Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Contents
PREFACE
Chapter I. Description of Farmer Oak—An Incident
Chapter II. Night—The Flock—An Interior—Another Interior
Chapter III. A Girl on Horseback—Conversation
Chapter IV. Gabriel’s Resolve—The Visit—The Mistake
Chapter V. Departure of Bathsheba—A Pastoral Tragedy
Chapter VI. The Fair—The Journey—The Fire
Chapter VII. Recognition—A Timid Girl
Chapter VIII. The Malthouse—The Chat—News
Chapter IX. The Homestead—A Visitor—Half-Confidences
Chapter X. Mistress and Men
Chapter XI. Outside the Barracks—Snow—A Meeting
Chapter XII. Farmers—A Rule—An Exception
Chapter XIII. Sortes Sanctorum—The Valentine
Chapter XIV. Effect of the Letter—Sunrise
Chapter XV. A Morning Meeting—The Letter Again
Chapter XVI. All Saints’ and All Souls’
Chapter XVII. In the Market-Place
Chapter XVIII. Boldwood in Meditation—Regret
Chapter XIX. The Sheep-Washing—The Offer
Chapter XX. Perplexity—Grinding the Shears—A Quarrel
Chapter XXI. Troubles in the Fold—A Message
Chapter XXII. The Great Barn and the Sheep-Shearers
Chapter XXIII. Eventide—A Second Declaration
Chapter XXIV. The Same Night—The Fir Plantation
Chapter XXV. The New Acquaintance Described
Chapter XXVI. Scene on the Verge of the Hay-Mead
Chapter XXVII. Hiving the Bees
Chapter XXVIII. The Hollow Amid the Ferns
Chapter XXIX. Particulars of a Twilight Walk
Chapter XXX. Hot Cheeks and Tearful Eyes
Chapter XXXI. Blame—Fury
Chapter XXXII. Night—Horses Tramping
Chapter XXXIII. In the Sun—A Harbinger
Chapter XXXIV. Home Again—A Trickster
Chapter XXXV. At an Upper Window
Chapter XXXVI. Wealth in Jeopardy—The Revel
Chapter XXXVII. The Storm—The Two Together
Chapter XXXVIII. Rain—One Solitary Meets Another
Chapter XXXIX. Coming Home—A Cry
Chapter XL. On Casterbridge Highway
Chapter XLI. Suspicion—Fanny Is Sent For
Chapter XLII. Joseph and His Burden—Buck’s Head
Chapter XLIII. Fanny’s Revenge
Chapter XLIV. Under a Tree—Reaction
Chapter XLV. Troy’s Romanticism
Chapter XLVI. The Gurgoyle: Its Doings
Chapter XLVII. Adventures by the Shore
Chapter XLVIII. Doubts Arise—Doubts Linger
Chapter XLIX. Oak’s Advancement—A Great Hope
Chapter L. The Sheep Fair—Troy Touches His Wife’s Hand
Chapter LI. Bathsheba Talks with Her Outrider
Chapter LII. Converging Courses
Chapter LIII. Concurritur—Horæ Momento
Chapter LIV. After the Shock
Chapter LV. The March Following—“Bathsheba Boldwood”
Chapter LVI. Beauty in Loneliness—After All
Chapter LVII. A Foggy Night and Morning—Conclusion
Notes
PREFACE
In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in
the chapters of “Far from the Madding Crowd,” as they appeared month by
month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt the word
“Wessex” from the pages of early English history, and give it a
fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once
included in that extinct kingdom. The series of novels I projected
being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed to require a
territorial definition of some sort to lend unity to their scene.
Finding that the area of a single county did not afford a canvas large
enough for this purpose, and that there were objections to an invented
name, I disinterred the old one. The press and the public were kind
enough to welcome the fanciful plan, and willingly joined me in the
anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living under Queen
Victoria;—a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and
reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who
could read and write, and National school children. But I believe I am
correct in stating that, until the existence of this contemporaneous
Wessex was announced in the present story, in 1874, it had never been
heard of, and that the expression, “a Wessex peasant,” or “a Wessex
custom,” would theretofore have been taken to refer to nothing later in
date than the Norman Conquest.
I did not anticipate that this application of the word to a modern use
would extend outside the chapters of my own chronicles. But the name
was soon taken up elsewhere as a local designation. The first to do so
was the now defunct _Examiner_, which, in the impression bearing date
July 15, 1876, entitled one of its articles “The Wessex Labourer,” the
article turning out to be no dissertation on farming during the
Heptarchy, but on the modern peasant of the south-west counties, and
his presentation in these stories.
Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the
horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-country, has become
more and more popular as a practical definition; and the dream-country
has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can
go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from. But I ask all
good and gentle readers to be so kind as to forget this, and to refuse
steadfastly to believe that there are any inhabitants of a Victorian
Wessex outside the pages of this and the companion volumes in which
they were first discovered.
Moreover, the village called Weatherbury, wherein the scenes of the
present story of the series are for the most part laid, would perhaps
be hardly discernible by the explorer, without help, in any existing
place nowadays; though at the time, comparatively recent, at which the
tale was written, a sufficient reality to meet the descriptions, both
of backgrounds and personages, might have been traced easily enough.
The church remains, by great good fortune, unrestored and intact, and a
few of the old houses; but the ancient malt-house, which was formerly
so characteristic of the parish, has been pulled down these twenty
years; also most of the thatched and dormered cottages that were once
lifeholds. The game of prisoner’s base, which not so long ago seemed to
enjoy a perennial vitality in front of the worn-out stocks, may, so far
as I can say, be entirely unknown to the rising generation of
schoolboys there. The practice of divination by Bible and key, the
regarding of valentines as things of serious import, the
shearing-supper, and the harvest-home, have, too, nearly disappeared in
the wake of the old houses; and with them have gone, it is said, much
of that love of fuddling to which the village at one time was
notoriously prone. The change at the root of this has been the recent
supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers, who carried on the
local traditions and humours, by a population of more or less migratory
labourers, which has led to a break of continuity in local history,
more fatal than any other thing to the preservation of legend,
folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities.
For these the indispensable conditions of existence are attachment to
the soil of one particular spot by generation after generation.
T. H.
February 1895
CHAPTER I
Description of Farmer Oak—An Incident
When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were
within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to
chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his
countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.
His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man
of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good
character. On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to
postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the
whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of
Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the
parish and the drunken section,—that is, he went to church, but yawned
privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed, and
thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening
to the sermon. Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of
public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was
considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a
good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a
kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.
Since he lived six times as many working-days as Sundays, Oak’s
appearance in his old clothes was most peculiarly his own—the mental
picture formed by his neighbours in imagining him being always dressed
in that way. He wore a low-crowned felt hat, spread out at the base by
tight jamming upon the head for security in high winds, and a coat like
Dr. Johnson’s; his lower extremities being encased in ordinary leather
leggings and boots emphatically large, affording to each foot a roomy
apartment so constructed that any wearer might stand in a river all day
long and know nothing of damp—their maker being a conscientious man who
endeavoured to compensate for any weakness in his cut by unstinted
dimension and solidity.
Mr. Oak carried about him, by way of watch, what may be called a small
silver clock; in other words, it was a watch as to shape and intention,
and a small clock as to size. This instrument being several years older
than Oak’s grandfather, had the peculiarity of going either too fast or
not at all. The smaller of its hands, too, occasionally slipped round
on the pivot, and thus, though the minutes were told with precision,
nobody could be quite certain of the hour they belonged to. The
stopping peculiarity of his watch Oak remedied by thumps and shakes,
and he escaped any evil consequences from the other two defects by
constant comparisons with and observations of the sun and stars, and by
pressing his face close to the glass of his neighbours’ windows, till
he could discern the hour marked by the green-faced timekeepers within.
It may be mentioned that Oak’s fob being difficult of access, by reason
of its somewhat high situation in the waistband of his trousers (which
also lay at a remote height under his waistcoat), the watch was as a
necessity pulled out by throwing the body to one side, compressing the
mouth and face to a mere mass of ruddy flesh on account of the exertion
required, and drawing up the watch by its chain, like a bucket from a
well.
But some thoughtful persons, who had seen him walking across one of his
fields on a certain December morning—sunny and exceedingly mild—might
have regarded Gabriel Oak in other aspects than these. In his face one
might notice that many of the hues and curves of youth had tarried on
to manhood: there even remained in his remoter crannies some relics of
the boy. His height and breadth would have been sufficient to make his
presence imposing, had they been exhibited with due consideration. But
there is a way some men have, rural and urban alike, for which the mind
is more responsible than flesh and sinew: it is a way of curtailing
their dimensions by their manner of showing them. And from a quiet
modesty that would have become a vestal, which seemed continually to
impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world’s room, Oak
walked unassumingly and with a faintly perceptible bend, yet distinct
from a bowing of the shoulders. This may be said to be a defect in an
individual if he depends for his valuation more upon his appearance
than upon his capacity to wear well, which Oak did not.
He had just reached the time of life at which “young” is ceasing to be
the prefix of “man” in speaking of one. He was at the brightest period
of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly
separated: he had passed the time during which the influence of youth
indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had
not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the
character of prejudice, by the influence of a wife and family. In