Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time, and: Thomas Hardy's 'Facts' Notebook (review)

Social and political upheavals and the impact of scientific ideas on human self-perception combined to make the nineteenth century a uniquely self-conscious and deeply historical time. Andrew Radford's Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time and William Greenslade's edition of the 'Facts' Notebook provide vital accounts of the ways in which Hardy delved into the past and into past ways of thinking, from folk customs that had survived centuries to recent, newsworthy local events.

Reading Radford is like arriving at an archaeological dig once the spadework has been done and the finds carefully identified. As he points out, many of the sciences that really took off in the century—geology, archaeology, and anthropology—were intrinsically historical. And Hardy's own professional and imaginative interest in architecture combined technological precision with interest in the past.

Radford establishes Hardy's familiarity both with the latest scientific tracts and amateur antiquarian ideas in the periodical press, and his interest in E. B. Tylor's idea of "survivals" as primitive or ancient forms that resist change. Hardy's fiction and poetry are permeated by new geological, archaeological, and anthropological knowledge. Henry Knight, finding himself hanging from a cliff in the middle of A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872–73), is projected back millennia. As Radford notes, the striking parallels between this famous cliff scene and the "Retrospect" at the end of Gideon Algernon Mantell's The Wonders of Geology (1838), revealed by Patricia Ingham in 1980, testify to the meticulous nature of Hardy's research. Knight imagines "fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts," and, further back, "huge elephantine forms," "the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size" ( A Pair of Blue Eyes [Penguin, 1998] 272); Mantell's voyager dreams of human beings "clad in the skins of animals, and armed with clubs and spears," and "groups of elephants, mastodons, and other herbivorous animals of colossal magnitude" (vol. 1 "Retrospect").

Radford's research opens new ways of understanding the novels. His careful readings of scenes and situations in Hardy's work demonstrate, usually conclusively, ways in which it registers Hardy's knowledge of contemporary anthropology. Radford shows that Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) is punctuated with detail from J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), which Hardy was reading in 1891, and argues that the time voyages in the 1897 Well-Beloved uncover primitive layers beneath late-Victorian culture. Handfesting, for example, the practice of ratifying a betrothal through sexual relations (216), as the indefatigable John Brand recorded in his Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777), still existed in nineteenth-century Portland,.

Responsive to the dislocations of modernity, Hardy felt a responsibility to record fading customs and traditions. But he was also a rationalist, keenly engaged with scientific thought, and his approach to tradition is one of detachment rather than provincial involvement. Radford suggests that Hardy's reference to "a break of continuity" in local history in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) is more ambivalent than it is often taken to be: popular village life was not necessarily ennobling and enabling. Hardy's novels generally demonstrate the misguided nature of such primitive practices as the skimmity-ride.

Radford's argument occasionally sinks in a frustrating welter of detail. For example, in his interpretation of Far From the Madding Crowd we move from considering the Shearing Barn, "which on ground plan resembled a church with transepts" (qtd. in Radford 68) to John Ruskin's irritation with geologists for shaking religious faith, to Leslie Stephen's Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873) and Agnostic's Apology (1876). Just as the reader may feel the detail excessive, Radford observes that Stephen (then overseeing the serialization of the novel in the Cornhill ) found Bathsheba's shearing feast in the barn "excellent" and goes on...