Abstract
This part of W. Minto’s review for the Examiner (5 December 1874) of Hardy’s fourth novel reflects the general tenor of Far From the Madding Crowd’s critical reception. With its anonymous appearance in Cornhill Magazine (January to December 1874), during which several reviewers attributed it to George Eliot, and its subsequent publication in two volumes in November 1874 by Smith, Elder and Company, Hardy was established as an important novelist — and a popular one. Far From the Madding Crowd was published seven times in 1874 alone: twice in London and five times in America.1
It is pleasing to meet with work that is so obviously the outcome of high aims: and one should not be grudging in expressing one’s conviction of the artist’s thorough success. ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ is not Mr. Hardy’s first novel, but it is so much more mature and powerful in every way than his earlier efforts that in them he seems rather to have been exercising himself with a view to obtaining a command of his materials.
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Notes and References
Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd ed. Carl J. Weber (New York, 1937) p. xvii. I am also indebted to the valuable notes Mr Weber has included in this edition.
Robert C. Schweik, ‘The Early Development of Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd’,TSLL, ix (1967) 415–28.
Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, Eclectic Magazine 82–84 (March 1874-February 1875).
Elizabeth Drew, The Novel: A Modern Guide for Fifteen English Masterpieces (New York, 1963) p. 43.
Carl Weber, Hardy of Wessex (New York, 1940) pp. 62–3.
Howard Babb, ‘Setting and Theme in Far From the Madding Crowd’, ELH, xxx (June 1963) 148.
For a discussion of the eroticism here, see Richard C. Carpenter, ‘The Mirror and the Sword: Imagery in Far From the Madding Crowd’, NCF xvini (March 1964) 341.
William Dean Howells, Heroines of Fiction (New York, 1901) p. 194.
Albert J. Guerard, Thomas Hardy: The Novels and Stories (Cambridge, 1949) p. 137.
For a Freudian interpretation see Carpenter, ‘The Mirror and the Sword’, 331–45.
J. R. Moore contends that Troy’s entire personality is an opprobrious allusion, asserting that Troy is obviously taken from Sergeant Bothwell, a dragoon in the Life Guards in Scott’s Old Mortality; ‘but almost every quality of Bothwell was copied in Troy only to be degraded’. See John Robert Moore, Two Notes on Thomas Hardy’, NCF, v (September 1950) 162–3.
Richard C. Carpenter, ‘Hardy’s “Gargoyles”’, MFS vi (autumn 1960) 227.
See,. for example, Herbert B. Grimsditch’s discussion in Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London, 1925) p. 62.
Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel (New York, 1966) p. 51.
See Henry C. Duffin, Thomas Hardy: A Study of the Wessex Novels (Manchester, 1937) p. 14; Drew, op. cit., p. 148.
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© 1983 Marlene Springer
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Springer, M. (1983). The Dimensions of Success and Failure. In: Hardy’s Use of Allusion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06389-5_3
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