Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Life & Times

About the Author

Thomas Hardy was born in a Dorset village in 1840. Although he had a modest upbringing, Hardy found himself working successfully as an architect in London at the age of 22. He spent five years in London, but was eventually drawn back to Dorset because he did not enjoy the urban environment or the class prejudice he felt, mixing with the well-heeled of England’s capital city. Having returned to the countryside, he began to consider an alternative career as a novelist. By 1867 he had already completed a manuscript, but had no luck placing it with a publisher. Despite this, his ambition knew no bounds and he persevered securing his first publication in 1871. His first five novels were well received and Hardy’s confidence in pushing the literary envelope grew steadily.

His sixth novel The Return of the Native (1878) is widely regarded as the first modern novel, because it dared to examine themes that Victorian society brushed under the carpet – namely sexual desire and obsession. The central female character, Eustacia, is something of a femme fatale. She is distractingly beautiful, but her seductive manipulation of the male characters leads to her death and that of her lover Wildeve. The book caused a stir in polite society, but it raised the bar in terms of what a novel could achieve as a medium for comment on the human condition. Eustacia essentially saw herself as a special individual and her ambitions led her to behave in ways that the local community could not accept. She was vilified for her lack of ability to fit in and accept her lot in life.

Four novels later and Hardy had published his best known novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). The eponymous Tess starts out as an innocent peasant girl, but embarks on a tragic life tale that ultimately ends in her execution for murder. For Hardy the story was an examination of how the individual can wind up in such desperate and forlorn situations even when their beginnings are much the same as others people’s. Again, like Eustacia, Tess is physically attractive and her ambitions lead her into scenarios that make her life ever more complicated and unsettled. This includes a scene in the first chapter when Tess loses her virginity but is seemingly too naive to understand whether she consented or was raped.

This loveless sexual encounter is her first step on the long road to the gallows. It was also a revealing read for a Victorian audience who were not used to reading about what went on behind the veneer of social etiquette. The admission that people could be drawn by lust and desire to ignore the rules of society came as a quite a shock, but Hardy was also attempting to show that Tess’s fate is what one might expect if those rules are ignored. In essence, Tess is a victim of circumstance, but she is still allowed to make her own decisions about which way to turn next. It is this interplay between the involuntary and voluntary that makes Tess’s story so tragic, and it also explains why the book is regarded as a masterpiece of English prose.

Most of Hardy’s work is set in a semi-fictional region called Wessex. The name comes from the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Wessex, which was eventually fragmented following the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066. In his imaginary Wessex, Hardy gives many real places alternative names as if it were a kind of parallel universe. This was Hardy’s devise, partly to make it abundantly clear that his work was not about real people and places, but also to provide a world into which he could escape as a writer.

Hardy’s Literary Legacy

In many respects the literature of Thomas Hardy is quintessentially English in tone and content. His stories are set in the deepest rural and bucolic southwest, where time attempts to stand still, preserving an English idyll that was worlds apart from the industrialization of the 19th century. For this reason his novels are described as belonging to the genre of ‘naturalism’.

Hardy was born and bred in Dorsetshire (now known simply as Dorset) and that is the epicentre of his constructed fictional world – one that is half imagined, half real, for he substitutes the actual names for places with alternatives conjured from his own mind.

Hardy was primarily concerned with the innate nature of personalities in his literature. He ascribed each character with a personality type which largely predetermined their fate. While other authors, such as Charles Dickens, conveyed the idea that people can learn from their mistakes and change, Hardy showed the opposite. For Hardy, people never really learn the error of their ways and fate will deal them their hand in proportion to their level of selfishness, vanity, pride, foolishness, arrogance, unkindness or other failing. In some cases Hardy even resorts to having troublesome characters killed off or removed to prison in order to restore harmony. In this way he gives the more deserving the opportunity to alter their circumstances for the better.

One might think that Hardy was religious, given this moral and ethical filter, but he wasn’t particularly interested in religion. He was more taken by the idea of allowing his characters to express superstitions and supernatural beliefs. In this regard he was really adopting the view of the anthropologist, who remains necessarily impartial on matters of belief, so that they can study people with neutrality. His work is also filled with subtle allusions to Classical references, which he used to underpin central characters.

Hardy used to search for events reported in newspapers and often used them in his plots. It wasn’t so much that he lacked the imagination to think up ideas, but that he wanted to inject a sense of realism by introducing elements that simply would not have occurred to him. Real life can sometimes be stranger than fiction.

