Abstract
In this key passage near the start of Hardy’s seventh novel, The Trumpet-Major John Loveday A Soldier in the War with Buonaparte and Robert his Brother First Mate in the Merchant Service: A Tale (1880), to restore its full title, important features are sounded. Grouped in the 1912 General Preface as one of the ‘Romances and Fantasies’, The Trumpet-Major is the sole example in Hardy of an ‘historical’ novel, appearing in the Edinburgh magazine Good Words, in twelve monthly instalments from January to December 1880, before its three-volume edition by Smith, Elder & Co. in October 1880.2 The presence of Egdon Heath in Hardy’s previous novel, RN, underlining the thematic role of primordial time, is matched here by datings both more recent and more specific, the critical years of 1804–6: the threat to Britain of invasion by Napoleon, and a naval campaign culminating in the Battle of Trafalgar.
The present writer, to whom this party has been described times out of number by members of the Loveday family and other old people now passed away, can never enter the old living-room of Overcombe Mill without seeing the genial scene through the mists of the seventy or eighty years that intervene between then and now. First and brightest to the eye are the dozen candles, scattered about regardless of expense, and kept well snuffed by the miller, who walks round the room at intervals of five minutes, snuffers in hand, and nips each wick with great precision, and with something of an executioner’s grim look upon his face as he closes the snuffers upon the neck of the candle. Next to the candle-light show the red and blue coats and white breeches of the soldiers — nearly twenty of them in all, besides the ponderous Derriman — the head of the latter, and, indeed, the heads of all who are standing up, being in dangerous proximity to the black beams of the ceiling. There is not one among them who would attach any meaning to ‘Vittoria’, or gather from the syllables ‘Waterloo’ the remotest idea of their own glory or death. Next appears the correct and innocent Anne, little thinking what things Time has in store for her at no great distance off.1
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Notes
Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet-Major, edited with Introduction and Notes by Linda M. Shires (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1997), p. 40
R. J. White, Thomas Hardy and History (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974), p. 62
George H. Thomson, ‘The Trumpet-Major Chronicle’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 17 (1962–3), 45–56
For Roger Ebbatson, ed., Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet-Major & Robert his Brother (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1987), p. 16
Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 66
T. R. Wright, Hardy and his Readers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 122–3.
Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1962), p. 172.
Peter Widdowson, Thomas Hardy (Plymouth: Northcote House/British Council, 1996), p. 42.
Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 3.
Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London: Bodley Head, 1971), pp. 162–3.
John Goode, Thomas Hardy and the Offensive Truth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 66.
Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), pp. 42
See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 105–23.
See Eberhard Lämmert, Bauformen des Erzählens (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlag, 1955), p. 171.
See Ken Ireland, The Sequential Dynamics of Narrative: Energies at the Margins of Fiction (Cranbury, NT and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), pp. 90–4.
Defined by Katie Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics (London and New York: Longman, 2011), p. 105
Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), p. 87
Julian Wolfreys, Thomas Hardy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 140.
Norman Page, Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 103.
Millgate, pp. 145–93. J. W. Beach, The Technique of Thomas Hardy (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), pp. 109–33
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© 2014 Ken Ireland
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Ireland, K. (2014). Martial Music: Time-Signatures in The Trumpet-Major. In: Thomas Hardy, Time and Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367723_7
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