Leslie Stephen, Thomas Hardy, and A Pair of Blue Eyes

Abstract

Much has been written about the famous scene in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872–3) in which Knight slips over the edge of a cliff and, while dangling over a deep chasm, reviews several thousand years of world history before being rescued by a rope of lady’s underwear. Carl J. Weber says the scene was adapted by Hardy from an incident that occurred during a picnic he went on in August 1870 with his future first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who lost an earring during the day in a rocky crevice and asked Hardy, despite the heavy rain, to look for it. According to Weber, Hardy sketched two pictures of the scene and afterwards wrote a poem, “Where the Picnic Was,” recalling the day’s events. The fictionalized version in A Pair of Blue Eyes is “the first indication in the novels of Hardy’s ability to sustain interest in a tense situation by the sheer power of vivid description,” Weber adds. Michael Millgate refers to Hardy’s account of the cliffs along the coasts of Britain, of which this scene forms a part, as irrelevant picture-painting typical of a novel which is little more than “a kind of ragbag of information, ideas, descriptive vignettes, personal experiences, fragments of the author’s brief literary past.” J. O. Bailey says the scene is characteristic of a writer who enjoyed injecting into his novels spectacular events involving man and nature.