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles there is a freak accident, where a mail cart collides with Tess’ wagon. Her horse, Prince, is impaled by a cart shaft and killed. This is an example of a news story read by Hardy and incorporated into his fiction. Because the event seems so unlikely, it functions very well as a devise to capture the reader’s imagination and carry the plot in an unexpected direction.

Central to Hardy’s overall ambition as a novelist was to tell stories about people in the landscape, making it all too obvious that living people are only ever custodians of the world for future generations. Dorset is filled with ancient sites of human activity and prehistoric evidence of a past without humanity. Hardy wanted to make it clear that we each have a window of opportunity in life to make our mark. That is why he had little time for people whom he considered to be fatuous or self interested, because he was acutely aware that it is the impression that we make on others and in their memories that counts the most, both during life and after death.

Quite apart from anything else, Hardy had an eye for the tragedy of life. He was a humanist, who cared about the underdog and expressed this by dealing with those who were more privileged in his prose. His own life was not entirely filled with happiness, as he became estranged from his first wife and was then deeply affected by her death. Many of his female characters have a dangerous beauty to them, suggesting that Hardy’s view of women was perhaps coloured by his own experience and that he felt men fall for the charm and allure of women, but end up beguiled and unhappy as the result of their infatuation.

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Preface to the Fifth and Later Editions

This novel being one wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as fatal to her part of protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of her enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions that the public should welcome the book, and agree with me in holding that there was something more to be said in fiction than had been said about the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe. But the responsive spirit in which Tess of the d’Urbervilles has been received by the readers of England and America, would seem to prove that the plan of laying down a story on the lines of tacit opinion, instead of making it to square with the merely vocal formulae of society, is not altogether a wrong one, even when exemplified in so unequal and partial an achievement as the present. For this responsiveness I cannot refrain from expressing my thanks; and my regret is that, in a world where one so often hungers in vain for friendship, where even not to be wilfully misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never meet in person these appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them by the hand. I include amongst them the reviewers—by far the majority—who have so generously welcomed the tale. Their words show that they, like the others, have only too largely repaired my defects of narration by their own imaginative intuition.

Nevertheless, though the novel was intended to be neither didactic nor aggressive, but in the scenic parts to be representative simply, and in the contemplative to be oftener charged with impressions than with convictions, there have been objectors both to the matter and to the rendering.

The more austere of these maintain a conscientious difference of opinion concerning, among other things, subjects fit for art, and reveal an inability to associate the idea of the sub-title adjective with any but the artificial and derivative meaning which has resulted to it from the ordinances of civilization. They ignore the meaning of the word in Nature, together with all aesthetic claims upon it, not to mention the spiritual interpretation afforded by the finest side of their own Christianity. Others dissent on grounds which are intrinsically no more than an assertion that the novel embodies the views of life prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, and not those of an earlier and simpler generation—an assertion which I can only hope may be well founded. Let me repeat that a novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest; as one is reminded by a passage which occurs in the letters of Schiller to Goethe on judges of this class: ‘They are those who seek only their own ideas in a representation, and prize that which should be as higher than what is. The cause of the dispute, therefore, lies in the very first principles, and it would be utterly impossible to come to an understanding with them.’ And again: ‘As soon as I observe that any one, when judging of poetical representations, considers anything more important than the inner Necessity and Truth, I have done with him.’

In the introductory words to the first edition I suggested the possible advent of the genteel person who would not be able to endure something or other in these pages. That person duly appeared among the aforesaid objectors. In one case he felt upset that it was not possible for him to read the book through three times, owing to my not having made that critical effort which ‘alone can prove the salvation of such an one.’ In another, he objected to such vulgar articles as the Devil’s pitchfork, a lodging-house carving-knife, and a shame-bought parasol, appearing in a respectable story. In another place he was a gentleman who turned Christian for half-an-hour the better to express his grief that a disrespectful phrase about the Immortals should have been used; though the same innate gentility compelled him to excuse the author in words of pity that one cannot be too thankful for: ‘He does but give us of his best.’ I can assure this great critic that to exclaim illogically against the gods, singular or plural, is not such an original sin of mine as he seems to imagine. True, it may have some local originality; though if Shakespeare were an authority on history, which perhaps he is not, I could show that the sin was introduced into Wessex as early as the Heptarchy itself. Says Glo’ster in Lear, otherwise Ina, king of that country:

‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.’

