’s power over Margery more absolute, and in the second paragraph of section XII ‘as yet’ was added after ‘nature’ to ‘the innocent nature of the acquaintanceship’.

52. the miniature Pillars of Hercules which formed the mouth of the cove: The Pillars of Hercules were erected by Hercules (or Heracles) on either side of the Straits of Gibraltar. This mock-epic image, probably an allusion to the cliffs on either side of the entrance to Lulworth Cove, was deleted when the story’s location was moved to Devon for 1913 CM (as were all references to the steam power of the yacht). The trip to the cove was added in the proofs for 1883 G (Ray, 335).

53. Algiers: A base for Barbary pirates before its capture by the French in 1830 and associated with ideas of exoticism and violence.

55. eagerly: Omitted in 1913 CM, which makes Margery less emotional about Hayward. Similarly, in Section XVI, 1913 CM replaces ‘miserable’ with ‘indignant’ and ‘she was crying’ with ‘her mood’.

56. Then the dairyman committed the greatest error of his life: 1913 CM has ‘Then the dairyman practised the greatest duplicity of his life’, perhaps to remove the narrator’s judgement about the story’s outcome.

57. This hamlet had once been a populous village. The full description of Letscombe Cross, with its medieval cross, was deleted for 1913 CM, presumably because of the shift in location (the baron makes his promise with his hand on the hilt of Hayward’s sword rather than on the cross). Gatrell offers Vera Jesty’s speculation that ‘as far as the cross, the depopulation and the situation of the London road are concerned, either Pimperne or Tarrant Hinton just north of Blandford Forum fit [the story] reasonably well, and are far enough from Dorchester to be plausibly at the edge of a horse’s comfortable endurance. However, they are both much too far from the Frome, and neither is at the junction of a road that leads down to the water-meadows’ (‘Topography’, pp. 44–5).

58. now gilded and glorious with the dying fires: 1913 CM has ‘now black and daemonic against the slanting fires’, thus repeating the demonic imagery associated with the baron.

59. peremptorily: Removed for 1913 CM, making the baron’s tone somewhat more ambivalent in response to a scene that is significantly altered. Margery is much less firm about her decision to stay back with Jim: when the baron asks, ‘Don’t you think you ought to be [at Jim’s house]?’, the narrator reports that ‘She did not answer’; and when the baron comments ‘Of course you ought’, we are told ‘Still she did not speak’. Further on, when the baron asks Margery to come with him, in 1913 CM she says that she cannot simply ‘Because –.’ In 1913 CM, Margery also does not implore the baron to ‘save’ her, but, after seeing ‘all contingencies’, leans on the baron with ‘clasped hands’ and ‘a bewildered look’ in her eyes. The baron’s decision to return her to Jim is a result of ‘her distracted look’, and when he asks her forgiveness, 1913 CM has him calling his mistake ‘a lover’s bad impulse’. The conclusion is also different: the baron ‘seemed to feel the awkwardness keenly’, and Margery says, ‘Of course I forgive you, sir, for I felt for a moment as you did. Will you send my husband to me?’

60. doubtful: 1913 CM has ‘wreckless’; the baron’s ‘suggestion that they should pursue Jim’ is described more cynically as ‘the fancied pursuit of Jim’, and the baron’s ‘doubtful sentiments’ become ‘impassioned sentiments’.

61. possible: 1913 CM has ‘mournful’, which makes a return by the baron impossible, and Margery follows her comment that she is ‘sorry’ for him with an explicit admission: ‘Now that he’s dead I’ll make a confession, Jim, that I have never made to a soul. If he had pressed me – which he did not – to go with him when I was in the carriage that night beside his yacht, I would have gone. And I was disappointed that he did not press me.’ When she says that the baron ‘would not move me now’, 1913 CM adds ‘It would be so unfair to baby’, again recalling ‘The Daemon Lover’. Hardy’s alternative ending of 1927 parallels even more closely the ballad’s closure (see notes 2 and 33).

62. his ‘la jalousie rétrospective,’ as George Sand terms it: ‘Retrospective jealousy’, quoted from Elle et Lui, chapter XII (1859); Hardy was reading George Sand as early as 1873 and took extensive notes on her works (Literary Notebooks, I, 300n).

