Hardy would set his novels in an area which included the counties of south-west and central-southern England, which he called ‘Wessex’ (after a previous Saxon kingdom of that name), but he invented his own names for the real-life places which existed within this region. For example, ‘Knollsea’ is Swanage; ‘Casterbridge’ is Dorchester; ‘Weatherbury’ is Puddletown; ‘Budmouth Regis’ is Weymouth.1
As for the content of his novels, Hardy, as already mentioned, once told his friend Edward Clodd that ‘every superstition, custom, &c., described therein may be depended on as true records of the same – & not inventions of mine’.2 This fact is borne out by a surviving notebook of Hardy’s which contains extracts collected from The Dorset County Chronicle, which was a primary source for the plots of many of his novels, together with extracts of histories and biographies which he had studied. However, Hardy also had a habit of blending into the fabric of his novels some of his own experiences, and in this, his third published novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, was to be no exception. To begin with, it is surely no coincidence that Emma Gifford, with whom Hardy had fallen in love, had eyes of blue.
In A Pair of Blue Eyes, the reader is brought face to face with a drama involving love, betrayal and death; played out in the equally dramatic countryside of Cornwall. It was published in May 1873 by Tinsley Brothers, when Hardy was aged 32.
The story centres around two friends, who unbeknown to one another fall in love with the same woman. The one, Stephen Smith, is an architect (as, of course, was Hardy) who is sent to Cornwall to work on the restoration of a church. Here he meets Elfride Swancourt, daughter of the parson, and falls in love. This, of course, is Hardy himself, reliving, Vicariously through ‘Smith’, his own journey to Cornwall and his first meeting with Elfride (Emma). Furthermore, Smith’s father (like Hardy’s) is a stonemason who lives not in Dorset, but near to Elfride’s home.
Smith’s friend, Henry Knight, also an admirer of Elfride, is a writer, reviewer, barrister and Smith’s former mentor. Knight is therefore reminiscent of Hardy’s friend Horace Moule, who in 1862 was admitted to the Middle Temple. This begs the question, if ‘Smith’ represents Hardy, and ‘Knight’ represents Moule, did Moule in real life also fall in love with Emma? The answer is no. In fact, Moule and Emma never met.3
Another parallel between the novel and Hardy’s own life may be that, just as Smith was at pains to conceal the fact that he formerly had a lover, so Hardy may have been anxious lest Emma find out about his own former attachment to his cousin Tryphena Sparks. As for Elfride’s mortification at Knight’s scathing review of a ‘novelette’ which she has written, this is surely a reflection of Hardy’s hurt at having his own works criticised and rejected.
In A Pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy beguiles the reader with the elegance of his prose and the richness of his vocabulary. For example, here are to be found words like ‘diaphanous’ and ‘parallelepipedon’. There are delightful descriptive passages, such as when candlelight falls on Elfride and transforms her hair ‘into a nebulous haze of light, surrounding her crown like an aureola’. He also makes skilful use of imagery, as when Smith ‘drew himself in with the sensitiveness of a snail’; ‘Time closed up like a fan before him’; ‘one ray was abstracted from the glory about her head’; and ‘feet’ played about under Elfride’s dress ‘like little mice’. (It takes but little discernment to realise that these references to the hair and feet of Elfride were inspired by Emma.)
There are references in the novel which reveal just how familiar Hardy was with the authors Shakespeare and Catullus; with the Psalms; with painters Holbein and Turner; with Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia, and with ‘Dundagel’ (the ancient name for the Cornish village of Tintagel). He also demonstrates his attention to detail, as for example when he is describing the so-called ‘cliff without a name’ (near ‘Castle Boterel’ – Boscastle), which he compares to others such as Beachy Head, St Aldhelm’s, St Bee’s, and the Lizard. And he is aware of the significance to the earth’s history of fossils, and in particular a type known as ‘trilobites’.
