Abstract
Hardy’s involvement with the Napoleonic era was remarked upon by T. E. Lawrence as late as 1923: “Napoleon is a real man to him, and the county of Dorsetshire echoes that name everywhere in Hardy’s ears. He lives in his period, and thinks of it as the great war.”1 Such immersion came only with The Dynasts, and since the long evolution of that drama seems clearly to have begun prior to the composition of The Trumpet-Major—Early Life (140) preserves from 1875 an idea for a Napoleonic balladepic—it is tempting to regard the novel as no more than a preparatory foray, a minor by-product of the major work. But the success of The Trumpet-Major on its own terms and the position it occupies in the sequence of Hardy’s career give a quite independent interest to its handling of time and history, its exploratory probing of the Wessex past.
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Notes
David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (London, 1938), p. 429.
Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (London, 1879), p. 329; and see Bernard Jones, ed., The Poems of William Barnes (London, 1962), I, xvi–xvii.
Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (New York, 1967), p. [147], draws a comparison with Faulkner
see Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (London, 1966), pp. 1–2, 78.
For Scott, see Ian Jack, English Literature, 1815–1832 (Oxford, 1963), pp. 186–187, and Scott’s own footnote to Chapter First of Redgauntlet. Hardy’s grandfather had been a volunteer at the time of Napoleon’s invasion threat (Early Life, p. 14), and Hardy himself made several visits to Chelsea Hospital to talk with surviving veterans of Waterloo and other battles of the period (Early Life, pp. 103, 139–140, etc.).
The naming of his heroine was perhaps influenced by local memories of a Major Garland who had distinguished himself at Waterloo: see p. 238, and Peter D. Smith, ‘William Cox and The Trumpet-Major’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 14 (1967), 64–65.
For some relevant background material, see R. Chevenix-Trench, ‘Dorset Under Arms in 1803’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 90 (1969), 303–312. Revisions within the MS, ff. 31, 96, show that Festus was originally conceived as Captain Delalynde, a regular officer in the same regiment of the dragoons as John Loveday. This change in conception is apparently to be associated with what evidence of repagination (e.g., f. 77 formerly numbered f. 57) suggests was a late development of the farcical material revolving upon Uncle Benjy in chapters 6, 7, and 8. The legendary ‘killing by a certain Thomas de la Lynd of a beautiful white hart that the king had run down and spared’ is recalled by Hardy in his New Quarterly Magazine review of Barnes, p. 470 (Personal Writings, p. 95) ; the passage recurs in Tess, p. 10.
Though his description of the notebook itself is unsatisfactory, Edwards’s thesis contains (pp. 139–142) an exhaustive account of the contents of the ‘Trumpet-Major Notebook’ and of the ways in which Hardy used it in writing the novel. See also Purdy, p. 34, Emma L. Clifford, ‘The “Trumpet-Major Notebook” and The Dynasts’, Review of English Studies, n.s.8 (1957), 149–161 (largely drawn from her 1955 Bristol University Ph.D. thesis, ‘Thomas Hardy’s View of History’, pp. 75–92)
and Walter F. Wright, The Shaping of The Dynasts’: A Study in Thomas Hardy (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1967), pp. 128–136, 139–140, etc. For Hardy’s part in supplying details for the illustrations, see Purdy, p. 33.
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© 1994 Michael Millgate
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Millgate, M. (1994). The Uses of a Regional Past. In: Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379534_13
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