‘Interlopers at the Knap’

1. Holloway Lane: The 1889 Macmillan one-volume edition of Wessex Tales substitutes for the fictional name an actual one: ‘Long Ash Lane’, the road out of Dorchester to Yeovil (Casterbridge to Ivell on the 1895–6 map). Hardy made topographical changes to the story at every stage of revision (see Ray, 49–54).

2. This comfortable position was, however, none of his own making: In this detail, as in many others, Darton resembles the alienated Mr Barnet of ‘Fellow-Townsmen’.

3. Japheth Johns: Japheth was a son of Noah blessed by his father: ‘God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant’ (Genesis 9.27), but Hardy’s Japheth is turned down by the woman he courts. The name of the happily unmarried Sarah Hall is similarly misapplied: Sarah was the wife of Abraham about whom Yahweh prophesied, ‘she shall be a mother of nations; kings of peoples shall be of her’ (Genesis 17.16). The story’s New Testament allusions are also ironic, e.g. when Sarah is awaiting Darton, she invokes the image of the star followed by the Magi on the night of the nativity; yet Darton, Johns and Enoch are hardly like the biblical Magi, while the poor people found in the stable turn out to be, not Mary and Joseph with the Messiah, but Philip’s wife Helena, whose classical name is associated with division and war, and their children.

4. Hanging and wiving go by destiny: In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Nerissa, the waiting gentlewoman of Portia, invokes this ‘ancient saying’ after the Prince of Arragon has chosen the wrong casket and so has lost the hand of Portia (II.ix.82).

5. one of the Hintocks (several of which lay thereabout): In 1884 EIM, ‘the old-fashioned village of Hintock Abbas’; both are based on Melbury Osmond, the home of Hardy’s mother’s family and the place where the senior Hardys were married in 1839. Millgate notes that ‘Interlopers’ is ‘partly based upon [Hardy’s] father’s journey to Melbury Osmond on the eve of the wedding. Family tradition concurs in the insistence upon the bridegroom’s hesitancy and in the anecdote about climbing a signpost in order to read it in the dark’ (Biography, 15). Kay-Robinson identifies ‘the Knap’ as Manor Cottage, Melbury Osmond, where the large stump of a yew tree can still be seen near the house’s former front door (pp. 109–10). The house appears in the poem ‘One Who Married above Him’ (1925). King associates it with Alexander Macmillan’s house ‘Knapdale’ (cited in Ray, 49; see also ‘Fellow-Townsmen’, note 4).

6. the great fireplace: 1912 WT has ‘the town of Smokeyhole’; 1896 WT had increased the dialect usage of Johns, but Mrs Hall has dialect removed (e.g. ‘match for ye’ becomes ‘match for you’, p. 256) for 1888 WT, thus making her seem more respectable.

7. Don’t you be such a reforming radical: It is inappropriate for Enoch, as a farmer’s man, to make a joke to the person for whom he works. Johns may be mockingly associating Enoch with those who had supported the Reform Bill of 1832, which extended voting rights to some male property owners.

8. as if Skrymir the Giant were sleeping there: In Norse mythology, when Thor finds Skrymir the Giant sleeping, he is unable to wake him, even with three violent blows to his head; the giant outwits the god.

9. Hintock village-street: King notes that the 1903 Macmillan edition of Wessex Tales has ‘King’s-Hintock village-street’ (cited in Ray, 53); 1912 WT adds that this location is ‘only a mile or two from King’s-Hintock Court, yet quite shut away from that mansion and its precincts’. The revision makes explicit the closeness of the setting to that of The Woodlanders, while also emphasizing the distance of the Hall family from a person like Felice Charmond, who inhabited King’s-Hintock Court in an early version. This house, the Wessex version of Melbury House, also provides the setting for the elopement in the 1889 story ‘The First Countess of Wessex’.

10. under Bacchic influence: Bacchus, or Dionysus, was the god of wine and ecstasy.

11. sinking down confounded: Added for 1888 WT, as were several exclamation points in this dialogue and below. Also, several paragraphs later, ‘bitterly’ was added to describe Philip’s tone.

12. Verton: 1896 WT makes this Evershead (see the 1895–6 map), the Wessex name for Evershot, and substitutes the ‘Sow-and-Acorn’ for the ‘Dog’. Both are associated with ‘The First Countess of Wessex’, and the latter appears in Tess.

