Abstract
Changes in nineteenth-century transport lessened internal distance times, drawing the country closer together. At the same time, paradoxically, they made Dorset comparatively more remote. London and Southampton were brought nearer to Dorchester while Dorset became more of a backwater. Or, perhaps it should be said, a different kind of backwater. A revolution in communications brought with it shifts in power, both economic and executive. It reduced the importance of regional centres while bringing them within easier reach and generated new centres within the regions — the railway towns like Swindon or Crewe, the tourist resorts such as Torquay or Bournemouth which expanded with the railways. As is apparent from the preceding chapter’s discussion of The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy’s novels register and reflect on these changes in their mappings and their sense of geography.
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Notes
E.P. Thompson points out that ‘So far from extinguishing local traditions, it is possible that the early years of the Industrial Revolution saw a growth in provincial pride and self-consciousness’ (The Making of the English Working Class, revised edition with new preface (London: Penguin, 1980), p.448).
Robin Gilmour, ‘Regional and Provincial in Victorian Literature’, The Literature of Region and Nation, edited by R.P. Draper (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), p.53 gives several examples of how provincial England began to be seen. See also
Philip S. Bagwell, ‘The Decline of Rural Isolation’, The Victorian Countryside, edited by G.E. Mingay, 2 vols (London, Boston & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), I, pp.30–42. Changes in the perception of provincial areas intersect with the other cultural transformations brought about by social change in the period, notably, redefinitions of class and the emergence of an urbanised personality. See
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, The English Novel in History 1840–1895, The Novel in History Series, gen. ed. Gillian Beer (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), which reads the period’s novels as ‘experimental laboratories for defining and exploring a new construction of corporate order’ (p.vii). See also the more Foucauldian study,
Mary Poovey, Making A Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–64 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) which reads the period’s novels as helping to put forward ‘the idea that individuals were alike in being responsible (economic and moral) agents […] as a substitute for the tutelary role that the metaphor of the social body had initially assigned to the state’ (p.22).
Hilary M. Schor, Scheherazade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.24.
Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850, Literature in History Series (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p.121. This is one of very few discussions of Mitford or the Howitts; even here, the Howitts are little more than referred to.
Merryn Williams, Thomas Hardy and Rural England (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972), pp.17–20, 59–62, discusses the Howitts.
P.D. Edwards, Idyllic Realism from Mary Russell Mitford to Hardy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) charts the use Tennyson, Gaskell and others made of the ‘gentle idyllic realism, or realistic idyll’ (p.3) invented by Mitford. The Howitts are not mentioned.
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981) discusses nineteenth-century novels’ rural scenery by contrast with sublime, romantic landscapes; ruralism becomes an aspect of Victorian realism’s support for moderation. See also
Gillian Beer, ‘Charles Kingsley and the Literary Image of the Countryside’, Victorian Studies, 8 (1965), pp.243–54.
Alun Howkins, in ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, edited by Robert Colls and Philip Dodds (Beckenham, North Ryde, New South Wales, and New York: Croom Helm, 1986), pp.63–4, has dated the emergence of this characteristic landscape later, around 1870, as a response to social and economic crisis. Howitt’s depiction can be used for such ends but originates in a more optimistic ambition in which economic progress benefits the countryside by ‘improving’ it. Simultaneously, the countryside provides images of ‘humble sociality’ that will be useful in tempering the excesses of industrial capitalism.
Christiana Payne, ‘Rural Virtues for Urban Consumption: Cottage Scenes in Early Victorian Painting’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 3:1 (Spring 1998), pp.45–68 (pp.47, 58). Helsinger’s work tends to neglect the morally instructive aspects of paintings; Constable’s rustic pictures ‘show us what should have been but never was — certainly not for Constable, nor for the consumers of his work’; they ‘project an idea of local, rural England as the enabling space of both careless boyhood and the bourgeois family’ (Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation, p.63). According to this, Constable’s pictures falsify; they are another instance of how the relations of power are ignored in the most popular Victorian art. Payne’s work suggests by contrast that relations of moral — if not economic — power are addressed in such work. On these issues, see
Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986) and her ‘System, Order, and Abstraction: The Politics of English Landscape Drawing around 1795’,
Landscape and Power, edited by W.J.T. Michell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp.77–109.
Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation, pp.128, 218. This point of view depends on arguments in Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Edwards, Idyllic Realism, places Hardy at the end of a ruralist tradition which he sees as lasting, largely unchanged, from the 1830s to the 1870s.
Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, 1887, chapter 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.8.
See K.D.M. Snell, The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.5–8, where the history of the genre is summarized; see also Literature of Region and Nation, p.2: Regionalism ‘seems to have been a growth of the late eighteenth century — a response to the Industrial Revolution’.
W.J. Keith, Regions of the Imagination: The Development of British Rural Fiction (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp.19–20, refers to Edgeworth but places her second to Scott as the primary source of regional writing; so too does
James Reed in Sir Walter Scott: Landscape and Locality (London: The Athlone Press, 1980), especially pp.2–9. How one defines the regional and the provincial novel influences where one locates its origins; see below.
Gilmour, ‘Regional and Provincial in Victorian Literature’, Literature of Region and Nation, pp.51–60, summarizes received histories of the genre. Glen Cavaliero, The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900–1939 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1977) remains the best study of the later sub-genre.
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Literature in History Series (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp.17, 141–2 is illuminating about intertextual relations in Romantic period fiction while the main thrust of her argument aims to show this writing’s indebtedness to other texts (antiquarian and commercial) and its responsiveness to social and political change. This seems the right balance to strike.
Ferrier’s notes are mostly very brief; I discuss one example below. Lady Morgan’s are longer, more effusive and combine rational clarity with chatty ardour. Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810) is extensively annotated; Mary Brunton’s Discipline (1814) provides notes to chapters 22–8 when the story moves to Scotland. Marilyn Butler discusses annotation of novels in connection with annotated Romantic poems in Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, edited by Marilyn Butler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp.16–17.
Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p.33. On cosmopolitan versus nationalist forms of travel writing, see Seamus Deane, ‘Virtue, Travel, and the Enlightenment’, Nations and Nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland and the Eighteenth-Century Context, edited by Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan (Oxford: Virtue Foundation, 1995), pp.275–95.
Discussion of Edgeworth’s politics has been considerable; see, particularly, Esther Wohlgemut, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 39:4 (Autumn 1999), pp.645–58, both for its argument, showing how Edgeworth ‘reinterpreted both cosmopolitan and national definitions of belonging’ (p.645) and for her assessment of the current literature (pp.645–7, 657). On Edgeworth as colonialist, see
E. Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); on the political aspect of the genre of national tale, see
Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), pp.86–98 and
Ina Ferris, ‘Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51:3 (December 1996), pp.287–303.
On differences between the political and colonial context of Irish and Scottish regional writing, see J.Th. Leerssen, ‘Fiction Poetics and Cultural Stereotype: Local Colour in Scott, Morgan, and Maturin’, Modern Language Review, 86 (1991), pp.273–84. On Scott’s various and subtle uses of annotation, see
Jane Millgate, Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1987).
For a useful discussion of accuracy and fantasy in Scott’s historical novels, see Gillian Beer, The Romance, Critical Idiom Series (London: Methuen, 1970), pp.64–8. For a more hostile account of Scott’s practice (both as novelist and annotator), see
James Kerr, Fiction against History: Scott as Story-Teller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp.21, 128–30.
Susan Ferrier, Marriage, 1818, vol. I, chapter 7 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p.36.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 1847, chapter 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p.3.
