Return of the Native
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
Thomas Hardy
Table of Contents
Title Page
History of Collins
Life & Times
PREFACE
BOOK ONE—THE THREE WOMEN
Chapter 1: A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression
Chapter 2: Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble
Chapter 3: The Custom of the Country
Chapter 4: The Halt on the Turnpike Road
Chapter 5: Perplexity among Honest People
Chapter 6: The Figure against the Sky
Chapter 7: Queen of Night
Chapter 8: Those Who Are Found Where There Is Said to Be Nobody
Chapter 9: Love Leads a Shrewd Man into Strategy
Chapter 10: A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion
Chapter 11: The Dishonesty of an Honest Woman
BOOK TWO—THE ARRIVAL
Chapter 1: Tidings of the Comer
Chapter 2: The People at Blooms-End Make Ready
Chapter 3: How a Little Sound Produced a Great Dream
Chapter 4: Eustacia Is Led on to an Adventure
Chapter 5: Through the Moonlight
Chapter 6: The Two Stand Face to Face
Chapter 7: A Coalition between Beauty and Oddness
Chapter 8: Firmness Is Discovered in a Gentle Heart
BOOK THREE—THE FASCINATION
Chapter 1: “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is”
Chapter 2: The New Course Causes Disappointment
Chapter 3: The First Act in a Timeworn Drama
Chapter 4: An Hour of Bliss and Many Hours of Sadness
Chapter 5: Sharp Words Are Spoken, and a Crisis Ensues
Chapter 6: Yeobright Goes, and the Breach Is Complete
Chapter 7: The Morning and the Evening of a Day
Chapter 8: A New Force Disturbs the Current
BOOK FOUR—THE CLOSED DOOR
Chapter 1: The Rencounter by the Pool
Chapter 2: He Is Set upon by Adversities but He Sings a Song
Chapter 3: She Goes Out to Battle against Depression
Chapter 4: Rough Coercion Is Employed
Chapter 5: The Journey across the Heath
Chapter 6: A Conjuncture, and Its Result upon the Pedestrian
Chapter 7: The Tragic Meeting of Two Old Friends
Chapter 8: Eustacia Hears of Good Fortune, and Beholds Evil
BOOK FIVE—THE DISCOVERY
Chapter 1: “Wherefore Is Light Given to Him That Is in Misery”
Chapter 2: A Lurid Light Breaks in upon a Darkened Understanding
Chapter 3: Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning
Chapter 4: The Ministrations of a Half-forgotten One
Chapter 5: An Old Move Inadvertently Repeated
Chapter 6: Thomasin Argues with Her Cousin, and He Writes a Letter
Chapter 7: The Night of the Sixth of November
Chapter 8: Rain, Darkness, and Anxious Wanderers
Chapter 9: Sights and Sounds Draw the Wanderers Together
BOOK SIX—AFTERCOURSES
Chapter 1: The Inevitable Movement Onward
Chapter 2: Thomasin Walks in a Green Place by the Roman Road
Chapter 3: The Serious Discourse of Clym with His Cousin
Chapter 4: Cheerfulness Again Asserts Itself at Blooms-End, and Clym Finds His
Footnotes
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary
Copyright
About the Publisher
History of Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
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.
Hardy’s Works
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.
In Far From the Madding Crowd, published in serial form in 1874, Bathsheba is his beautiful female protagonist and it is through her experiences that Hardy exposes his feelings on romantic love and the inconsistency and destruction that can be caused by relationships. However, the central concern of Far From the Madding Crowd highlights Hardy’s preoccupation with the modernity and industrialization of society. Many of his texts are set in rural locations and Hardy details the dialects, landscape, and people of the English countryside to try and preserve that history and endangered way of life. Central to Hardy’s overall ambition was to show 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 that counts the most, both during life and after death.
