Hardy and the Imagery of Place

Abstract

In the text that follows, I make two assumptions about the nature of Thomas Hardy's fiction and poetry in general, both of which were articulated years ago byJohn Holloway in The Victorian Sage and both of which have been echoed many times since. The first is that though one looks in vain for a coherent general philosophy in Hardy's works, it is clear that he does have something like a coherent imaginative vision, a consistent set of ways of viewing and presenting the world. The second assumption is that this larger vision is seldom, if ever, effectively expressed in abstract terms. What Holloway calls Hardy's view of the emerges instead from image, symbol, and the often symbolic or metaphoric narrative structures of the novels.' It pervades the fiction and poetry, because in them it is more than simply issues or subjects that drive Hardy's imagination, it is also what he once termed an idiosyncratic mode of regard, a way of looking at the world with the quality and characteristics of intuitive and imaginative insight, rather than a considered or