13. universal custom thereabout to wake the bees… whenever a death occurred in the household: According to Udal, informing bees ‘of the death of their master or mistress by tapping upon the hives and announcing it in order to prevent their forsaking the place is a common superstition in Dorsetshire as in other counties’ (p. 246).

14. to the ‘Pack-Horse’, a roadside inn: 1896 WT makes this the ‘“White Horse”, at Chalk Newton’, and 1912 WT adds that it was a ‘fine old Elizabethan inn’, with a footnote indicating that the inn ‘is now pulled down, and its site occupied by a modern one in red brick’. In ‘Destiny and a Blue Cloak’, this is the inn from which Agatha took the carrier’s van.

15. I’ll swing the mallet: Since a mallet is used in both croquet and polo, this idiom may mean ‘I’ll take my turn’ or ‘I’ll give this a shot’.

16. your nice long speeches on mangold-wurzel: Recalls the reference in the Finale of George Eliot’s Middlemarch to Fred Vincy’s authorship of a work on ‘turnips and mangel-wurzel’. Both uses are sardonic.

17. But if I had ‘twould have been all the same: 1912 WT has ‘That you believed me capable of refusing you for such a reason does not help your cause.’

‘The Waiting Supper’

1. Squire Everard’s lawn… fifty years ago: The Everard family once occupied Stafford House, near Lower Bockhampton (Mellstock in Wessex, east of Casterbridge), which, according to Ray, ‘had formerly been known as Frome Everard’ (p. 275). The fictional ‘Swenn-Everard House’ is like the actual Stafford House in having grounds close to a waterfall on a river, the ‘Swenn’ in this text, the ‘Froom’ in 1913 WT, at which point the house became ‘Froom-Everard House’. So Salisbury becomes Melchester; Troyton Inn becomes the Buck’s Head in Roy Town, a setting used also in Far From the Madding Crowd; Frome becomes Froom (the Frome River, which runs from Evershot (Evershead) through Dorchester (Casterbridge) to Wareham (Anglebury) and Poole (Havenpool)). Kay-Robinson notes that ‘the reach between West Stafford and Woodsford’ on the Frome River has sinister connotations in Hardy’s fiction: it provides the setting for the drownings of Eustacia Vye and Damon Wildeve in The Return of the Native and for the suicide attempt of Retty Priddle in Tess (pp. 61–2). If the narrator’s present is the date of the story’s composition in 1887 or its first publication in 1888, then this scene is set in 1837 or 1838; cf. Christine’s letter of 13 Oct. 1838. In 1913 CM, the letter has the less specific ‘183 –’.

3. Take me whilst I am in the humour: Disguised as a man pretending to be a woman, Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It playfully says to Orlando, ‘Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humour and like enough to consent’ (IV.i.68–9). Though Christine self-consciously may be quoting Rosalind, her tone is petulant.

4. the clandestine marriage of an aunt under circumstances somewhat similar to the present: Possibly an allusion (though the date would suggest a great- or great-great-aunt) to the secret marriage in 1735 of Elizabeth Strangways-Horners to Stephen Fox, fictionalized by Hardy in ‘The First Countess of Wessex’. The plan for a secret marriage also recalls A Pair of Blue Eyes.

5. the bottle-green glass of the old lead quarries: Glass was given its colour by the fusion in the glass mixture of metallic oxides.

6. (for he lived in a remote part of the parish): 1913 CM has ‘(for he lived aloofly in the next parish)’. Here and elsewhere, as Ray has noted, ‘Nic’s social relation to Christine is made more independent in 1913 by moving his farm out of her father the Squire’s parish and into a neighbouring one. This removes those undertones in the serial of the Poor Man and the Lady theme’ (p. 275).

7. far: 1913 CM has ‘months’, diminishing the impression that Christine is too young; also, a few paragraphs further, that ‘Christine grew passionate’ and that she ‘painfully reflected’ become that ‘Christine [was] spurred by opposition’ and that she ‘reflected’.