That Hardy is in touch with the land and its people – as is to be expected from one born in the country and steeped in its ways – is revealed when he writes of how ‘labouring men’ are able to tell the time of day ‘by means of shadows, winds, clouds, the movements of sheep and oxen, the singing of birds, the crowing of cocks, and a hundred other sights and sounds which people with watches in their pockets never know the existence of …’
He is familiar with ‘hydatids’ – a disease of sheep caused by tapeworm larvae which affects the animals’ brains and causes them to walk ‘round and round in a circle continually’. The elegance of his style is shown by this description of the sea:
And then the waves rolled in furiously – the neutral green-and-blue tongues of water slid up the slopes, and were metamorphosed into foam by a careless blow, falling back white and faint, and leaving trailing followers behind.
He also writes in an informed way about such places as Naples, Greece, Berlin, and even India, despite not having visited them.
There is to be found much humour and wit in A Pair of Blue Eyes. For example, in English history it is a well-known fact that there were only two King Charles’ – I and II. However, the driver of the dog-cart in which Smith is travelling believes that there was also a King Charles III. To which Smith replies sceptically: ‘I don’t recollect anything in English literature about Charles the Third.’ When the driver goes on to mention a Charles the Fourth, Smith retorts: ‘Upon my word, that’s too much!’
‘Why?’ asks the cab driver, after all, ‘there was a George the Fourth, wasn’t there?’
After the death of Lady Luxellian, wife of the squire, the mourning letters are seen to have ‘wonderful black rims … half-an-inch wide’. Was this too excessive, asks inn proprietor Martin Cannister dryly? Was it really possible for people to feel grief to the extent of ‘more than a very narrow border’?
These two examples alone are sufficient to demonstrate Hardy’s keen sense of humour; but did he ever laugh? Writer, critic and acquaintance of his, Desmond MacCarthy, affirms that he did laugh, but that ‘his laughter made no sound. As is usual with subtle people, his voice was never loud, and a gentle eagerness, which was very pleasing, showed his manner when he wanted sympathy about some point.’
On the other hand, says MacCarthy, Hardy ‘would instantly recoil on being disappointed’.4 Another acquaintance of Hardy’s, Dorset-born publisher Sir Walter Newman Flower, states that when Hardy was amused, ‘A happy smile would flick across his face like a flash of summer lightning. He would inwardly chuckle: he would relate a humorous happening he had known, and rejoice in it.’5
In any novel the plot is of fundamental importance, so how, in A Pair of Blue Eyes, did Hardy craft the story so as to keep the reader interested, right up until the final page? The answer lies in the character of Knight, who in many ways is similar to his creator. Knight is a man animated by ‘a spirit of self-denial, verging on asceticism’, whose imagination had been ‘fed … by lonely study’, and whose emotions had been ‘drawn out … by his seclusion’. Knight’s ‘introspective tendencies’ have ‘never brought himself much happiness’. As for Elfride, the object of Knight’s desire, his inflexibility demands that he should be ‘the first-comer’. In other words, she should have had no other lovers prior to him, for he simply cannot tolerate an ‘idol’ who is ‘secondhand’. Surely this is precisely how Hardy saw himself in respect of Emma.
Conflict, of course, is at the heart of all novels, and it is to be found in A Pair of Blue Eyes when Knight begins to suspect that he is not, in fact, Elfride’s first love. There are clues along the way which alert Knight as to this possibility. Elfride is in the company of Knight when she rediscovers an earring which had previously been lost when in the company of Smith. This earring had been given to her by a lover to whom she had been informally engaged. Knight and Elfride later find themselves in a cemetery, sitting together on a tombstone, when he discovers that this is the tomb of Felix Jethway, Elfride’s first love.
Elfride says she would like to give Knight ‘something to make you think of me during the autumn at your chambers’. When he suggests a particular potted dwarf myrtle tree of hers, she demurs, and presents him with a different one; whereupon he guesses that the tree which he had originally chosen was given to her by a former lover.
Knight recognises a likeness to Elfride in faces drawn by his friend, Smith, as designs for proposed images of saints and angels to be created in stained glass. Finally, Felix Jethway’s mother sends Knight a letter telling him the full story of Elfride’s previous attachments, including the one to Smith. Again, Hardy is using ‘Knight’ to reflect his own feelings – in this case, feelings of anxiety and jealousy, for (as will be seen) he was aware that Emma had at least one suitor in Cornwall before he himself arrived on the scene.
The final twist-in-the-tail comes when Knight and Smith find themselves journeying together from London to Cornwall, each to claim Elfride for his own; not realising that the coffin containing her dead body is also travelling with them.
