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The Time Machine

July 25, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Time Machine (1888-1895) is the first of H.G. Wells’ works which made him instantly famous as a writer of science fiction novels at the end of the nineteenth century. He had studied biology and zoology at the National School of Science in South Kensington (later to become Imperial College London) under the tutelage of Charles Darwin’s friend and supporter, Thomas Huxley. Wells’ first novels featured a number of issues in theoretical science on which he also speculated in his journalism – time travel, genetic engineering, inter-planetary warfare, ecology, eugenics, and space travel – all of which he crafted into short, very readable fictions that appealed to a very wide public.

The Time Machine – a note on the text

The Time Machine first saw light of day as a short story called ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ Wells published it as a student in three editions of the Science Schools Journal (April-June 1888). It then appeared, after several re-writes, in 1894 as The Time Machine in National Observer. but the serial version was halted whilst still incomplete because the editor of the magazine changed.

However, his original supporter W.E. Henley became the editor of the New Review and encouraged Wells to revise and expand the work. It then appeared as a monthly serial between January and May 1895, attracting considerable attention even before it appeared in single-volume book form published by William Heinemann in May 1895.

For full details of the history and development of the text, plus revisions to subsequent editions, see the note by Patrick Parrinder in the Penguin Classics edition of the novel.

The Time Machine – critical commentary

The conceits which underpin the credibility of the novel are developed in two parts. The first concerns the concept of what constitutes a ‘dimension’. The scientist (and time traveller) argues at the beginning of the story that if we can move in any one of three dimensions (length, breadth, thickness), and if time is considered the forth dimension, then why should we not be able to move in time as well? The idea is very seductive. Wells simply equates these ‘four’ dimensions as equal – and the rest follows naturally:

“There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it”, and “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and Duration”.

This rather simplistic notion of time being a ‘dimension’ of the same order as length, breadth, and thickness is taken at face value by Wells, his outer-narrator, and the scientist himself. That having been argued (and ‘established’) Wells makes no effort at all to create a convincing method of explaining how these transitions in time will be made. Instead, the scientist constructs his time travel machine – a Heath-Robinson type of contraption, with ‘ivory bars’, ‘a brass rail’, ‘a saddle’, and a ‘starting lever’ which propels him eight hundred thousand years into the future. In a later essay (1933) commenting on his own work, Wells admitted that this was a form of literary-scientific sleight-of-hand:

For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader play the game properly, he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis He must trick him into an unwary concession to get some plausible assumption and get on with the story whilst the illusion holds. … Hitherto, … the fantastic element was brought in by magic … It occurred to me that … an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted.

The second part of his conceit is the social conditions of the world his scientist visits. This world of the future (located in the Thames valley) of 802, 701 AD is comprised of a rag bag of elements that reflect interests Wells himself espoused – vegetarianism, socialist utopias, class conflict, and genetic mutation.

The creatures who live above ground – the Eloi – are etiolated and enfeebled because they have reached a stage of development in which all conflict and struggle has been removed from their lives. They exist in a state of idiotic collective bliss, surviving on a diet of fruit in communal halls. Even the differentiation between the sexes has almost disappeared. However, they are ‘supported’ by the Morlocks, who live underground and take their revenge for this injustice by eating the Eloi when they get the chance.

It is not entirely clear why the Morlocks, having mastered machinery, have not also retained the skills of husbandry, and why they are still afraid of light – including struck matches. Wells’ vision of a future world is not an altogether coherent set of circumstances, just a set of alarmist warnings.

Form

It has to be said that for such an early work, the novel is very neatly constructed – in three parts. The first two chapters of the novel outline the scientist’s ‘theory’ of travelling in the fourth dimension and his presentation of the model version of his time machine to his dinner guests. The second and main part of the work is his account of the temporal journey and his adventures in the future – which he gives as a first person narrative. Then the third part returns to the scene of the somewhat incredulous dinner guests where the outer narrator takes over to report that the scientist has embarked on another journey and has not been seen for three years.

This conclusion suggests that either something has gone wrong and the scientist is ‘stuck’ in some future (or past) date, or that he has somehow become a permanent time-traveller with no reason to return to his earthly ‘present’. Both of these possibilities reinforce the illusion that the time machine actually ‘works’.

In her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the book, Marina Warner describes The Time Machine as ‘a long short story’ , and there are good arguments to support this view. The work is only 25,000 words long, and it is composed essentially of one anecdote.

But on the other hand the book is built on a large and powerful idea with universal implications – even if the theory is flawed. And the scientist’s exploits amongst the Morlocks and Eloi are more complex and substantial than constitute the material of a short story. So it could be argued that the work is a short novel or even a novella.

