A Study of Hardy: Theme of His Work-Darwinism and Its Uses

Introduction

In his novels and poems, Hardy insisted on the crucial importance of early life events in the formation of character—and therefore, destiny. His ghost-written biography, The Life of Thomas Hardy (1928; published under the name of his second wife, Florence Emily Hardy, although generally attributed to Hardy himself), makes frequent connections, even in describing his earliest years, between biographical episodes and themes and events in his work. Buckler (pp. 45-57) mentions novelist and poet, Hardy initially trained as an architect. He left his native Dorset, the 'Wessex' of his books, for London where he lost his faith under the influence of Darwin and Huxley. His famous pessimism developed early and coloured everything to come. In the 1870s he caught the taste of an increasingly urbanized England for accounts of a vanishing world with Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). Yet he was no sentimentalist of rural life (Buckler, pp. 45-57). This paper presents a study of Hardy and the theme of his work-Darwinism and its uses in a concise and comprehensive way.

A Study of Hardy: Theme of His Work-Darwinism and Its Uses

A similar “horror” awaited the Victorian reader who confronted the new discoveries in geology and archaeology. Charles Lyell's revolutionary treatise The Principles of Geology, first published in 1830, had gone through eleven editions by 1872. Lyell's account of the formation of the earth through gradual processes taking place over millennia was deeply unsettling to those who had accepted the biblical story of creation. Lyell's theory initiated a series of scientific challenges, including the nebular hypothesis and culminating in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution that saw the exile of humanity from the center of an ordered universe tended by a benevolent creator (Buckler, pp. 45-57).

Hardy's reading journals and letters show how closely he followed the controversies in geology and other natural sciences, and these preoccupations are fully present in his literary work. In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), the narrator comments on the transparency of the modern veneer covering over the ancient past: “Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome” (Boumelha, pp. 90-99).

Hardy repeatedly describes how the landscape of Wessex bears the marks not only of ancient history, but also of geological time: in Tess, the narrator tells us that the land around Talbothay's dairy consisted of “a level landscape compounded of old landscapes long forgotten, and, no doubt, differing in character very greatly from the landscape they composed now”. Again, this awareness of the interarticulation of the present and the past is available only to the sensitive and astute observer; as the narrator of The Woodlanders (1887) notes, the “countryman who is obliged to judge the time of day from changes in external nature sees a thousand successive tints and traits in the landscape which are never discerned by him who hears the regular chime of a clock” ...