The Return of the Native (1878), Hardy’s sixth novel, is arguably his finest work and one of the best novels ever written. At the time of its publication, its themes were viewed as rather controversial, due to the sensibilities of Victorian polite society. In truth, it was a novel of insightful realism, about human nature leading people to make foolish decisions that bring about their own unhappiness and leave victims in their wake. As a literary work, The Return of the Native is impressive in its use of prose. Hardy evokes the environment and mood of Egdon Heath in exacting detail. The writing is also steeped in metaphor and classical reference, with every paragraph considered and crafted to perfection.
The anti-heroine of the story is Eustacia Vye, a shallow, vain young woman who imagines a high-society life in London and makes no effort to fit into the Wessex community in which she is immersed. She also happens to be exquisitely beautiful – a femme fatale to the eligible young men who cross her path. This is a trope often used by Hardy. His rather black-and-white view of attractive women was that physical beauty often masked inner ugliness –a beguiling combination to lustful men.
Clement Yeobright, the central character, is an earthy school teacher who returns to the area having seen a bit of the world – he is the returning native of the title. He falls for Eustacia’s beauty, unable to see that his cousin, Thomasin, is better suited to his needs. Ultimately Eustacia shows her true colours when she realizes that Clement is content to remain living in Egdon Heath. She attempts to elope with Thomasin’s first husband, the womanizer Damon Wildeve, but both are drowned in a weir by Hardy’s pen. Clement continues life alone, while Thomasin marries Diggory Venn, an admirer who has protected Thomasin’s interests throughout the story.
The novel was considered risqué in the 19th century because it dealt with marriage failure and sexual liaison out of wedlock, both of which were real-life issues, of course, but were brushed under the Victorian carpet. As values shifted during the 20th century, readers began to realize what a masterpiece Hardy had produced. Fundamentally, The Return of the Native is an allegory about what people can expect from life when they lack the wisdom to pursue what is best for them and choose instead to satisfy their primal desires and vanities. Hardy also rewards those who do have wisdom, and his themes still ring true today, which is perhaps why the novel is so highly regarded.
In 1886 Hardy published The Mayor of Casterbridge. At a country fair, Henchard, Hardy’s tragic hero, auctions off his wife and daughter when he’s drunk. He spends most of his life repenting for this act and eventually becomes an upstanding citizen of Casterbridge, a successful businessman and mayor of the town. Impulsive and volatile, yet emotional and repentant, when his wife and daughter return to Casterbridge Henchard attempts to make amends. Throughout the novel, Hardy focuses on the importance of reputation and good character and demonstrates how the present is always haunted by the past and cannot be denied. Particularly Hardy-esque in nature is the great tension that is set up between Henchard’s public and private life in a small rural town where the community act as judge and jury on the flaws and mistakes of those among them.
Hardy’s best-known novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, was published in 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.
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 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. 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.
PREFACE
The date at which the following events are assumed to have occurred may be set down as between 1840 and 1850, when the old watering place herein called “Budmouth” still retained sufficient afterglow from its Georgian gaiety and prestige to lend it an absorbing attractiveness to the romantic and imaginative soul of a lonely dweller inland.
Under the general name of “Egdon Heath”, which has been given to the sombre scene of the story, are united or typified heaths of various real names, to the number of at least a dozen; these being virtually one in character and aspect, though their original unity, or partial unity, is now somewhat disguised by intrusive strips and slices brought under the plough with varying degrees of success, or planted to woodland.
It is pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose southwestern quarter is here described, may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex—Lear.
July, 1895.
“To sorrow
I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind.
I would deceive her,
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.”
CHAPTER 1
A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.
The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced halfway.
The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow.
It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.
Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand dunes of Scheveningen.
The most thoroughgoing ascetic could feel that he had a natural right to wander on Egdon—he was keeping within the line of legitimate indulgence when he laid himself open to influences such as these. Colours and beauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of all. Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the level of gaiety. Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon was aroused to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend. Then it became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived by scenes like this.
It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.
This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness—“Bruaria”. Then follows the length and breadth in leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. “Turbaria Bruaria”—the right of cutting heath-turf—occurs in charters relating to the district. “Overgrown with heth and mosse,” says Leland of the same dark sweep of country.
Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape—far-reaching proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.