8. Eldhampton Hall: 1913 CM has ‘Athelhall’, the Wessex name for Athelhampton, close to Puddletown (Weatherbury in the 1895–6 map), a house Hardy knew in his youth. Kay-Robinson notes that the Great Hall ‘still has its fine timbered roof and musicians’ gallery’, as well as its spiral staircase, ‘but it does not and never did give access to the gallery’ (p. 55).

9. her husband and children: Desmond Hawkins was the first to remark that in all versions this female cousin becomes male several paragraphs later: ‘Nicholas’s cousin and cousin’s wife and cousin’s children among the rest’ (cited in Ray, 277).

11. Michaelmas-daisies and chrysanthemums: Hardy wrote to C. Kegan Paul in January 1888, presumably in response to a question about this story, that chrysanthemums ‘were known 40 years ago – I could not swear to 50 – They were mostly pink, & not much like those we see now’ (Collected Letters, I, 172).

12. the celebrated Mellstock fiddlers: These musicians establish a link with Under the Greenwood Tree, set during roughly the same period. They could also refer to older members of Hardy’s own family, the originals for the Mellstock Quire, who made a practice of performing at various communal events. As John Rabbetts notes, ‘images of the Dewy family… flicker throughout Hardy’s later fiction with a kind of totemic significance’ (From Hardy to Faulkner: Wessex to Yoknapatawpha (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 138).

13. staleness, flatness, or unprofitableness: Cf. Hamlet I.ii. 134–5: ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!’ In this story about procrastination and indecision, another possible reference to Hamlet was added for 1913 CM.

14. a young man of Swenn-Everard: 1913 CM changes the location of Long’s ‘Homeston Farm’ to ‘Elsenford’, whose original, according to Hardy, was either Bhompston or Duddle Farm. In a story about procrastination and indecision, Elsinore, the setting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, may also be invoked.

15. the very twin halves of a perfect whole: This may be an allusion to Matthew Arnold’s ‘Too Late’ (1852), which focuses on potentially perfect matches that are not consummated:

Each on his own strict line we move,

And some find death ere they find love;

So far apart their lives are thrown

From the twin soul which halves their own.

And sometimes, by still harder fate,

The lovers meet, but meet too late.

– Thy heart is mine! – True, true! ah, true!

– Then, love, thy hand! – Ah, no! adieu!

16. But as a sensible, new-risen poet says: Robert Browning had begun publishing during the 1830s, but Christine anachronistically quotes ‘The Statue and the Bust’ (1855), of which Hardy said, ‘there’s nothing about procrastination that is not in that poem’ (Elliott Felkin, ‘Days with Thomas Hardy: from a 1918–1919 diary’, Encounter 18 (1962), 30). The poem sees the postponement of sexual consummation as a greater ‘sin’ than the ‘vice’ of an adulterous relationship (see also n. 28). Hardy also repeats details from George Crabbe’s ‘The Parting Hour’ (1812), in which former lovers, who have been separated for most of their adult lives, sit together in old age awaiting their deaths; from the Decameron’s ninth story of the tenth day, in which a woman’s first husband arrives on the scene just as she is marrying the second; and from an old Dorset County Chronicle, which he had summarized and commented on in his ‘Facts’ Notebook, begun in 1882:

Long engagemt. Scotch youth & damsel (Elgin) – attachment – 1794. Separated, & marriage forbidden by their relations. Ten years passed; union again nearly achieved, when doomed to disappt. Twenty more years mutually constant, & in uninterrupted correspce. Then married. Wd. it not have been better to wait till death, & c. –

(‘Facts’ Notebook, [82], quoted in Brady, 179–80)

17. All’s well that ends well: See ‘The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid’, note 34.

18. I have suffered more in this last half hour than I hope you may suffer all your life. 1913 CM has ‘here’s a paragraph in the paper hinting at a secret wedding, and I’m blazed if it don’t point to you’. As Ray has pointed out, the change makes Everard’s motivation plausible: ‘In the serial he seems to move too quickly and for no obvious reason from calling Nic a scoundrel to accepting him as a son-in-law’ (p. 276). Also in 1913 CM, Hardy dropped the ‘almost’ from ‘I almost feel that you must carry out this attempt’.

19. Parents propose, and ungrateful children dispose: Ironic variation of the cliché, ‘Man proposes, God disposes.’

20. the gold-fields: Given the date is roughly 1853, Long is probably referring to the Australian gold rush of the early 1850s.