A Pair of Blue Eyes gives the author the opportunity of presenting some of his own personal views about women. It is his opinion, for example, that Smith’s ‘failure to make his hold [on Elfride’s heart] a permanent one was [because of] his too timid habit of dispraising himself’ to her, because such self-denigrating behaviour on his part ‘inevitably leads the most sensible woman in the world to undervalue him who practises it. Directly domineering [of the woman] ceases in the man, snubbing begins in the woman.’ Hardy also states that it is an ‘unfortunate fact the gentler creature [the woman] rarely has the capacity to appreciate fair treatment from her natural complement [her male spouse]’.
Suppose for a moment that what Hardy is really doing here is voicing his own thoughts in regard to Emma. He feels that he is not appreciated, and wonders if instead of being self-deprecating to her, which gives her the opportunity to snub him, he should be more assertive, in which case she might have more respect for him. It also implies that Emma has adopted the same supercilious attitude to Hardy as her father has done. And suppose that Hardy was of the same opinion as ‘Knight’, who regards women as something of an unknown quantity, and declares it to be a ‘trick’ to read truly ‘the enigmatic forces at work in women at given times’.
Hardy’s criticisms are not reserved only for the female sex. ‘What fickle beings we men are!’ says Knight to Smith. ‘Men may love strongest for a while, but women love longest.’
The difficulties encountered by one who falls in love with another from a higher social class, and the consequent feelings of social superiority or inferiority which the rigid class structure existing in Hardy’s day could engender, was a theme which would occupy Hardy greatly throughout his life. This was an issue which he had addressed in his first (unpublished) novel, The Poor Man and the Lady. Perhaps it was Hardy’s youthful infatuation with the aristocratic Julia Martin that had first put the idea into his head that he might one day marry a ‘lady’. And when, three years later, he met Emma Gifford, the issue would confront him head on. ‘Fancy a man not being able to ride!’says Elfride scornfully to Smith, when he sorrowfully confesses that he does not go horse riding. (Emma rode a pony called Fanny, whereas Hardy himself did not ride.)
‘Did you ever think what my parents might be, or what society I originally moved in?’ enquires Smith of Elfride, before revealing to her that his father is a ‘cottager and working master mason’. ‘That is a strange idea to me,’ Elfride replies, ‘but never mind, what does it matter? I love you just as much.’
To Elfride’s father, the Revd Swancourt, however, it does matter. Says Swancourt, scornfully, on discovering his daughter’s attachment to Smith: ‘He a villager’s son; and we, Swancourts, connections of the Luxellians. What shall I next invite here, I wonder?’ If his daughter were to marry Smith, then even though he was an architect, Elfride would always be known thereafter as ‘the wife of Jack Smith the mason’s son, and not under any circumstances as the wife of a London professional man’. In Swancourt’s experience, it was always the ‘drawback’ and ‘not the compensating factor’ which was talked of in society.
The Revd Swancourt’s reservations were confirmed when he observed that Smith did not care about ‘sauces of any kind’. Said he: ‘I always did doubt a man’s being a gentleman if his palate had no acquired tastes.’ After all, did not the presence of an ‘unedified palate’ indicate ‘the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart’? Why, the Revd might have lavished a bottle of his ‘[18]40 Martinez’ – of which he had only eleven bottles left – on ‘a man who didn’t know it from eighteenpenny’.
As for Elfride’s stepmother, she is obliged to rebuke Elfride for using the word ‘gentlemen’ in what she considers to be the wrong context. ‘We have handed over “gentlemen” to the lower middle class, where the word is still to be heard at tradesmen’s balls and provincial tea parties,’ said she haughtily. It was now ‘Ladies and MEN’, always! Again, in reality, these voices are those of Emma’s father John Gifford and his wife.
Why did Hardy choose to include such details of his personal life in a novel? Partly because this was his modus operandi, but also out of anger. He had asked Emma’s father, in all good faith, for the hand of his daughter, and instead of being welcomed into the Gifford family, John Gifford had chosen to humiliate him. So how could Hardy express his disgust? Through his writings, where not he but his fictitious character, Stephen Smith, becomes the victim of social snobbery. And Hardy was determined to have the novel published, come what may, even if this meant offending Emma, who would inevitably read it, if she had not done so already.