Footnote

Regarding Wells’ quasi-scientific notions of ‘dimensions’ , there is an interesting but little-known novella which explores imaginary worlds of one, two, and three dimensions published only ten years earlier. It was written by Cambridge scholar and clergyman Edwin A. Abbott in 1884. . Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions explores (in a witty and fantastical manner) the idea that people living in a world of only x-dimensions cannot conceptualise anyone living in a world of x+1 dimensions. His examples range from people living in lines, squares, cubes, and spheres, and In one sense his satirical thesis supports Wells’ notion that time is merely another ‘dimension’. Abbott’s conclusion is that we, who live in a world of three dimensions, merely have difficulty conceptualising life in a world of four dimensions – or even more.

The Time Machine – study resources

The Time Machine – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Time Machine – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

H.G. Wells Classic Collection – five novels – Amazon UK

H.G. Wells Biography – Amazon UK

The Time Machine – first edition – 1895

The Time Machine – chapter summaries

1 A scientist (the Time Traveller) is explaining the geometry of four dimensions – length, breadth, thickness, and time. He produces a model of a time machine and sets it off into the future or maybe the past. He has a full scale model in his laboratory

2 A week later a group of observers assemble for dinner at the scientist’s house in Richmond. He appears in a ragged and dishevelled state. After dressing for dinner he then tells them that he has been time travelling for eight days.

3 He tells how got into the machine, pulled its levers, and shot forward in time at a vertiginous pace, traversing years in minutes. When he stops he encounters a huge Sphinx figure on a bronze pedestal, then is approached by small long-haired people.

4 It is the year 802, 701 AD. The elfin-like folk take the scientist into a large dilapidated hall where they eat fruit around low stone tables. Many common animals have become extinct. He tries to learn their language, but they have very little patience or concentration. There is little differentiation between the sexes. He perceives this society as a form of cvommunism, a social paradise in which there is no disease, no traffic, and no conflict. He also sees it as a society which is ‘resting’ in its historical development, having eliminated the need to struggle.

5 After exploring the area overlooking the Thames he finds that his time machine has disappeared. He searches desperately, concluding that it has been hidden inside the bronze pedestal. There are no shops, no machinery, and no old or infirm people in evidence. He rescues a woman-child Weena, who becomes attached to him. He sees ghosts, waterless wells, and a strange white animal resembling an ape. He reasons that another species lives underground – the Morlocks – who are like slaves to the Eloi, who live above ground.

6 After fearful hesitation he climbs down a well and discovers a system of underground tunnels and a hall of machinery. The Morlocks attack him, so he escapes back to the surface again.

7 In fear of the Morlocks he takes Weena to the Palace of Green Porcelain (in Wimbledon) and spends a night under then stars He plans to take her back with him in the time machine

8 When they reach the Palace it turns out to be a derelict museum which he plunders, retrieving a crowbar, some camphor, and a box of matches [which are 800,000 years old].

9 In returning he sets up camp in a wood and lights a fire. But he falls asleep and is set upon by the Morlocks. His camp fire sets the woods alight, and this drives away the Morlocks, who are afraid of light.

10 He returns to the pedestal, to find its doors open and the time machine inside. But as he enters, the doors close and the Morlocks attack him again. He fights them off with matches and the crowbar, and then escapes in the time machine.

11 However, he presses the accelerator and flies even further into the future, bringing the machine to a halt on a desolate stony beach where he is attacked by giant crabs. He goes even further into the future to discover that all animal life has disappeared, and he witnesses an eclipse.

`12 He gradually returns to the laboratory and his dinner guests. They are incredulous, but he has some flowers of an unknown species in his pocket that were put there by Weena. Next day the narrator goes to see him again, but the scientist takes off in the time machine again. Three years later he has still not returned.

Epilogue The outer narrator reflects that the scientist might have gone back into prehistoric times, or he might be in the near future, when all society’s current problems have been solved.

More science fiction by H.G. Wells

The Invisible Man (1897) – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Wheels of Chance (1896) – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds (1898) – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

The First Men in the Moon (1901) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Shape of Things to Come (1933) – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

More on H.G. Wells
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Tragic Muse

September 22, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Tragic Muse first appeared as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly from January 1889 through to 1890. The novel was then presented in three volumes published in America by the Boston publishers Houghton, Mifflin and Company in 1890, and in England by Macmillan at virtually the same time. It is one of the longest of Henry James’ novels, and deals with a subject dear to his heart – the relationships between life and art.

first English edition in three volumes 1890

The Tragic Muse – critical commentary

The main theme

It is no surprise that this novel attracted very little attention when it was first published, and has generated so little citical commentary in the years since. The novel contains none of the careful organisation and tight structure of James’s more successful works, and its main theme of the artistic life versus social integration is not well realised.