21. shining one at each comer like types of the four Evangelists: May refer to a feature in chapel architecture where each Evangelist occupies one compartment of a four-part vault; may also refer to Revelation 7.1: ‘I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth.’

22. without any warning, the clock slowly inclined forward and fell at full length upon the floor. According to Udal, this ‘foretells a death in the family of the owner’ (p. 183); he uses this story as his example.

24. So once said a sorely tried man in the land of Uz: The quotation is from Job 30.26; this scene anticipates Jude Fawley’s identification with the despairing voice of the biblical Job in Jude the Obscure (see note 25); similarly, Christine’s comment that she has been ‘roughly received back into – the right way!’ looks forward to Sue Bridehead’s grotesque sense of moral correctness when she returns to Phillotson.

25. His last state was worse than his first. He was more than once tempted: 1913 CM has ‘If he had been younger he might have felt tempted’. This revision and others removing the suggestion that Long is truly suicidal were made after the 1895 publication of Jude the Obscure, perhaps to distinguish Long’s frustration from Jude’s despair.

26. So like, so very like, was day to day: From William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont’ (1807), l. 6, which describes a peaceful time in the past of the speaker, about which he now has a negative judgement:

Such happiness, wherever it be known

Is to be pitied; for ’tis surely blind. (ll. 55–6)

27. J. Bellston: 1838: See Introduction for later changes to this detail and additions to the final dialogue.

28. With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come: In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Gratiano argues that one should pursue pleasure to the fullest, even in old age:

Let me play the fool!

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come,

And let my liver rather heat with wine

Than my cool heart with mortifying groans.

Why should a man whose blood is warm within,

Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster? (I.i.79–84)

Again the literary text is used to say the opposite of what it purports. This also may be another connection with Browning’s ‘The Statue and the Bust’: while the young Christine quotes Browning’s lady to argue that ‘The world and its way have a certain worth’, she later quotes Gratiano just after he has told the depressed Antonio ‘You have too much respect upon the world’ (I.i.74). Also incongruous is Christine’s use of biblical language to introduce Shakespeare.

‘The Withered Arm’

1. A lorn milkmaid: Suzanne R. Johnson notes that the section titles, especially this one and ‘The young wife’, by foregrounding a basic contrast within the story, serve a function similar to that of the ‘Phase’ titles of Tess (‘Metamorphosis, desire, and the fantastic in Thomas Hardy’s “The Withered Arm”’, Modem Language Studies 23 (1993), 138n).

2. It was an eighty-cow dairy: As is also true of Talbothays in Tess, the size and capitalist structure of this dairy, where the dairyman rents cows from a landowning farmer and ‘supernumerary’ workers are hired at particular seasons, were not uncommon during the early nineteenth century. See G. E. Fussell, ‘“High Farming” in Southwestern England, 1840–1880’, Economic Geography 24 (1948), 57; and Barbara Kerr, ‘The Dorset agricultural labourer, 1750–1850’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 84 (1962), 176.

4. Has anybody seen her: 1896 WT substitutes ‘Hav”for ‘Has’; such revisions increase the sense that the people who work in the dairy use Dorset dialect, and reinforce the contrast between Rhoda Brook and Gertrude Lodge.

5. before our Great Weir was builded: According to Kay-Robinson, this is probably Stony or Bovington Weir, near Hethfelton Old Farm, the original for the ‘outlying second farm’ of Farmer Lodge; though the milkman’s reference to forty years earlier would suggest the weir was built in the late eighteenth century, Stony Weir is actually ‘medieval in origin’ and ‘was fully rebuilt… in 1749’. Lodge’s large white house at Holmstoke is an earlier incarnation of Hethfelton House, located between Bovington and Stokeford. Rhoda’s cottage is ‘probably up the lane between Stokeford and Stokeford farm’ and ‘would have been no more than one of those humble cob-and-thatch dwellings effaced as soon as their owners (if not always their occupants) had ceased to have a use for them’. Holmstoke Church is the church of St Mary, now in ruins (pp. 65–8). Holmstoke does not appear on the 1895–6 map of Wessex, but is west of Anglebury. 1888 BM reads ‘Stickleford’, the Wessex name for Tincleton, instead of Holmstoke; this revision removes the geographical irregularity that had been created by the necessity, in order to make Gertrude Lodge’s journey to Casterbridge an arduous one, of moving Stickleford to the other side of Egdon Heath. Hardy may also have wanted to remove the allusions to the area of his own birthplace – and, implicitly, to his mother, his source for this narrative – which would have been familiar to the readers of 1888 WT (1888 BM had been published anonymously).