The word is usually applied to smaller objects than legs — fruit, especially grapes, or flowers — or to larger objects made smaller by distance or point of view — islands and nebulae are both quoted in the OED. Applied to joints of meat, the word suggests Lockwood’s attempt to prettify and to shrink the objects while appearing to give a simple, helpful description; the clash of register shows the legs’ obstinately disconcerting presence. For a fuller discussion of how a scientific vocabulary bears on travel writing and the beginnings of anthropology, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).
‘[F]aishion tuh’, meaning ‘have the face to’, and ‘war’, meaning ‘worse’, are candidates for glossing. See Wuthering Heights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), Appendix VII for a fuller discussion of Brontë’s dialect. Patricia Ingham, ‘Dialect in the Novels of Hardy and George Eliot’, Literary English Since Shakespeare, edited by George Watson (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp.347–63 perceptively discusses the consequences of both novelists’ use of dialect and forms a helpful introduction to the subject more generally. I discuss Hardy’s use and presentation of dialect in Chapter 6.
Nancy Armstrong, in her insightful article, ‘Emily’s Ghost: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Fiction, Folklore, and Photography’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 25 (Spring 1992), pp.245–67, discusses the novel in similar terms as a response to internal colonization. She reads the narrative as showing that ‘Yorkshire culture belongs to the past’ (p.251) and is gradually being assimilated and homogenized — by the end of the book, ‘Anyone who cannot assume a role within the modern nuclear family has passed or will soon pass away’ (p.260). Armstrong admits, however, that the novel also remains inconclusive: ‘Does [Lockwood’s dream] ask us to contemplate something that someone like Lockwood can never feel or know because his experience is narrower and more homogeneous than that encoded in the British culture he confronts?’ (p.251).
George Eliot, Adam Bede, chapters 41, 48, edited by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp.424, 468. The phrase may be not only proverbial but an allusion to Charles Reade’s novel, It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856). Hardy mocks the phrase when Arabella resolves to remarry Jude: ‘It is — hic — never too late — hic — to mend!’ (Hardy, Jude, part 6, ch.6, p.376).
This relatively little-discussed but moving story, fundamental to an understanding of George Eliot, is the third of the Scenes of Clerical Life. See David Carroll, ‘“Janet’s Repentance” and the Myth of the Organic’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35:3 (December 1988), pp.331–48.
Steve Bamlett, ‘“A Way-Worn Ancestry Returning”: The Function of the Representation of Peasants in the Novel’, Peasants and Countrymen in Literature, edited by Kathleen Parkinson and Martin Priestman (Roehampton Institute, 1982), pp.153–82, argues that Eliot’s realism is governed by the belief that peasant life offered a means of harmonizing country and city, a belief she took from Riehl’s Natural History of German Life.
Henry Auster, Local Habitations: Regionalism in the Early Novels of George Eliot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p.30. Auster is quoting from Phyllis Bentley’s pioneering study, The English Regional Novel (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1941); on p.39n, Auster cites Lord David Cecil cornmenting to similar effect about Eliot’s localities.
Graham Handley, George Eliot’s Midlands: Passion in Exile (London: Allison & Busby, 1991) identifies Eliot’s locations very thoroughly but remarks of Middlemarch, ‘the physical identification of place is subordinate to the moral and spiritual concerns of character’ (p.9).
Michael Squires, The Pastoral Novel: Studies in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D.H. Lawrence (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974), precisely locates Adam Bede and Silas Marner within the pastoral genre. Stability becomes a virtue in itself, increasingly so as Eliot’s career continued, as is indicated by the much-quoted passage from chapter 2 of Daniel Deronda (1876): ‘A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land’ and in the essay, ‘Looking Backward’, published in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879). These sentiments have been linked to Riehl’s Natural History of German Life, but were present also in the English ruralist tradition. See Mrs. Craik, Olive, 3 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1850), p.6: ‘It is sweet to say, “Those are my mountains,” or “This is my fair valley;” and there is a delight almost like that of a child who glories in his noble or beautiful parents, in the grand historical pride which links us to the place where we were born.’
