HARDY'S WORK BEFORE 1874

In Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy finds his own voice for the first time. It was not, of course, his first novel. As early as 1868 he had completed a novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, which was rejected by publishers who were looking for something more sensational. Hardy responded to this with Desperate Remedies (1871), which, although it certainly is sensational, has little else to recommend it. It is a strained novel, uncomfortable to read; too much of it comes from Hardy's own reading, and the characters are largely stock types, conventional villains, heroines and detectives from the ranks of minor Victorian fiction. It was suggested to him, however, that the rustic elements in both of these first novels were successful, and Hardy, taking the hint, produced Under the Greenwood Tree (1872).

In this work we can find in rudimentary form most of the elements of Hardy's major fiction, something we might expect from his having grouped it with the Novels of Character and Environment.

Under the Greenwood Tree is about love. It is about the love of more than one man for the same woman and it is about the winning of her by the poorest and least ostentatious of these men. This is an ordering of character and event that persists remarkably in Hardy. The characters bear a relationship to one another that will become familiar as the novels proceed.