Nick Dormer has a career as a member of parliament virtually handed to him on a silver dinner plate, but he turns it down in favour of his enthusiasm for painting. But his skill and his application as a painter are never convincingly presented. It is also difficult to believe that somebody would give up a parliamentary career on the strength of one painting which was deemed successful. He remains a weak and dilettantish figure throughout.

His sister Biddy’s activity as a sculptor is simply not realised at all. She merely hovers in her brother’s background as a fellow enthusiast.

Only Miriam’s transformation from pushy and ambitious would-be actress with few skills has any credibility attached to it. She develops via application and practice, through to a successful professional career. This part of the novel is altogether more convincing.

The length of the novel

This is possibly one of the slowest-moving of all James’s novels. It’s not only inordinately long (almost 200,000 words) but inordinately long-winded in terms of narrative technique and the recounting of events. The pace is so glacially slow at times that paragraph upon paragraph is devoted to issues as trivial as who might or might not turn up to a restaurant for lunch.

The result is a form of authorial ‘thinking out loud’ which includes multiple possibilities for almost every scene – all of which merely represent James’s point of view – not that of any of his characters. Thus the tale is essentially told, not shown.

James and the theatre

It is interesting to note that the overt subject matter of the novel (reflected in its title) of the stage and acting are topics which fascinated James and were to lead to his own ultimately disastrous excursions into playwrighting and the theatre. He converted his own early novel The American (1876) into a play which had modest success in the 1890s. On the strength of this he wrote a dozen plays, but all of them proved unsuccessful, and most famously his costume drama Guy Domville was booed off stage on its first night in England in 1895.

Nevertheless, although he was deeply wounded by the experience, he retained his interest in dramatic structures, and some of the works he conceived as dramas were later converted to novels which consist largely of conversations between the characters – such as The Other House (1896) and The Outcry.

It is also worth noting that almost all of his most carefully crafted works were later successfully adapted for the cinema – from Washington Square (1880) The Bostonians (1886) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to The Golden Bowl (1904). And a number of his shorter works have been turned into operas and plays, such as Owen Wingrave (1892) The Aspern Papers (1888) and The Turn of the Screw (1898).

However, despite the presence of drama in many of his novels and stories, the choice of theatre and acting as a serious topic for The Tragic Muse presents special difficulties for even so skilled a writer as James. It simply isn’t possible to give a convincing account of an evanescent art form such as the theatre in prose form.

He creates a persuasive sense that Miriam Rooth improves her acting skills as a result of learning from Madame Carré, and he evokes both the backstage and front of house atmosphere of the theatre very well, but the essence of what drama means eludes him.

The same is true in his choice of painting as Nick’s vocation. No matter how many brush strokes across canvass and paint-soaked rags are mentioned, it is virtually impossible to convey with words the visual quality of any work Nick produces. We are simply told that his portraits of Miriam (and he only paints two during the entire novel) are successful.

The actress

Contemporary readers might find it difficult to understand why Peter is confronted with a dilemma in his passion for Miriam. He is in love with her, but in order to make a relationship with her he must persuade her to give up the very thing in which she is passionately interested – the theatre.

During the nineteenth century (and into the middle of the twentieth) the profession of actress was regarded as not far short of prostitution. Peter is a diplomat – and could not possibly combine a relationship with an actress and his career.

There was a long-standing tradition of upper-class males who had casual and semi-official liaisons with actresses. One thinks of the Prince of Wales and Lillie Langtry (real name Emile Charlotte Le Breton). But these relationships could not normally be incorporated into polite society. In Peter’s own words of warning to Miriam “e;an actress would never be invited into the drawing room of a lady”e;.

So Peter realises that there is a total incompatibility between his duties and protocols as a diplomat and his passion for such a bohemian figure as an actress – a problem which he solves by his sudden decision to marry Biddy at the end of the novel.

Those who wish to take a psycho-analytic approach to the interpretation of the story will not fail to recognise that it is one (of many in James’s oeuvre) in which two men (very close friends, and cousins) are in love with the same woman – the magnetic figure of Miriam.

Loose ends

Given the enormous length of the novel, it is reasonable to complain that it contains far too many loose ends – lines of the plot which are unexamined, unfinished, or unexplained (to use the three part amplification figure which James employs throughout the narrative).

