FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
by
Thomas Hardy
CONTENTS
Preface
I. Description of Farmer Oak--An Incident
II. Night--The Flock--An Interior--Another Interior
III. A Girl on Horseback--Conversation
IV. Gabriel's Resolve--The Visit--The Mistake
V. Departure of Bathsheba--A Pastoral Tragedy
VI. The Fair--The Journey--The Fire
VII. Recognition--A Timid Girl
VIII. The Malthouse--The Chat--News
IX. The Homestead--A Visitor--Half-Confidences
X. Mistress and Men
XI. Outside the Barracks--Snow--A Meeting
XII. Farmers--A Rule--An Exception XIII. Sortes Sanctorum--The Valentine XIV. Effect of the Letter--Sunrise
XV. A Morning Meeting--The Letter Again
XVI. All Saints' and All Souls' XVII. In the Market-Place
XVIII. Boldwood in Meditation--Regret
XIX. The SheepWashing--The Offer
XX. Perplexity--Grinding the Shears--A Quarrel
XXI. Troubles in the Fold--A Message
XXII. The Great Barn and the Sheep-Shearers
XXIII. Eventide--A Second Declaration XXIV. The Same Night--The Fir Plantation XXV. The New Acquaintance Described XXVI. Scene on the Verge of the Hay-Mead XXVII. Hiving the Bees
XXVIII. The Hollow Amid the Ferns XXIX. Particulars of a Twilight Walk XXX. Hot Cheeks and Tearful Eyes XXXI. Blame--Fury
XXXII. Night--Horses Tramping XXXIII. In the Sun--A Harbinger XXXIV. Home Again--A Trickster XXXV. At an Upper Window
XXXVI. Wealth in Jeopardy--The Revel
XXXVII. The Storm--The Two Together
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XXXVIII. Rain--One Solitary Meets Another
XXXIX. Coming Home--A Cry XL. On Casterbridge Highway XLI. Suspicion--Fanny Is Sent For
XLII. Joseph and His Burden--Buck's Head
XLIII. Fanny's Revenge
XLIV. Under a Tree--Reaction XLV. Troy's Romanticism XLVI. The Gurgoyle: Its Doings XLVII. Adventures by the Shore
XLVIII. Doubts Arise--Doubts Linger
XLIX. Oak's Advancement--A Great Hope
L. The Sheep Fair--Troy Touches His Wife's Hand
LI. Bathsheba Talks with Her Outrider
LII. Converging Courses
LIII. Concurritur--Horae Momento
LIV. After the Shock
LV. The March Following--"Bathsheba Boldwood" LVI. Beauty in Loneliness--After All
LVII. A Foggy Night and Morning--Conclusion
PREFACE
In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd," as they appeared month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt the word "Wessex" from the pages of early English history, and give it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once included in that extinct kingdom. The series of novels I projected being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed to require a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity
to their scene. Finding that the area of a single county did not afford a canvas large enough for this purpose, and that there were
objections to an invented name, I disinterred the old one. The press and the public were kind enough to welcome the fanciful plan, and willingly joined me in the anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living under Queen Victoria;--a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who could read and write, and National school children. But I believe I am correct in stating that, until the existence of this contemporaneous Wessex was announced in the present story, in 1874, it had never been heard of, and that the expression, "a Wessex peasant," or "a Wessex cus-tom," would theretofore have been taken to refer to nothing later in date than the Norman Conquest.
I did not anticipate that this application of the word to a modern use would extend outside the chapters of my own chronicles. But the name was soon taken up elsewhere as a local designation. The first to do so was the now defunct Examiner, which, in the impression bearing date July 15, 1876, entitled one of its articles "The Wessex Labourer," the article turning out to be no dissertation on farming during the Heptarchy, but on the modern peasant of the south-west counties, and his presentation in these stories.
Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-country, has become more and more popular as a practical definition; and the dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from. But I ask all good and gentle readers to be so kind as to forget this, and to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any inhabitants of a Victorian Wessex outside the pages of this and the companion volumes in which they were first discovered.
Moreover, the village called Weatherbury, wherein the scenes of the present story of the series are for the most part laid, would perhaps be hardly discernible by the explorer, without help, in any existing place nowadays; though at the time, comparatively recent, at which the tale was written, a sufficient reality to meet the descriptions, both of backgrounds and personages, might have been traced easily enough. The church remains, by great good fortune, unrestored and intact, and a few of the old houses; but the ancient malthouse, which was formerly so characteristic of the parish, has been pulled down these twenty years; also most of the thatched and dormered cottages that were once lifeholds. The game of prisoner's base, which not so long ago seemed to enjoy a perennial vi-
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tality in front of the worn-out stocks, may, so far as I can say, be entirely unknown to the rising generation of schoolboys there. The practice of divination by Bible and key, the regarding of valentines as things of serious import, the shearing-supper, and the harvest-home, have, too, nearly disappeared in the wake of the old houses; and with them have gone, it is said, much of that love of fuddling to which the village at one time was notoriously prone. The change at the root of this has been the recent supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers, who carried on the local traditions and humours, by a population of more or less migratory labourers, which has led to a break of continuity in local history, more fatal than any other thing to the preservation of legend, folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities. For these the indispensable conditions of existence are attachment to the soil of one particular spot by generation after generation.
T. H.
February 1895
CHAPTER I
Description of Farmer Oak--An Incident
When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.
His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good character. On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the parish and the drunken section,--that is, he went to church, but yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed, and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening to
the sermon. Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of