For a discussion of this view and its limitations, see Pearl L. Brown, ‘The Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phyllis’, The Victorian Newsletter, 82 (Fall 1992), pp.22–7.
Henry Fothergill Chorley, Athenaeum, 7 (April 1855), quoted in
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, edited by Jenny Uglow (London and Vermont: Everyman, 1993), p.442.
The phrases quoted are from Mary Barton, chapter 37. Helen M. Jewell, The North–south divide: The origins of northern consciousness in England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994) gives a helpful survey of the historical background to the divide;
D.F. Pocock, ‘North and South in the Book of Genesis’, Studies in Social Anthropology: Essays in Memory of E.E. Evans-Pritchard by his former Oxford Colleagues, edited J.H.M. Beattie and R.G. Lienhardt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp.273–84 suggests symbolic resonances (the south is luxurious, the north austere) which may have crossed into English culture.
John Lucas, The Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Provincial Novel (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1977), p.18.
Joseph Kestner, Protest and Reform: The British Social Narrative by Women, 1827–67 (London: Methuen, 1985), quoted North and South, pp.465–6.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, 1866, ch.10, edited by Angus Easson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p.117.
Similarly, at the close of Mary Barton, we learn that it is ‘Dear Job Legh’ who plans to visit, ‘to try and pick up a few specimens of Canadian insects’ (ch.38). Tess Cosslett, The ‘Scientific Movement’ and Victorian Literature (Brighton and New York: Harvester and Barnes & Noble, 1982) helpfully summarizes different versions of scientific inquiry available in the period.
Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) raises the same issues as emerge here from provincial novels’ striving for scientific accuracy. He argues that the Welsh language should be replaced by English (in order to expedite the ‘fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous, English-speaking whole’) and, secondly, that studying Celtic literature reveals an underlying kinship between Celt and Saxon. ‘And this new, reconciling sense has, I say, its roots in science.’ The Celts can be ‘known as they are’ once they have been brought into the fold and their language eradicated
(The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol.2, edited by R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michagan Press, 1962), pp.296–302).
This quality draws Gaskell close to Charlotte Brontë. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp.37–57, identifies a comparable dividedness in Brontë who defies paternalist order while also submitting to it. Tim Dolin reads Shirley (1849) as an exemplary provincial novel because it resists the centre, being ‘never silently complicit in internal colonization’; he concludes again, however, that though ‘a confrontational book’ it is also ‘an appeasing one’ (‘Fictional Territory and a Woman’s Place: Regional and Sexual Difference in Shirley’, ELH, 62 (1995), pp.197–215 (pp.211–12).) On this subject, see also the excellent article by
Pam Morris, ‘Heroes and Hero-Worship in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 54:3 (December 1999), pp.285–307.
Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, 1873, ch.13. Knight calls the view from the window of his chambers into the gaslit street outside, his ‘Humanity Show’ and Hardy links it to the acquarium, suggesting that science has helped create in him an unfeeling detachment from other people.
Hardy mentions in passing that Alec’s father comes from ‘the North’ and ‘decided to settle as a county man in the South of England’, partly to lose his identity as ‘the smart tradesman of the past’. This detail suggests that he is thinking in terms of north and south and, even, writing North and South in reverse. On country houses in the period, see Michael Hall, The English Country House: From the Archives of Country Life 1897–1939 (London, Auckland, Melbourne, Singapore and Toronto: Mitchell Beazley, 1994), esp. pp.7–12, and
Clive Aslet, The Last Country Houses (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982).