6. Rhoda Brook: ‘Rhoda’ comes from the Greek word for rose, while ‘Brook’ suggests running water; both names, with their emphasis on natural beauty, movement and fertility, contrast with the surname of Farmer Lodge, which suggests his grand house. In Studies, Hardy recorded three biblical uses of the word ‘lodge’ (pp. 38, 44). Kay-Robinson also notes that on an estate map of 1828 Hethfelton House is called ‘“Heffleton Lodge“, a rare term in Dorset, inviting speculation as to whether Hardy’s choice of “Lodge” for the surname of his chief characters was entirely coincidental’ (pp. 65–6, his italics). In any case, the brook/lodge contrast suggests an opposition between the ‘natural’ (or, in this case, the ‘primitive’) and the ‘civilized’. ‘Brook’ might also invoke Rhoda’s role of drawing together the worlds of Holmstoke and Casterbridge, just as the water in the meads of Holmstoke comes from the ‘deep slow river’ that runs by the Hangman’s Cottage in Casterbridge. (The name Gertrude – a reference to Hamlet’s mother – could be read as ironically applied to Mrs Lodge, whose withered limb is associated with her childlessness.)

7. a many-forked stand made of the peeled limb of an oak-tree: 1912 WT adds ‘as usual’ after ‘made’, thus emphasizing the traditional status of the object, even on a farm with a relatively new economic structure. Romey T. Keys suggests that this detail, among others, links Holmstoke with Casterbridge, the place of the story’s hanging: the forked stand ‘takes the place of the gallows, which receives the briefest of descriptions’ (‘Hardy’s uncanny narrative: a reading of “The Widiered Arm” ‘, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 27 (1985), 111).

8. If she’s dark or fair, and if she’s tall – as tall as I: Rhoda is echoing the desperately jealous instructions of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to her servants soon after she has learned from a messenger that Antony has married Octavia. To one she says,

Go to the fellow, good Alexas, bid him

Report the feature of Octavia, her years,

Her inclination; let him not leave out

The color of her hair. Bring me word quickly.

Cleopatra continues:

Bid you Alexas

Bring me word how tall she is.

(Antony and Cleopatra, II.v.111–14, 117–18)

Like Cleopatra, Rhoda is dark and tall, as well as being an outsider to her lover’s social world, and is associated with witchcraft; like Octavia, Gertrude is fair and short, as well as being a member of her husband’s class (Octavia is Caesar’s sister). Hardy copied down in Studies (p. 69) many quotations from Antony and Cleopatra, including part of Cleopatra’s interrogation of the messenger after he has seen Octavia:

What majesty is in her gait? Remember,

If e’er thou look’st on majesty. (III.iii.17–18)

9. It whewed and whistled so loud when it rubbed against the pews: See ‘Fellow-Townsmen’, note 27.

10. realistic as a photograph: The technology of photography dates back only to 1839 in Britain, more than ten years after the date of the story (see note 20). This detail is not anachronistic, however, for it reflects the time of the narrator in 1888, when photography was well established. A similar effect, of a narrator who invokes scientific concepts to describe the story’s strangest moments, was added for 1888 WT: when Gertrude Lodge first sees the corpse of the nameless young man, 1888 BM says ‘it was as though she had half-fainted and could not finish’; 1888 WT says, ‘it was as though she had nearly died, but was held up by a sort of galvanism’.

11. since her assertion… was not to be believed: 1888 BM has ‘if’ for ‘since’. The revision, which only slightly calls into question the certainty of the event, was one of several made by Hardy in response to Leslie Stephen’s criticism:

Either I would accept the superstition altogether and make the wizard a genuine performer – with possibly some hint that you tell the story as somebody told it; or I would leave some opening as to the withering of the arm, so that a possibility of explanation might be suggested, though, of course, not too much obtruded…

As it is, I don’t know where I am. I begin as a believer and end up as a sceptic.

