Far from the Madding Crowd

About this edition

Introduction

The title is borrowed from a graveyard poem about people who avoided the world’s noise, and the novel is about what happens to a woman who does not. Bathsheba Everdene inherits a farm, decides to run it herself, and is immediately surrounded by men who would each prefer her to be something simpler: a wife, a prize, an object of pursuit. The book’s subject is not really which of them she chooses. It is the cost of being the person who has to choose at all — and the fact that the farm, unlike the suitors, cannot be charmed, only worked.

Hardy had written three novels before this one, and none of them had done much. This is the book where he stops apologising for his material and commits to it: rural labour taken seriously as work, weather as an actual antagonist, and a countryside populated by people whose lives are shaped by wages, rents and the price of corn. It is also the first novel in which he names his fictional south-west England Wessex, and the first in which the natural world is not scenery but a system with no interest in human plans.

That indifference is what makes the book feel modern. A sheepdog can ruin a shepherd in a night. A storm can take a harvest that was insured by nothing but hope. A man can be ruined by an accident of timing rather than a flaw of character, and the novel is honest enough not to pretend otherwise. Hardy was accused, throughout his career, of being unpleasant about providence; the accusation is really a compliment to his accuracy.

There is also, underneath the farming, one of the oddest and most memorable pieces of writing about attraction in the nineteenth-century novel: a chapter in which a soldier demonstrates his sword in a hollow among ferns, and the woman watching it is not persuaded by an argument but overwhelmed by an image. Hardy understood that desire is often decided before it is reasoned about, and he wrote it down at a time when English fiction was not supposed to.

This edition gives the complete text, unaltered, in fifty-seven chapters. The notes gloss the rural economy that drives the plot — ricks, bailiffs, sheep-rot, market day — and the reading guide is for anyone who wants to argue with the book rather than simply be carried by it.

The author

Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in Dorset, the son of a builder, and died on 11 January 1928. He trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset before publishing his first novel in 1871; the early books were written to a market, and he disliked at least one of them for the rest of his life.

Far from the Madding Crowd, his fourth novel, was the first to be widely noticed, and it made him a name. He went on to write the series of novels — The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895) — for which he is best known. The reception of the last of these was harsh enough that he gave up fiction altogether and spent the remaining thirty-odd years of his life writing poetry, including the vast verse-drama The Dynasts.

His Wessex is a real place with the names changed: Dorset and its neighbours, mapped onto a county with its own towns, weather and economy. The novels are regional in the strict sense — they cannot be moved — and that is precisely why they have travelled so well. He is buried in Westminster Abbey, with his heart, at his own request, in the churchyard at Stinsford where his family lay.

Publication history

The novel was written in 1873 and 1874 and published serially and then in book form in 1874, which is the year that matters for its copyright status. Its success was immediate and large: it was the book that established Hardy as a novelist rather than a writer of pleasant rural entertainments, and it was the first of his works to be widely read outside Britain.

Hardy revised his novels repeatedly across his career, and later editions of Far from the Madding Crowd differ from the first in many small particulars — punctuation, dialect spellings, and occasionally a sentence or two. This is worth knowing because it means the phrase “the original text” is not entirely innocent here: there is a first edition, and there is the text Hardy settled on decades later.

The text reproduced here follows the first-edition text as transcribed for Standard Ebooks, and not a word of it has been changed. Where later editions differ, they differ elsewhere; nothing has been imported from them.

Notes

A short glossary of the rural economy and institutions that drive the plot. Most of them are financial, and the novel turns on precisely those.

• Madding — an archaic word meaning “maddening” or “frenzied”. The title comes from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and refers to the noise of the world, not to a crowd in a field.
• Wessex — Hardy’s fictional south-west England, named after the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that once covered the region. This is the first of his novels to use the name; the towns in it (Weatherbury, Casterbridge) are Dorchester and its neighbours under other names.
• Bailiff — the man employed to manage a farm or estate on the owner’s behalf: to hire, to sell, to decide what gets planted and when. Bathsheba’s decision to run the farm herself is a decision not to have one.
• Rick — a large stack of hay or sheaves, built in the open and thatched to shed rain. A rick is both a year’s animal feed and a fire risk, which is why the burning rick in this novel is a catastrophe rather than an inconvenience.
• Sheep-rot — a liver disease of sheep, spread by grazing wet pasture, and a total loss for the flock’s owner. The shepherd is responsible for keeping the flock off wet ground; the consequences of failing are the consequences of a single night.
• Harvest supper — the meal given by the farmer to the labourers at the end of harvest. It is a form of payment in kind, and a stage on which the social order of the parish is briefly visible all at once.
• Market day — the weekly occasion on which livestock and corn are sold in the nearest town. Prices set there decide whether a farm year is a profit or a loss, which makes a market journey a plot event rather than an errand.
• Sergeant — a non-commissioned officer in the army. Troy’s rank matters socially: high enough to be glamorous, low enough to be precarious, and no rank at all once he leaves the service.
• Workhouse — the institution that provided relief to the destitute in return for labour, under conditions deliberately made worse than the lowest paid work outside. It is the fate the novel’s poorest characters are always one accident away from.
• Enclosure and tenancy — the arrangement by which the land is held: farmed by tenants who pay rent to a landowner, with the poor having no legal claim on either. Almost everyone in the novel is somebody’s tenant.

Reading guide

Six questions for a first or a fifth reading. None of them has a settled answer.

1. Bathsheba is an employer before she is anybody’s beloved. How much of the novel’s plot is decided by her competence at that job, and how much by her mistakes in the other one?
2. Gabriel Oak loses everything early and then spends the book being useful to a woman who does not notice him. Is his patience a virtue, a strategy, or the novel’s most quietly devastating subject?
3. The sword demonstration is one of the most famous scenes in Victorian fiction — and nothing much happens in it. Why does it work, and what does it say about how the novel thinks desire is produced?
4. Hardy kills animals to move his plots. What does the novel’s use of the flock, the dog and the storm say about who bears the cost of other people’s decisions?
5. Boldwood is destroyed by a letter he did not ask for. Is he a victim of Bathsheba, of his own rigidity, or of a society that gives a man of property nothing else to want?
6. The ending is a marriage, and much of the book has been about how little a marriage can fix. Is Far from the Madding Crowd a romance with a farming problem, or a farming novel with a romance attached?