The conventional associations of the forest can be illustrated from Mary E. Braddon, Vixen (1879), set in the New Forest, especially ch.17, ‘Where the Red King was Slain’. The forest offers beauty, seclusion and a panorama showing ‘a vast champaign, stretching far away to the white walls, tiled roofs, and ancient abbey-church of Romsey; here a glimpse of winding water, there a humble village […] nestling among the trees’
(Mary E. Braddon, Vixen (Stroud and New Hampshire: Alan Sutton, 1993), p.158). The Red King is William Rufus, son of William the Conqueror. His death was often read as a Saxon attack on Norman tyranny and lends the New Forest a patriotic meaning, being the place where a (foreign) tyrant was executed. Hardy’s poems, ‘Last Look round St. Martin’s Fair’ and ‘Throwing a Tree: New Forest’, Poems nos. 730, 837, confirm his wariness of the ‘Great Forest’.
Thomas Hardy, ‘Lady Mottisfont’, A Group of Noble Dames, 1891 (London and New York: Macmillan and St Martin’s, 1968), p.132. The sentence runs ‘[Her husband] repaired and improved the old highway running from Wintonchester south-westerly through the New Forest — and in the heart of this [….]’. He seems the refuge, by contrast with the forest; secondly, his road improvements open up the forest and in the same way he releases one of its prisoners, his wife.
It ‘may have been originally conceived as a story in A Group of Noble Dames’ (Martin Ray, Thomas Hardy: A Textual Study of the Short Stories (Aldershot and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1997), p.313.
See Life, p.126. Bernard Jones, ‘William Barnes, the Philological Society up to 1873 and the New English Dictionary’, Speech Past and Present: Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Ihalainen, edited by Juhani Klemola, Merja Kytö and Matti Rissanen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), pp.80–100, suggests Barnes was more cosmopolitan, being a comparative philologist of great range who was ‘demeaned to the level of a local parson glossarist’ by the academic establishment (p.98). See also,
Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p.44, for a similar view of Barnes.
See John Prest, Liberty and Locality: Parliament, Permissive Legislation, and Ratepayers’ Democracies in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp.44–7, 208–20. See also
R.J. Lambert, ‘Central and Local Relations in Mid-Victorian England: the Local Government Act Office, 1858–71’, Victorian Studies, 6 (1962), pp.121–50. See
Geoffrey Best, in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, rep. 1979): ‘from the forties until the seventies, the urban local authorities of Britain were, vis-à-vis Whitehall, more independently active than ever before […] or since’ (p.55) and
W.L. Burn in The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (London: Unwin University Books, 1964): ‘[the mid-sixties saw] a lessening of the reaction against “centralization”, a greater disposition to accept authoritative and even authoritarian action’ (p.82).
John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p.140. Thinkers as widely different in their opinions as
John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton were both arguing against a powerful central government in the 1860s — Mill in his essay ‘Centralisation’, Edinburgh Review, 105 (April 1862), pp.327–58, Lord Acton in his reviews in the Home and Foreign Review
(reprinted in Lord Acton, Essays on Church and State, edited by Douglas Woodruff (London: Hollis and Carter, 1952), pp.398ff). Mill’s position is similar to that put forward in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book 5, ch.11; in 1862, he sees it beginning to be adopted even by Frenchmen.
J.B. Bullen, ‘The Gods in Wessex Exile: Thomas Hardy and Mythology’, The Sun is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century, edited by J.B. Bullen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp.181–98 (p.197).
Jeff Nunokava, ‘Tess, tourism and the spectacle of the woman’, Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, history, and the politics of gender, edited by Linda M. Shires (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp.70–86, notices Hardy’s closeness to tourist language when describing both Wintonchester and Sandbourne, citing a contemporary Baedeker in support. He reads these similarities as making the novel ‘a generic handbook for the tourist’ (p.78), without an ironic or parodic angle on this rhetoric and the vantage-point it creates.
Jean Jacques Leclercle makes the same point about the word ‘hanging’ here in ‘The Violence of Style in “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”’, Alternative Hardy, edited by Lance St John Butler (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), p.1.
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Pite, R. (2002). Ruralism and Provincialism in the Victorian Novel: North and South. In: Hardy’s Geography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512665_3
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