(Stephen to Hardy, 10 Jan. 1888, in The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, ed.

Frederick William Maitland (London: Duckworth, 1906), pp. 393–4)

12. The impression remaining from the night’s experience was still strong: Norman D. Prentiss suggests that ‘impression’ is a pun here: ‘The dream leaves a mental impression on Rhoda, but it also leaves a physical impression on Gertrude’ (‘The poetics of interruption in Hardy’s poetry and short stories’, Victorian Poetry 31 (1993), 49).

13. Conjuror Trendle: In Dorset tradition, a conjuror (also called a cunning-man, or a white witch) was the seventh son of a seventh son who had special powers, especially to diagnose and treat illnesses. ‘Trendle’ is a form of the Anglo-Saxon word meaning circle, a mystical symbol in magic (see ‘The Three Strangers’, note 16), and may also refer to Trendle Hill near Cerne Abbas, upon whose chalk surface is still carved the ancient image of a huge man with an erect penis; Udal reports that the ‘Cerne Giant’ was often the location of maypole celebrations and fertility rituals (pp. 157–8). Hardy told Lea that Trendle ‘is a composite figure of two or three [conjurors] who used to be heard of (Collected Letters, III, 264).

14. the malignant influence which was blasting the fair person of Gertrude: The association of blasting with withering suggests that the story’s central image may be linked to Shakespeare’s Richard III, who thinks he has been cursed by his brother’s wife and Jane Shore, his brother’s former mistress:

Look how I am bewitch’d; behold mine arm

Is, like a blasted sapling, wither’d up.

And this is Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch,

Consorted with that harlot strumpet Shore,

That by their witchcraft thus have marked me.

[Richard III, III.iv.68–72)

In both texts, the withering of the limb has a sexual dimension.

15. the Wessex King Ina, presented to after-ages as Lear: King of Wessex at the end of the seventh century, just after it had been taken over by the West Saxons; William Camden relates the story of his relationship with his three daughters to that of King Lear (Remaines Concerning Britaine (1606)).

16. the house of the man they sought: Lea reported in 1913 that the conjuror’s house had ‘fallen into complete decay’, though the walls had been standing twenty years before, and he claimed to have passed the spot ‘some years’ before, when he ‘inquired of an old rustic who was working near whether he remembered it when it was occupied, and he replied that a man used to live there who was “a seventh of a seventh” ‘(pp. 151–2).

17. he took the glass and its contents to the window, and told Gertrude to watch them closely: According to Firor, showing the form of an enemy ‘assumed by the white of an egg dissolved in a glass of water’, sometimes called ‘Scrying the future’, is ‘an ancient mode of divination’ (p. 88).

18. overlooked: Udal offers numerous instances of overlooking in Dorset and quotes from a Handbook of Folk-lore: ‘the belief known as the “Evil Eye” is not a matter of art, magic, or witchcraft, but a supposedly natural power inherent in certain persons, whether voluntarily or involuntarily exerted’. He comments that sometimes ‘an unusually ill-tempered, shrewish, or for any reason particularly obnoxious old woman… would be credited with such a power’ (p. 205, my italics).

19. It will turn the blood and change the constitution: According to Udal (p. 207), the general belief in Dorset was ‘that the most effectual way of neutralizing, or of removing, the baneful influence exerted by the… person who was supposed to be overlooking the sufferer, was to draw blood from the “overlooker” ‘(this is evident in the actions of Susan Nunsuch in The Return of the Native).

Firor, however, notes that the ‘corpse-cure’, or touching of the neck of a man who has just been hanged, was another possible way of turning the blood (the idea was to transfer the parting life of the hanged victim to the dead limb of the living person). It was not uncommon, right up to 1900, for a hangman both to allow people to stand near the scaffold in order to touch the corpse and to sell bits of the rope for medicinal use (p. 111). According to Roger Ebbatson, William Calcraft, the Dorchester hangman, ‘was in the habit of selling the rope by the inch after a hanging’ (‘“The Withered Arm” and history’, Critical Survey 5 (1993), 132).

