Far from the Madding Crowd Read Free Page A

with which his readers were likely to be familiar. Spotting the allusions and understanding the “something extra” that they lent to the novel would have given Hardy’s well-read audience pleasure. For instance, the novel’s title comes from a poem that many people knew by heart, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Hardy quotes a line from the nineteenth stanza of Gray’s beloved poem: “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife/ Their sober wishes never learned to stray;/ Along the cool sequestered vale of life/ They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.” This stanza describes country people whose lives stay relatively calm, quiet, and undisruptive compared to those who participate in a more ambitious, frenzied existence (“madding” means “acting madly,” not “maddening”). Gray thought that rural seclusion limited people’s desires so they couldn’t sin in big ways. Hardy’s allusion gives readers the pleasure of recognition, but it also opens the possibility of an ironic interpretation of Gray’s lines. While emphasizing a literary connection to country values, and suggesting the remoteness of the scene, “far from the madding crowd” also leads the reader to question just how ordinary, sober, and noiseless Bathsheba, Boldwood, Troy, and Fanny Robin seem in the end. Perhaps only Gabriel Oak lives up to the allusion, but when he and Bathsheba work side by side to save her harvested crops from destruction in a powerful thunderstorm, Hardy revises Gray again, suggesting that excitement and intensity can coexist with good husbandry when a man and a woman enjoy the fellowship of work that matters.
     
    —Suzanne Keen

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 “Wes sex” 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 region designated was known but vaguely, and I was often asked even by educated people where it lay. However, 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 work-houses, 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 in place of the usual counties was announced in the present story, in 1874, it had never been heard of in fiction and current speech, if at all, 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 modern story would extend outside the chapters of these particular chronicles. But it was soon taken up elsewhere, the first to adopt it being 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.
    Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons and landscapes of a partly real, partly dream-country, has become more and more popular as a practical provincial definition; and the dream-country