Context Flashcards
Author
Thomas Hardy
When was is the novel set?
1870s
Setting (place)
Wessex, the Southwest of England
When was the novel published
1891
Thomas Hardy and rural life
born in Dorset , he grew up examining rural life which figures prominently in his novel. he used to walk to school and around in general so many of his novels are based around walking and the power of nature.
Thomas Hardy education
· His parents were able to earn enough to send him to a private school allowing him to gain the position of an apprentice with an architect who lived in Dorchester
hardy’s wife’s education and class
· Hardy’s 1st wife, Emma’s parents were lawyers and looked down upon his lower-class upbringing - similar to Alecs perants regarding Tess
inspiration to the novel for Hardy
· Hardy and his wife caught their servant Jane Phillips attempting to bring a man into the house. They went to see her parents when she ran away soon after. She was unwed, and baptized her new-born child who died at the age of 2 days - inspiration
Capital punishment in Victorian England
- In the 1870s, when the novel is set, there were five capital crimes: murder, treason, arson in a royal dockyard, espionage and piracy with violence.
- At the end of the novel, Tess is convicted of the murder of Alec D’Urberville and hanged at Wintoncester (Winchester) prison.
- Public hanging was abolished in Britain in 1868.
- When he was eighteen, Thomas Hardy witnessed the public hanging of Elizabeth Martha Brown, a working class woman who had murdered her violent husband, in 1856. She wore a silk black dress, and a cloth was placed over her mouth. Hardy states that he remembers “what fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain”. Tess is also hung like Martha.
The mechanisation of agriculture
- For millennia, humans used hand tools to farm, such as the flail or the scythe.
- In Britain, the mechanisation of farming started in the 1790s, with the invention of the threshing machine.
- By the late 1800s, threshing machines were powered by steam, like the on in chapter 47 of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
- Hardy often describes the machines using diabolical imagery, suggesting that the use of machinery is having a negative impact on the nature of agricultural work.
Victorian morality
- Queen Victoria ruled Britain and the Empire from 1837 to 1901, offering a ‘perfect’ role model for women and motherhood.
- The ‘sexual norm’ for Victorian woman was to be a virgin until marriage. Angel is appalled by Tess’s revelation, despite not being chaste himself.
- Victorian society was underpinned by Christian values. The established Church was widely followed; as the novel shows, there were also newer evangelic churches.
- Hardy’s subtitle for the novel, ‘A Pure Woman’, was a challenge to the conventional (and, as he saw it, hypocritical) conceptions of Victorian women.
The influence of Darwinism
- Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. It challenged widely accepted ideas about creation and man’s place in the universe.
- Thomas Hardy, a keen amateur scientist, read Darwin’s work, and his novel reflect the fun de siècle trend towards pessimism and religious scepticism.
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles could be said to illustrate a ruthless, post-Darwinian society, in which characters who cannot adapt to social change do not survive.
- Hardy’s descriptions of hardship at Flintcomb-Ash, where labourers choose to work only when better jobs are unavailable, depict a life of struggle.
Emigration to brazil 1870-1900
- In the latter part of the 19th century, Britain underwent a demographic crisis as the population increased rapidly.
- Brazil, which had been an independent nation since 1825, abolished slavery in 1850. This created an economic crisis and a demand for agricultural workers.
- Immigration gradually intensified: about 71,000 Europeans emigrated to Brazil each year between 1877 and 1903.
- Angel Clare goes to Brazil to seek his fortune as part of this migration pattern after his separation from Tess. His venture fails.
Gender Issues in Victorian England
- The Victorians held the notion that moral purity was tied to physical virginity or sex within wedlock, as opposed to ones character or state of mind. This definition did not exempt victims of sexual violence and a woman wad considered “fallen” if she engaged in activities outside of marriage, no matter the circumstances.
- Responsibility for a woman’s lack of virginity fell solely on the woman; men had no responsibilities towards former partners and frequently failed or refused to provide for their own illegitimate children.
- Tess repeatedly bears the responsibility and the consequences for her fallen state. In Victorian England Tess is as guilty as the perpetrator.
Hardy is similar to Tess in the fact that
he was too poor to attend university despite being highly intelligent
he married an upper-class woman but was rejected by her family
Classism and Rural Decline In Victorian England
- Hardy’s mother worked as a maid, and his father as a master mason. Because they provided him with as many advantages as they could, he had opportunities to move to a higher social position.
- Hardy’s awareness of the problems of rural life, classism, and morality is often reflected in his fiction; poverty, job instability, and a generally hard life are more responsible for lower morality. This concepts is shown in the portrayal of Tess. She is not impure because she is poor; rather she is exposed to dangers that arise because her family’s poverty places her in a vulnerable position.