To summarise, the idea that Hardy used A Pair of Blue Eyes as a debating chamber in which to mull over his own private thoughts about women in general, and Emma in particular, and the problems attendant on who falls in love with a person of higher social standing, may at first appear fanciful; but as the novel progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that this is exactly what he is doing.
The first instalment of A Pair of Blue Eyes appeared in Tinsley’s Magazine in September 1872, and in May 1873 the novel was published by Tinsley Brothers in three volumes.
In June 1873 Hardy visited Cambridge where he met his friend Horace Moule, and the two of them visited Kings College Chapel, from the roof of which they could see Ely Cathedral ‘gleaming in the distant sunlight’.6 (Whatever doubts Hardy may have had about the dogma of Christianity, he was still in love with its ritual, its imagery and the splendours of its architecture.) Sadly, this was to be the pair’s last encounter. Hardy visited St Juliot on two occasions during 1873; the second time at Christmas.
On 21 September 1873, in his rooms at Queens College, Cambridge (where he was employed as a Poor Law inspector), Horace Moule took his own life. He had befriended Hardy; encouraged him with gifts of books and intellectually stimulating conversations; set him on the road to socialism, and shielded and defended him when his books were denigrated by other critics. But for years Moule, a taker of opium and a heavy drinker, had battled against severe depression and suicidal tendencies, and at the end of the day, Hardy’s great friend and comrade had been unable to overcome his problems. What was it that had brought the two of them so closely together? Perhaps in Hardy, Moule recognised a kindred spirit: a person, like himself, of great sensitivity, who saw enormous suffering in the world and found it hard to bear.
Moule’s body was brought back to Fordington for burial in consecrated ground. This was possible, because although it was normally considered a crime for a person to commit suicide, the jury had returned a verdict of ‘temporary insanity’. Hardy was nonplussed and wrote, quoting Psalm 74: ‘Not one is there among us that understandeth any more.’
In December 1872, scholar and critic Leslie Stephen, who had been impressed by his reading of Under the Greenwood Tree, asked Hardy to provide a story suitable for serialisation in the Cornhill Magazine, of which he was editor. Stephen, a philosopher and man of letters, was also editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. A year later, Hardy would meet him in person and the two would become lifelong friends.
Accordingly, having completed A Pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy set out to write Far from the Madding Crowd, in which he ventured beyond the world of his own personal experiences and instead used as the basis of the plot a story told to him by his cousin Tryphena Sparks. It tells of a woman who has inherited a farm, which contrary to the tradition of the times she insists on managing herself. However, Hardy does not neglect to include his favourite theme – that of a man of humble means but nevertheless honourable, steadfast and industrious, who finds himself in the seemingly impossible position of having fallen in love with a woman above his station. This, of course, is a reflection of his inferiority complex in respect of Emma.
The novel is set in and around Puddletown (‘Weatherbury’), and it is said that during the writing of it, when Hardy remembered to carry a pocket notebook, ‘his mind was [as] barren as the Sahara [Desert]’. And yet when he did not, and ideas came thick and fast, he was obliged to search for ‘large dead leaves, white chips [of wood] left by the wood cutters or pieces of stone or slate that came to hand’ on which to write.7
Gabriel Oak, Known as ‘Farmer Oak’, Is the lessee of a sheep farm on which he keeps 200 sheep. One day, he encounters an attractive young lady riding in a cart. She approaches a toll gate but refuses to pay the gatekeeper the full fare requested. Oak offers to make up the difference, which is tuppence. When he receives no thanks for his pains, he considers the young lady to be vain.
However, he is determined to make her his wife, and to this end he calls at her house with the gift of a lamb. ‘I am only an every day sort of man,’ he tells her, self-deprecatingly, but he has a ‘nice, snug little farm’, and when they are married, he promises to work ‘twice as hard as I do now’. Music is introduced into the story, when Oak tells Bathsheba Everdene – for that is her name – that if she marries him, she shall have a pianoforte ‘in a year or two’, and he, for his part, will practise on the flute and play to her in the evenings. He will love her, he says, until he dies.
