Hardy, Victorian culture and provinciality

Abstract

From his dates it seems abundantly clear that Hardy was a Victorian writer: born in 1840, three years after Victoria ascended the throne, he wrote all his novels during her reign, as well as a substantial body of poetry, and his second collection of poetry came out in 1901, the year of Victoria’s death. That he also turned 61 in 1901 makes it hard to see him as anything but a Victorian writer, or at least a Victorian novelist, despite the poetic achievement of his last three decades. For much of the twentieth century, though, critics rarely approached him primarily as a Victorian, preferring to associate him with a rustic, isolated world untouched by history, or with a past far enough back to be almost atemporal, as in Lord David Cecil’s assertion that Hardy ‘was stirred primarily by the life he had known as a child’. For Cecil, that life, ‘little touched by the changes of the great world … revolved in the same slow rhythm as for hundreds of years past’.1 Though Cecil goes on to discuss the ‘age of transition’ Hardy inhabited, the rustic writer of ‘village tragedy’, whose timeless characters battle an equally timeless ‘omnipotent and indifferent fate’, is the dominant presence in his influential Hardy the Novelist (1943).2