Industrialization
- Industrialization, which Hardy viewed as causing a problematic mobility and a loss of connection to nature and local identity, was on a rise.
- Technology was also on a rise, which Hardy represents as dangerous and disturbing, causing farm workers to be disconnected from the land that they work. There is a notable contrast between the idyllic work at the Talbothays Dairy, and the unpleasant, depersonalised labour at Flintcomb-Asch.
Augusta Way
Another real life model for Tess Of the D’Urberville’s was Augusta Way, whom Hardy apparently saw milking cows at her grandfathers farm as a teenager. He was strucked by the image and may have invoked it in the novel.
Hardy’s Wessex
- A fictional region of England that strongly suggests the real landscape of the Southern and Southwestern parts of the country.
- He kept some real place names but changed others.
- Marnhull is the real-world location of Marlott.
Great depression of British agriculture
The great depression of British agriculture occurred during the late nineteenth century and is usually dated from 1873 to 1896. The depression also accelerated Britain’s rural depopulation.
Britain’sagricultural depressionwas caused by the dramatic fall in grain prices that followed the opening up of the Americanprairiesto cultivation in the 1870s and the advent of cheap transportation with the rise ofsteamships (import of American wheat).
The dramatic fall in grain prices triggered two decades of stagnation that resulted in “bankruptcies, escalating unemployment, a halt in public works, and a major trade slump that lasted until 1897”.
British society, especially in rural areas, was transformed almost overnight. Men and women who had lived and worked their little plots of land for generations were displaced, forced into nomads who traveled from farm to farm, getting work where they could. As Thomas Hardy puts it in his penultimate novel,“The landlord does not know by sight, if even by name, half the men who preserve his acres from the curse of Eden. They come and go yearly, like birds of passage, nobody thinks whence or whither”.
People were forced to move from farm to farm due to the increased competition for war as a result of the Agricultural Revolution, industrialization, and the search for better economic opportunities and conditions.
Historical Context of Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Tess of the d’Urbervilles is set in England in the first part of the Long Depression (1873-1879), so in general life is especially hard for the poor characters of the book. English society was also going through some major changes during this time. Most important for the novel are the shift from an agricultural to an industrial culture, which is emphasized in the novel as a tension between nature and modernity, and the decline of the old aristocracy. Old names like “d’Urberville” didn’t mean much in terms of power anymore, except as status symbols that could be purchased by the newly wealthy, like the Stokes. The sexual morality of the day was also very conservative
Hardy’s religious beliefs
Thomas Hardy struggled with his own religious beliefs, and that struggle comes through in his work. He idealized the paganism of the past but was also attached to his family’s Christianity, and generally he accepted some sort of supernatural being that controlled fate.
Class Issues in Hardy’s work
- Hardy’s works reflect the ideas of a man who was clearly obsessed with the issue of social class throughout his literary career. His works are personal in the sense that they depict Hardy’s own lifelong struggles with social mobility and the class structure as a whole throughout his life.
- Born the son of an independent mason in the rural area of Higher Dorset, as he was growing up, Hardy felt that the circumstances surrounding the working class limited the opportunities by which he could fully develop his talents. Thus, in order to create a place for himself in society, he pursued architecture for nearly twenty years while writing on the side. Only when Hardy had firmly established himself as a writer with the success of Far from the Madding Crowd did he completely devote himself to his literary career.
- However, like many who rise in society, Hardy experienced what might be called a double bind. While he had connections to both the working class and the upper classes, he did not feel that he belonged in either.
- Hardy writes in Jude the Obscure, that “To have a good chance of being one of his country’s worthies,” a man “should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig” (Chap. 43). Therefore, he felt that rising in society was like a double-edged sword: in rising, one must leave others behind and in a sense compromise one’s beliefs; yet, by failing to rise, one does not fulfill one’s potential.
- Hardy incorporates class issues into his novels through the creation of protagonists somewhat modeled after himself (we see this with Tess). These characters feel that their talents cannot be fully used and developed within the world to which they are born.
- Driven by a strong sense of ambition and self- discovery, these figures pursue their talents in a world socially higher than their own. Through such situations, Hardy’s works demonstrate the precariousness of social mobility, the arbitrariness of class differentiation, and furthermore, the impossibility and the fruitlessness of completely disassociating oneself from one’s origins in an attempt to move up the ladder of social class hierarchy.
Hardy’s religious views
His father, and grandfather, used to sing and play in the choirs and bands that provided music for the church services. Young Hardy enjoyed music and grew up in this atmosphere of simple worship. As an adult, however, he encountered the challenges to dogmatic religious belief that were sweeping England, sparked by books such as Darwin’s Origin of Species and the new “higher criticism” of the Bible. Hardy slowly moved from the Christian teachings of his boyhood to become a thoughtful, questioning agnostic.