Oak’s offer is refused. Bathsheba says she does not love him, and throws in the fact that she is better educated than he;she advises that he find someone to provide him with the money with which to stock a larger farm. ‘Then I’ll ask you no more,’says Oak. Another disaster befalls Oak, when an overzealous sheepdog chases his flock over a precipice.
In the hope of finding work, Oak journeys to Casterbridge to attend a ‘hiring fair’ – where workers would assemble in the hope of being taken on by an employer – but without success. He then travels onward by waggon to Shottsford, where another hiring fair is being held. En route, he hears the waggoner discussing a woman, evidently a farmer, whom he describes as a ‘very vain feymell [female]’ who can ‘play the peanner [piano]’. Oak deduces, correctly, that this woman is none other than Bathsheba.
Having alighted from the waggon, Oak sees a hayrick which is on fire. This is an opportunity for the author, Hardy, in his description of burning hayricks, to display his deep knowledge of country matters. He states that in such an eventuality: ‘the wind blows the fire inwards, the portion in flames completely disappears like melting sugar, and the outline is lost to the eye.’ By the judicious placement of tarpaulins around the base of the stack to stop the draught, and with the application of water, Oak saves the day. His actions do not go unnoticed, and the lady farmer (who, as it happens, is Miss Bathsheba Everdene), agrees to employ him as her shepherd. A deputy is required to assist Oak – the person chosen being ‘Young Cain Ball’.
‘How did he come by such a name as Cain?’enquires Bathsheba. The answer: because his mother was not ‘a Scripture-read woman’, and believing that it was Abel who killed Cain, Instead of the other way round, a mistake was therefore made at his christening. As always, the Bible is never far from Hardy’s thoughts.
Bathsheba catches her farm bailiff stealing barley; she dismisses him, but instead of seeking a replacement, swears that she will attend to everything herself. At the same time, Fanny Robin, the youngest of her servants, goes missing. In fact, impatient to be married, she has gone to see her ‘young man’, Sergeant Troy of the militia.
Bathsheba buys a Valentine’s Day card, thinking to send it to a child, but instead sends it as a prank to Farmer Boldwood, a bachelor who has a neighbouring farm. The words imprinted on its seal read ‘Marry Me’. Boldwood shows the card to Oak, who tells him that the handwriting on it is Miss Everdene’s.
Fanny Robin’s plans to marry Sergeant Troy encounter a hitch when she mistakenly goes to the wrong church. Meanwhile Boldwood, who has taken the sending of the Valentine card seriously, proposes marriage to Bathsheba. She refuses him on the grounds that she does not love him. Furthermore, she admits to him that the sending of the Valentine card was ‘wanton’ and ‘thoughtless’ on her part. When she asks Oak his opinion on the matter, he gives it to her in no uncertain terms. The act, says he, was ‘unworthy of any thoughtful, and meek, and comely woman’.Leading a man on whom she did not care for was ‘not a praiseworthy action’. (He had previously described her behaviour as ‘coquettish’.) Bathsheba is incensed by Oak’s criticism of her and she orders him to leave the farm. Oak is quickly recalled, however, when his services are required to attend to some sheep which have become bloated and sick after breaking down the fence and feeding off a field of clover.
Boldwood reappears at the shearing supper, held in Bathsheba’s great barn, where there is much music and merriment. When farm labourer Joseph Poorgrass is asked to sing, he retorts, ‘I be in liquor, and the gift is wanting in me’, but he obliges nonetheless.
One night, when Bathsheba is taking a final look around her farm, she encounters Sergeant Troy, and her skirt becomes entangled in his riding spur. ‘I wish it had been the knot of knots, which there’s no untying,’ he says, on catching sight of her beautiful face. Troy tells Bathsheba she is beautiful, something Farmer Boldwood had never done; and this she regards as a fatal omission on the latter’s part. Bathsheba meets Troy again at the haymaking, at which he has come to assist. He gives her a gold watch which had belonged to his father. He then helps her with her bees, and gives her an exhibition of sword play. Here, in describing the various ‘infantry cuts and guards’, Hardy again shows his knowledge and attention to detail.
