“‘Kiss me too, Frank … You will Frank kiss me too!’” Sensationalism, Surveillance, and Gazing at the Body in Far from the Madding Crowd

Abstract

Like The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd is often assigned a significant place within Hardy’s novelistic canon. His first major literary success, serialized in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine under the editorship of prominent Victorian man-of-letters Leslie Stephen, it provided the foundation upon which much of his later popularity would rest. This is true not least because this novel contains his earliest use of the word Wessex, and although that fictional landscape “did not exist in anything like the form we are now accustomed to, until the writing of his last three novels,”¹ it would come to be seen as one of the defining elements of his work. That Hardy’s great strength as a novelist lay in his representation of rural life, based on his own intimate knowledge of the countryside of southwest England, seems fully confirmed by Far from the Madding Crowd, and the result is that, as Shires asserts, for “more than a hundred and twenty-five years, most commentary on this novel celebrated it as an organic pastoral through the transparent conventions of realism.”² Yet not all of Hardy’s original readers were so sure about these generic identifiers. The anonymous critic for the Westminster Review of January 1875, for one, had no doubts at all about the novel’s proper place:

the fault of Far from the Madding Crowd is undoubtedly its sensationalism. We are not so well acquainted with Mr. Hardy’s previous writings as to entitle us to speak with perfect confidence, but as far as we can remember they were distinguished for their pastoral tone and idyllic simplicity rather than for violent sensationalism … But in Far from the Madding Crowd sensationalism is all in all. If we analyse the story we shall find that it is nothing else but sensationalism, which, in the hands of a less skilful writer than Mr. Hardy, would simply sink the story to the level of one of Miss Braddon’s earlier performances. Take the career of Gabriel Oak, who is the least sensational of the chief characters. He loses the whole of his property in a sensation scene of two or three hundred sheep being driven by a dog over a precipice. He finds his mistress in a sensation scene of blazing ricks. He regains her estimation in another sensation scene of thunder and lightning in the same rick-yard. So the story progresses in a succession of sensation scenes.³