By Sword or by Crook: Cross-Plotting in Far from the Madding Crowd

Abstract

It is in his fourth, and first major novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), that Hardy introduces to his novels a key term.² By its mode of appearance, it also typifies the way in which technical devices accentuate textual significance.³ Thus, the transition above is between the final phase of a chapter, where Farmer Boldwood projects his marriage six years hence to Bathsheba Everdene, and the initial phase of a new chapter, where his bitter rival, Sergeant Troy, presumed drowned, unexpectedly reappears. This use of Hakenstil, whereby an episode is telegraphed at chapter-end, and retrospectively confirmed at chapter-start,⁴ serves here to direct the reader’s attention to Hardy’s adoption, in the first line of ch. 50, of ‘Wessex’. As he states in his Preface of 1895–1902, the concept is intended to give ‘a territorial definition’ and to ‘lend unity’ to a series of novels, situated in a ‘partly real, partly dream-country’ (p. 3).

Meanwhile the early and the late summer brought round the week in which Greenhill Fair was held. This fair, being but seven miles off, was largely attended by the folk of Weatherbury.

CHAPTER L THE SHEEP FAIR: TROY TOUCHES HIS WIFE’S HAND

Greenhill was the Nijnii Novgorod of South Wessex; and the busiest, merriest, noisiest day of the whole statute number was the day of the sheep-fair. This yearly gathering was upon the summit of a hill which retained in good preservation the remains of an ancient earthwork ...¹