The remaining two or three manipulators of Tess were of the predetermined sort whom most writers and readers would gladly forget; professed literary boxers, who put on their convictions for the occasion; modern ‘Hammers of Heretics’; sworn Discouragers, ever on the watch to prevent the tentative half success from becoming the whole success later on; who pervert plain meanings, and grow personal under the name of practising the great historical method. However, they may have causes to advance, privilege to guard, traditions to keep going; some of which a mere tale-teller, who writes down how the things of the world strike him, without any ulterior intentions whatever, has overlooked, and may by pure inadvertence have run foul of when in the least aggressive mood. Perhaps some passing perception, the outcome of a dream hour, would, if generally acted on, cause such an assailant considerable inconvenience with respect to position, interests, family, servant, ox, ass, neighbour, or neighbour’s wife. He therefore valiantly hides his personality behind a publisher’s shutters, and cries ‘Shame!’ So densely is the world thronged that any shifting of positions, even the best warranted advance, galls somebody’s kibe. Such shiftings often begin in sentiment, and such sentiment sometimes begins in a novel.

July 1892

The foregoing remarks were written during the early career of this story, when a spirited public and private criticism of its points was still fresh to the feelings. The pages are allowed to stand for what they are worth, as something once said; but probably they would not have been written now. Even in the short time which has elapsed since the book was first published, some of the critics who provoked the reply have ‘gone down into silence,’ as if to remind one of the infinite unimportance of both their say and mine.

In the present edition it may be well to state, in response to inquiries from readers interested in landscape, prehistoric antiquities, and especially old English architecture, that the description of these backgrounds in this and its companion novels has been done from the real. Many features of the first two kinds have been given under their existing names; for instance, the Vale of Blackmoor or Blakemore, Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe Tout, Dogbury Hill, High-Stoy, Bubb-Down Hill, The Devil’s Kitchen, Cross-in-Hand, Long-Ash Lane, Benvill Lane, Giant’s Hill, Crimmercrock Lane, and Stonehenge. The rivers Froom or Frome, and Stour, are, of course, well known as such. And in planning the stories the idea was that large towns and points tending to mark the outline of Wessex—such as Bath, Plymouth, The Start, Portland Bill, Southampton, &c—.should be named outright. The scheme was not greatly elaborated, but, whatever its value, the names remain still.

In respect of places described under fictitious or ancient names—for reasons that seemed good at the time of writing—discerning persons have affirmed in print that they clearly recognize the originals: such as Shaftesbury in ‘Shaston,’ Sturminster Newton in ‘Stourcastle,’ Dorchester in ‘Casterbridge,’ Salisbury in ‘Melchester,’ Salisbury Plain in ‘The Great Plain,’ Cranborne in ‘Chaseborough,’ Cranborne Chase in ‘The Chase,’ Beaminster in ‘Emminster,’ Bere Regis in ‘Kingsbere,’ Woodbury Hill in ‘Greenhill,’ Wool Bridge in ‘Wellbridge,’ Hartfoot or Harput Lane in ‘Stagfoot Lane,’ Hazelbury in ‘Nuzzle-bury,’ Bridport in ‘Port-Bredy,’ Maiden Newton in ‘Chalk Newton,’ a farm near Nettlecombe Tout in ‘Flintcomb Ash,’ Sherborne in ‘Sherton Abbas,’ Milton Abbey in ‘Middleton Abbey,’ Cerne Abbas in ‘Abbot’s Cernel,’ Evershot in ‘Evershead,’ Tauton in ‘Toneborough,’ Bournemouth in ‘Sandbourne,’ Winchester in ‘Wintoncester,’ and so on. I shall not be the one to contradict them; I accept their statements as at least an indication of their real and kindly interest in the scenes.

January 1895

The present edition of this novel contains a few pages that have never appeared in any previous edition. When the detached episodes were collected as stated in the preface of 1891, these pages were overlooked, though they were in the original manuscript. They occur in Chapter X.

Respecting the sub-title, to which allusion was made above, I may add that it was appended at the last moment, after reading the final proofs, as being the estimate left in a candid mind of the heroine’s character—an estimate that nobody would be likely to dispute. It was disputed more than anything else in the book. Melius fuerat nonscribere. But there it stands.

The novel was first published complete, in three volumes, in November 1891.

T. H., March 1912