Influences

Abstract

Some scholarly writers have depended considerably for their imaginative sustenance on literature; none, probably, more than T. S. Eliot. Thomas Hardy, who admitted that bookishness was the most consistent feature of his life, created the main phases of his plot, the principal character, and some episodes, in The Mayor of Caslerbridge, largely as a result of conceiving a Wessex story in terms of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the love—jealousy— hatred relationship of Saul and David, an important situation in King Lear, and much more in Hugo’s Les Misérables. The full impact of Tess of the d’Urbervilles cannot be felt until it is seen as a comment on Richardson’s Clarissa. Hardy’s incidental allusiveness and love of quotation is marked, but it is usually less concentrated, as one would expect in novels, than it often is in Eliot’s poetry.