When Oak warns Bathsheba of the dangers of becoming involved with one such as Troy, she reacts by dismissing him, Once again, from the farm. She confesses to her maid Liddy that she loves Troy ‘to very distraction and agony’. When Boldwood discovers this he is distraught. Despite her feelings for Troy, Bathsheba decides to travel to Bath where he is currently staying and ‘bid him farewell’ – that is, end her relationship with him. Troy, on his return, encounters Boldwood, who encourages him to marry Fanny Robin. However, when Boldwood sees how much Bathsheba appears to love Troy, he changes his mind and exhorts Troy instead to marry Bathsheba. Troy then informs Boldwood that he and Bathsheba are already married – she having changed her mind once more and the ceremony having taken place in Bath.
At the harvest supper and dance, when all the employees are the worse for drink and a storm blows up, Oak, with Bathsheba’s help, Manages to save the precious hayricks once again. Bathsheba confesses to Oak that when she had visited Troy in Bath, he had emotionally blackmailed her by saying that he had seen a woman more beautiful than her, and therefore could not be counted upon unless she ‘at once became his’. Through ‘jealousy and distraction’ she had married him. As her husband, Troy, now demands money from Bathsheba for gambling purposes.
Bathsheba becomes suspicious when they encounter a poor woman en route to the Casterbridge workhouse whom Troy appears to know. It is Fanny Robin. Troy promises to meet her and bring her money in two days time. He confesses to Bathsheba that this is the woman he was intending to marry before he met her. Bathsheba realises that her romance with Troy is at an end. When news comes that Fanny Robin has died, Bathsheba sends a waggon to Casterbridge to collect her coffin.
On the return journey with the coffin, driver Joseph Poorgrass, who ‘felt anything but cheerful’ and wished he had some company, calls at an inn, where Oak finds him so drunk that he himself is obliged to drive the waggon for the remainder of its journey. ‘All that’s the matter with me,’ says Poorgrass, ‘is the affliction called a multiplying eye.’ This reference to double vision, brought on by drink, is Hardy’s rustic humour at its best.
It is now too late for the funeral to take place so it is postponed until the following day. Meanwhile, the coffin is kept at Bathsheba’s house in a sitting room next to the hall.
While awaiting her husband’s return, Bathsheba, who suspects that Fanny Robin has had a baby, allows her curiosity to overcome her; she prises open the coffin lid. Her worst fears are realised when she finds two bodies inside: one of an infant child, and the other of Fanny. Troy returns, sees the situation, kisses the corpse and tells Bathsheba: ‘This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be.’
Troy, miserable after the death of Fanny Robin, chooses to disappear from the scene, and Bathsheba believes him to be dead – he having left his clothes on a beach, prior to going for a swim from which he does not return. In reality he has found employment at a sheep fair in an ‘entertainment’, in which he takes the part of highwayman Dick Turpin.
Boldwood finally extracts from a most reluctant Bathsheba a promise that she will marry him in six years time, provided that Troy has not returned. But Troy does return, making himself known at a party held by Boldwood one Christmas Eve, at which Bathsheba is in attendance. As Troy summons her, and seizes her arm, Boldwood reacts by shooting him dead.
Oak, meanwhile, has decided to emigrate to California. Bathsheba is dismayed at this news. The wheel has turned full circle and now it is she who wants him. This causes Oak to change his mind and move, instead, to a small farm in the locality. Would Bathsheba allow him to love her, win her and marry her, even though, as he puts it, ‘I’ve danced at your skittish heels … for many a long mile, and many a long day’.
‘But you will never know,’ she replies.
‘Why?’ he asks.
‘Because you never ask.’
Finally, after a rollercoaster ride to which both humour and tragedy are essential ingredients, the coquettish Bathsheba and the long-suffering but steadfast Oak resolve their differences and the couple marry to the sound of cannon fire and numerous musical instruments, including drum, tambourine, serpent, tenor viol and double bass. Such a happy ending is also, undoubtedly, what Hardy the author desires for himself and Emma.
In respect of Far from the Madding Crowd (which Leslie Stephen helped him to edit), Hardy had the satisfaction of being asked by a publisher for a manuscript, rather than having to endure the painful process of seeking a publisher out as previously. He is now at his best, as, confidently and without inhibition, he portrays the life and landscape of his beloved Wessex. The novel was serialised between January and December 1874 in the Cornhill Magazine and, on the strength of Hardy having been paid the sum of £400 by its publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., he and Emma could now afford to marry.