Abstract
In this pivotal scene, the villain of the piece consults, all too hastily, a copy of the Victorian rail-users’ bible. The misreading of the Bradshaw’s Guide by Miss Aldclyffe’s steward Manston is to have fateful consequences, anticipating similar instances of accident, chance and coincidence in all of Hardy’s later fiction. A ‘shunt’, a diagonal line scarcely five millimetres long, defined as a ‘thin line in the middle of trains … intended to show the continuous route of the traveller’,2 goes unobserved in a microsecond lapse of concentration by Manston. As a result, he meets the 11.45 p.m. rather than the 9 p.m. train, by which his wife actually arrives; in that interval, she decides to lodge at the Three Tranters and apparently perishes when that inn and adjoining cottages burn down.
Monday came, the day named for Mrs. Manston’s journey from London to her husband’s house; a day of singular and great events, influencing the present and future of nearly all the personages whose actions in a complex drama form the subject of this record.
The proceedings of the steward [Aeneas Manston] demand the first notice. Whilst taking his breakfast on this particular morning, the clock pointing to eight, the horse and gig that was to take him to Chettlewood waiting ready at the door, Manston hurriedly cast his eyes down the column of Bradshaw which showed the details and duration of the selected train’s journey.
The inspection was carelessly made, the leaf being kept open by the aid of one hand, whilst the other still held his cup of coffee; much more carelessly than would have been the case had the expected newcomer been Cytherea Graye, instead of his lawful wife.
He did not perceive, branching from the column down which his finger ran, a small twist, called a shunting-line, inserted at a particular place, to imply that at that point the train was divided into two. By this oversight he understood that the arrival of his wife at Carriford-Road Station would not be till late in the evening: by the second half of the train, containing the third-class passengers, and passing two hours and three-quarters later than the previous one, by which the lady, as a second-class passenger, would really be brought.1
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Notes
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies, edited with Introduction and Notes by Patricia Ingham, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 161
George Bradshaw, Bradshaw’s Monthly General Railway and Steam Navigation Guide for Great Britain and Ireland (Manchester and London: Bradshaw, 1864), p. 21.
See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 315
See Pamela Dalziel, ‘Exploiting The Poor Man: The Genesis of Hardy’s Desperate Remedies’, JEGP 94.2 (1995), 220–32.
A terminal point, prescribed time-limit or deadline which heightens narrative tension. See D. L. Higdon, Time and English Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 74–105.
See also Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1986)
Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Trish Ferguson, ‘Hardy’s Wessex and the Birth of Industrial Subjectivity’, in Ferguson, ed., Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 57–76.
See J. B. Bullen, The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 193–5
Annie Escuret, ‘Thomas Hardy and J. M. W. Turner’, in Lance St John Butler, ed., Alternative Hardy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 205–25.
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), p. 959.
Wilkie Collins, No Name, edited with Introduction by Virginia Blain, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 1 [1862].
Anon. rev. of DR, in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 1–2 [1871].
Sir George Douglas, in F. B. Pinion, Thomas Hardy, Art and Thought (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 1.
Albert Guerard, Thomas Hardy: The Novels and Stories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 12.
K. Z. Moore, ‘The Poet Within the Architect’s Ring: Desperate Remedies, Hardy’s Hybrid Detective-Gothic Narrative’, Studies in the Novel 14.1 (1982), 31–42.
Joseph Warren Beach, The Technique of Thomas Hardy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), p. 18.
Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 219.
Mary Rimmer, ed., Desperate Remedies (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. xx.
Julian Wolfreys, Dickens to Hardy 1837–1884: The Novel, the Past and Cultural Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 244.
S. Onega and J. A. G. Landa, eds., Narratology: An Introduction (London and New York: Longman, 1996), pp. 129–42.
Günther Müller, ‘Goethes Morphologie in ihrer Bedeutung für die Dichtungskunde’, Morphologische Poetik: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), pp. 287–98 [1951].
See Ken Ireland, The Sequential Dynamics of Narrative: Energies at the Margins of Fiction (Cranbury, NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), pp. 80–7.
See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane. E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 52.
Patricia Ingham, ed., Desperate Remedies, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xxiv
Raymond Chapman, ‘The Reader as Listener: Dialect and Relationships in The Mayor of Casterhridge’, in Leo Hickey, ed., The Pragmatics of Style (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 159–78
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© 2014 Ken Ireland
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Ireland, K. (2014). Trainspotting in Wessex: Temporal Transparency in Desperate Remedies. In: Thomas Hardy, Time and Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367723_2
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