Abstract
Chapter 17 deals with meliorism in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). The conclusion of Part III is that these last four ‘tragic’ novels end in showing how Hardy’s meliorism was baffled by the historical effect of ‘feminine wisdom’, as it developed through ‘the long sexual revolution’ which, historians have shown, operated in England from the end of the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, a period strongly marked by an intense crisis of civilisation.
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Notes
- 1.
J. Engell and W. J. Bate (eds), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, VI: Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (London, 1993), pp. 48f.
- 2.
All three articles have been reproduced several times, most recently in M. Millgate (ed.), Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose (Oxford, 2001), pp. 75–88, 96–104, 106–110.
- 3.
Far from the Madding Crowd, p. 384.
- 4.
E. J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (London, 1977), pp. 5, 30ff.
- 5.
Bristow, Vice and Vigilance, p. 127.
- 6.
Drysdale, Elements, p. 77.
- 7.
Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act I, Sc. 2.
- 8.
My copy of Thomas Hardy’s Works, Viii: Jude the Obscure (London, Osgood, McIlvaine and Co.) is dated 1896.
- 9.
The Holy Bible (King James Version) 1Esdr., IV, 26–27 and 32.
- 10.
1Esdr. IV.
- 11.
As suggested by Patricia Ingham in her introduction to Jude the Obscure (Oxford, 2002), p. 403, n. 76.
- 12.
The concept is Dugald Stewart’s. See his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792). For a thorough account of Stewart’s influence on the Oxford Noetics, see P. Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 83–142. No ‘worthies’ are named in Jude, but Hardy identified them in a letter to Florence Henniker. See Millgate (ed.), Collected Letters , II, p. 95.
- 13.
Is it an accident that she is given the same name as the wife of the Roman Emperor Caligula?
- 14.
E. D. McDonald (ed.), The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (London, 1967), p. 509. See also Millgate, Career, p. 320.
- 15.
Jude the Obscure, epigraph to Part Fifth.
- 16.
Mill, On Liberty. See Ch. 15 above.
- 17.
Millgate, Career (London, 1971), p. 324.
- 18.
D. Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (Detroit, U.S.A., 1975), p. 162.
- 19.
Ingham, introduction to Jude the Obscure, p. xxi.
- 20.
Goode, Offensive Truth, pp. 138–166.
- 21.
R. A. Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (London, 1982), p. 57.
- 22.
Soloway, Birth Control, pp. 90, 92, 94.
- 23.
Hardy, Early Years, p. 294.
- 24.
For the Legitimation League, see Benn, Predicaments of Love, pp. 154–159. For Hardy’s response see The Adult, Vol. 1, No. 1, Aug. 1897.
- 25.
Millgate (ed.), Collected Letters, III, p. 238.
- 26.
H. Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception, 1800–1975 (Oxford, 2004).
- 27.
For this definition and its significance, see Cook, Long Sexual Revolution, p. 14.
- 28.
Cook. Long Sexual Revolution, pp. 15f, 90–121, 122–142.
- 29.
Soloway, Birth Control, p. 134.
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Reid, F. (2017). Stopping Wedding Guests. In: Thomas Hardy and History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54175-4_17
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