Hardy’s Deathbeds

Abstract

Writing in 1880, John Ruskin found himself troubled by certain tendencies in the contemporary novel and pinned the blame for them on the conditions of urban life: according to his argument, city-dwellers, bored to desperation by the monotony of their existence, had begun to seek a synthetic excitement in the reading of fiction, and novelists had been quick to oblige by supplying a highly sensational variety of product. Nowhere, suggested Ruskin, was this more obvious than in the fictional treatment of death: ‘the ultimate power of fiction to entertain [the Londoner]’, he wrote, ‘is by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dullness the horrors, of Death’. Thus, in Bleak House, Dickens had killed off no fewer than ten of his characters; but (Ruskin goes on) it is not so much the number of deaths that is significant as the fact that nearly all these deaths are of ‘inoffensive, or at least in the world’s estimate, respectable persons; and that they are all grotesquely either violent or miserable’. This, he concludes, constitutes ‘the peculiar tone of the modern novel’; and he contrasts Dickens with Walter Scott, whose novels demonstrate that ‘In the work of the great masters death is always either heroic, deserved, or quiet and natural.’¹