Abstract
Chapter 1 is introductory. It opens with the questions which this study will try to answer: what did Thomas Hardy think about history and how does this enter into his fiction? It surveys three critical approaches which have offered answers: ‘revolutionary’, ‘gender’ and ‘postcolonial criticism’. Though valuable in its own way, each fails to answer the opening questions because it is concerned with ‘Hardy in history’, whereas this study is concerned with ‘Hardy and history’, where ‘history’ means ‘historical writing’. The chapter suggests that the kind of historical writing which interested young Thomas Hardy was that known in the nineteenth century as ‘philosophical’, aimed at predicting the future of humanity. Hardy’s pseudo-biography, Life and Work, strongly indicates that he was introduced to it by his friend and mentor Horace Moule, in the form of ‘the Liberal Anglican idea of history’. This idea, the study will show, was taken up by Hardy in the late 1850s, and was modified by the debate over love and marriage in the 1860s, to survive as a substratum of his thinking about history until the end of his life. Accordingly, we find it inscribed in his fiction and discussed in Life and Work as his idea of ‘meliorism’.
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Notes
- 1.
P. Ingham, Thomas Hardy (Oxford, 2003), p. 213.
- 2.
R. J. White, Hardy and History (London, 1974).
- 3.
White had in mind here D. Brown, Thomas Hardy (London, 1954, 1961), pp. 36, 101ff, and A. Kettle, Introduction to the English Novel II: Henry James to the Present Day (London, 1953), p. 49.
- 4.
White, Hardy and History, p. 5.
- 5.
White, Hardy and History, pp. 15, 7.
- 6.
P. Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London, 1989).
- 7.
For a critical account of its development, see F. Mulhern, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’ (London, 1979).
- 8.
T. Eagleton, ‘Introduction’ to Jude the Obscure, New Wessex edn (London, 1896), pp. 9–20.
- 9.
T. Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. M. Millgate (London, 1984, repr. with corrections 1989), esp. editor’s introduction, pp. x–xviii. Cp. F. E. Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891 (London, 1928) and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928 (London, 1930).
- 10.
Widdowson, Hardy in History, pp. 149, 150.
- 11.
Widdowson, Hardy in History, p. 198.
- 12.
M. Foucault, The Order of Things: Archeology of the Human Sciences (London, 2001). For gender theory, see J. W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (London, revd edn, 1999).
- 13.
P. Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexuality and Narrative Form (Brighton, 1982), p. 7.
- 14.
Boumelha, Hardy and Women, pp. 16ff.
- 15.
For Boumelha’s discussion of the ‘new woman’ fiction, see Hardy and Women, ch. 4, pp. 63–97.
- 16.
Boumelha, Hardy and Women, p. 173.
- 17.
T. Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. with an introduction and notes by P. Ingham (Oxford, 1985), esp. p. xxi.
- 18.
P. Ingham, Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading (Hemel Hempstead, 1989), pp. 1–8, 61–95.
- 19.
For ‘post-Saussurean criticism’, see C. Belsey, Critical Practice (London, 1980), esp. ch. 1, pp. 1–36.
- 20.
Ingham, Hardy: Feminist Reading, p. 95.
- 21.
J. Goode, Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth (London, 1988), pp. 138–166.
- 22.
Goode, Offensive Truth, p. 14.
- 23.
Goode, Offensive Truth, p. 13.
- 24.
Goode, Offensive Truth, p. 14.
- 25.
J. L. Bownas, Thomas Hardy and Empire: The Representation of Imperial Themes in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Farnham, 2012).
- 26.
E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London 1994).
- 27.
Bownas, Hardy and Empire, p. 1.
- 28.
Bownas, Hardy and Empire, p. 2.
- 29.
Bownas, Hardy and Empire, p. 4.
- 30.
Bownas, Hardy and Empire, p. 5.
- 31.
Bownas, Hardy and Empire, p. 8.
- 32.
Bownas, Hardy and Empire, p. 8.
- 33.
The debate over ‘paradigms’ of historical inquiry is complex. For a defence of the ‘Rankean’ paradigm, adopted in western academies in the early decades of the twentieth century, see G. Elton, The Practice of History (London, 1967). For a balanced account of collaboration with theory in the later decades, see G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (London, 1975, revd edn 1985). For postmodern scepticism about historians’ claims to ‘realism’, see H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London, 1973). A. Marwick, The Nature of History (3rd edn, London, 1989), attempts a robust defence of history as a ‘science’, as does his debate with White, ‘Two approaches to historical study: the metaphysical (including “postmodernism”) and the historical’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30, 1, 1995; see Vol. 30, 2 for White’s ‘Response’. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978), rebuts modernist and postmodernist theories, and works from the tradition of historical materialism to offer an important contribution to a distinctive paradigm which he calls ‘social’ history. I am sympathetic to his claims for the value of ‘literature’ as a source of knowledge in that field, but my approach in this study, as I indicate further on here, is based on the pragmatic philosophy of language, for which see J. Searle, Mind, Language and Society: Doing Philosophy in the Real World (London, 1999).
- 34.
See e.g., B. Kerr, Bound to the Soil: A Social History of Dorset, 1750–1918 (London, 1968); P. Horn, The Rural World, 1780–1850: Social Change in the English Countryside, passim; E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present, 50, 1, 1971, pp. 76–136; reprinted in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 185–258.
- 35.
K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 382ff. For the pioneering discussion of demographic history as an indispensable correlative to literary evidence in historical sociology, see P. Laslett, ‘The wrong way through the telescope: a note on literary evidence in sociology and in historical sociology’, British Journal of Sociology, 17, 3, 1976, pp. 319–342. For a correction to Snell’s comment on female labour on threshing machines, see F. Reid, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, P. Mallet (ed.), Thomas Hardy in Context (Cambridge, 2013), p. 180.
- 36.
R. Morgan (ed.), The Ashgate Companion to Thomas Hardy (Farnham, 2010), esp. pp. 1–22.
- 37.
L. A. Bjork, Psychological Vision and Social Criticism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (Stockholm, Sweden, 1987), pp. 59–78.
- 38.
A. Radford, Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 1–29. See also M. Zeitler, Representations of Culture: Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and Victorian Anthropology (Oxford, 2007), pp. 1–32.
- 39.
P. Mallett, ‘Hardy and Philosophy’, in K. Wilson (ed.), A Companion to Thomas Hardy (London, 2009), pp. 21–35.
- 40.
S. Keen, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (Columbus, Ohio, 2014).
- 41.
Hardy, Life and Work, p. 37. See also Hardy, Early Years, p. 43.
- 42.
H. C. Webster, The Art and Thought of Thomas Hardy: A Darkling Plain (London, 1948), p. 37; M. Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford, 2004), p. 66; R. Pite, Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life (London, 2006), p. 84.
- 43.
Bjork, Psychological Vision, pp. 79–106.
- 44.
Hardy, Life and Work p. 406.
- 45.
S. Gatrell, Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Mankind (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1993), is a notable exception which relates Hardy’s fiction to the ‘New Imperialism’.
- 46.
Hardy applied this term to his own way of seeing nature as art. See Life and Work, p. 235.
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Reid, F. (2017). Introduction: Approaches to Hardy and History. In: Thomas Hardy and History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54175-4_1
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