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Undermining the ‘Pastoral Idyll’: The Trumpet-Major and Under the Greenwood Tree

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Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy

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Abstract

This chapter will expand on the examples in Chap. 2 by examining how a sub-textual narrative of food references in The Trumpet-Major and Under the Greenwood Tree captures the instability of the pre-industrial era. Set within the context of the Napoleonic Wars, Hardy undermines the nostalgia of a lost idyll. As such, The Trumpet-Major is concerned with the role of ‘idealism,’ which is both promoted and disrupted through the availability and production of food items that serve as a micro-analogy for wider ideological concepts: national identity and patriotism. Under the Greenwood Tree has its context in the ‘Poaching Wars’ of the 1830s and 1840s, inviting the reader to consider the social unrest that was bound up in food taxes, game laws and educational reform.

‘The defence and salvation of the body by daily

bread is still a study, a religion, and a desire.’

(Far From the Madding Crowd, 2003, p. 126)

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  1. St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, UK

    Kim Salmons

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  1. Kim Salmons
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Correspondence to Kim Salmons .

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Salmons, K. (2017). Undermining the ‘Pastoral Idyll’: The Trumpet-Major and Under the Greenwood Tree . In: Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63471-5_3

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