20. The last I sent was in ‘13 – near twenty years ago: 1912 WT changes ‘twenty’ to ‘twelve’, thus dating the story’s conclusion in 1825 rather than 1833, and setting it, as Ebbatson notes, before the agricultural unrest of the 1830s (‘“The Withered Arm” and history’, pp. 132–3). In making arson the boy’s alleged crime, however, Hardy may have been thinking of the Kenn incendiaries; he copied the description of their 1830 execution from the Dorset County Chronicle into his ‘Facts’ Notebook. Also relevant is a hanging Hardy’s father told him about:
My father saw four men hung for being with some others who had set fire to a rick. Among them was a stripling of a boy of eighteen. Skinny. Half-starved. So frail, so underfed, that they had to put weights on his feet to break his neck. He had not fired the rick. But with a 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.

(Newman Flower, Just as It Happened (London: Cassell, 1950), p. 92)

Many acts of arson were committed in the early 1830s by frustrated farm labourers protesting their appalling conditions and the loss of work resulting from new technology; thus, as Ebbatson comments, Rhoda’s son ‘attends a rick-fire which might be aimed at his own father’ (‘“The Withered Arm” and history’, pp. 132–3).

21. Instead of her formal prayers… hang some guilty or innocent person soon: Added for 1888 WT, thus intensifying the sense that Gertrude has lost all her former compassion.

22. Enclosure Acts had not taken effect: These parliamentary acts, variously passed between 1750 and 1850, turned six million acres of commonly held agricultural land into private property; see also ‘The Waiting Supper’, note 20.

23. She halted before a pond: 1896 WT gives the name ‘Rushy-pond’, the actual place from which, with a telescope, Hardy witnessed a hanging as a boy. In his poem ‘At Rushy-pond’ (1925), the place embodies the guilty memory of the male speaker, who had ended his relationship with a woman there.

24. hang-fair: According to Firor, hanging ‘was a public spectacle up to 1868; executions used to take place over the gateway of the county jail, and formed the excuse for a general holiday. The rich paid for choice seats; the tradesmen, farmers, and rustics ate, drank and made merry with a callousness it is difficult to understand today’ (pp. 243–4).

25. a lonely cottage by a deep slow river flowing under the cliff on which the prison buildings were situate: According to Kay-Robinson, Hangman’s Cottage ‘is today a very neatly kept private residence. The outside staircase noticed by Gertrude Lodge has been removed… The wicket in the prison wall, pointed out by the hangman to Gertrude, has so completely disappeared that it is difficult to judge where it was, for the cottage is not really opposite the prison’ (pp. 10–11). The mention of a boy pointing out the cottage may be a reference to Hardy’s childhood self: Henry Nevinson reports that Hardy showed him ‘the railings he used to climb as a boy to watch the hangman having his tea at a cottage in a hollow below on the evening before an execution, and wonder how the man could eat anything so soon before his terrible task’ (Thomas Hardy (1941; New York: Haskell House, 1972), p. 18).

26. formally: 1888 BM has ‘slyly’; the change diminishes the hangman’s tone of black humour, perhaps to distinguish him from the hangman of ‘The Three Strangers’, also in 1888 WT.

27. We always wait for that, in case of a reprieve: On 7 Feb. 1879, Hardy made the following note: ‘Father says that when there was a hanging at Dorchester in his boyhood it was carried out at one o’clock, it being the custom to wait till the mail-coach came in from London in case of a reprieve’ (Life, 128).

28. uncovering the face of the corpse: This chilling detail was added for 1888 WT.

29. a chastened and thoughtful man: 1888 BM has ‘serious-minded’ for ‘thoughtful’; Hardy had originally sent Blackwood’s a manuscript in which Lodge is described as having killed himself, but Hardy then sent on this ‘improvement’ (Collected Letters, I, 170).

30. he went away to Port-Bredy: The setting of ‘Fellow-Townsmen’ recalls that story’s focus on alienation and exile. ‘Fellow-Townsmen’ immediately follows ‘The Withered Arm’ in 1888 WT and all subsequent editions of the collection. The Wessex name for Bridport may also serve as a veiled allusion to the 1833 hanging in Dorchester of an arsonist from Bridport (Ebbatson, ‘“The Withered Arm” and history’, p. 133).

NOTES

‘Destiny and a Blue Cloak’