Geology, Genealogy and Church Restoration in Hardy’s Writing

Abstract

In 1879 Henry James wrote in his study of Nathaniel Hawthorne,

History, as yet, has left the United States but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we can very soon touch the hard substratum of nature…. A large juvenility is stamped upon the face of things….¹

James implies here that the soil or deposits are thin in America for narrative, as there has not yet been enough history in that young nation to prove fertile ground for stories. As he writes earlier in the same book: The moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,’² James is of course privileging history pertaining to ‘Old World’ populations, from the Europeans in America mainly, and ignoring the history of Native Americans. Controversial as his assertions about history and narrative may be, they accord with the ideas of his English contemporary, Thomas Hardy. While James eventually transplanted himself from that ‘hard substratum of nature’ in the United States to the presumably richer soil of Sussex, Hardy refused to travel in the other direction, to America. He expresses his reasons for this refusal in his poem, ‘On an Invitation to the United States’.