Nick’s elder brother, Percival Dormer, is suddenly mentioned towards the end of the novel, and for a moment it looks as if he will add to the significance of the family’s social fortunes – but he just as suddenly disappears and is never mentioned again. This is bad on two counts.

As the elder son, it is more likely that the family’s hopes would rest on him, not Nick. It is the elder son who would be expected to follow his father’s role in parliament, but all those hopes (and Mr Carteret’s money) are placed on Nick. These apparently minor details undermine a significant building block of the realist novel – social accuracy, plausibility, and consistency.

Biddy is an interesting character in embryo. She is spirited, independent, and like her brother inclined to practice art. But her activity as a sculptress is never persuasive and simply evaporates in the hurried and unsatisfying conclusion when she marries Peter and disappears to his next diplomatic posting.

Julia Dallow too is a potentially interesting character – a rich and attractive woman who wishes to engage in (Liberal) politics at a national and local level. She is the financial power behind the selection of a candidate for the constituency of Harsh – though it should be noted that this is a ‘rotten’ (more euphemistically a ‘pocket’) borough.

Gabriel Nash is like a Satan figure, coming in to plead the case for aestheticism and lure people (Nick in particular) away from their civic duty. Nash appears from nowhere, plants his ideas, then disappears again. Nobody knows where he lives, and when Nick tries to paint his portrait, he escapes, claiming to be ‘indestructible’.

The Tragic Muse – study resources

The Tragic Muse – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Tragic Muse – Library of America – Amazon US

The Tragic Muse – Kindle edition

The Tragic Muse – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Tragic Muse – plot summary

Chapter I. Nicholas (Nick) Dormer is on a cultural visit to Paris with his widowed mother and sisters. Lady Dormer has severe doubts about the moral effects of the modern art they are viewing. Nick however believes that all art contributes to a general good.

Chapter II. Nick is the second eldest son of a politician and a would-be painter who is aware of his limitations. His sister Bridget (Biddy) wants to be a sculptor. They meet Gabriel Nash, who is an aphoristic conversationalist and an aesthete. Biddy is intrigued by him.

Chapter III. Grace Dormer and her mother go to lunch and discuss people’s marriage and money prospects. They are joined by their relative Peter Sherringham who reveals that Nick is being tipped for his father’s old seat as a member of parliament.

Chapter IV. Everyone thinks that Nick should ‘apply’ for the seat – but he needs money to do so (because it is a rotten borough). Nash is against the plan: he offers to introduce the family to his friend Miriam Rooth, an actress, and her mother. The theatre is considered as an artistic medium. Nick thinks it is a feeble art form; Sherringham is an enthusiastic supporter; and Lady Dormer disapproves of it completely.

Chapter V. His mother wishes that Nick were more active and enthusiastic about the chance of the parliamentary seat, and feels disappointed not to find Julia Dallow available as a potential financial supporter. Meanwhile Peter defends his enthusiasm for the theatre to Nick.

Chapter VI. The family have a restaurant dinner with Julia Dallow who is the power behind the appointment of a candidate at Harsh, her estate and parliamentary rotten borough. Julia and Nick then discuss his prospects. He is sceptical about standing: she is willing to put up the money in order to keep out the Tories.

Chapter VII. Nick and Peter meet Miriam Rooth and her mother at the home of Madame Carré. Miriam delivers recitations, but Madame Carré does not think she has any real talent. Peter however is keen to support and promote her.

Chapter VIII. Miriam and her mother are living in reduced circumstances. She gives another recital next day at an event organised by Peter. He is embarrassed by her performance and thinks her vulgar – but is nevertheless attracted to her.

Chapter IX. Gabriel Nash talks to Nick about his personal theories of the aesthetic life – turning his own feelings into a form of art. Nick is going to stand for parliament, but wishes to be a painter. He feels the force of the family’s political tradition as a burden.

Paris Street – Caillebot

Chapter X. Peter feels oppressed by the promise he has made to help Miriam, and he also fears he might be falling in love with her. She gives another pushy and bad recital chez Madame Carré. Peter also feels that critics treat actresses badly.

Chapter XI. Peter and Miriam discuss her life of poverty-in-exile and speaking styles in the theatre. He argues that she is without a genuine personality, but makes herself into a work of art, and is acting all the time.

Chapter XII. Peter is conscious that the protocols of his career in the diplomatic service mean that he should keep his theatrical enthusiasm under firmer control. He disregards Mrs Rooth’s superficiality, and the summer passes with MIriam still taking lessons from Madame Carré. Peter tries to educate her and pays for better lodgings. He thinks he might rise above personal issues, but when he goes back to London at the end of the summer he realises that he is completely in love with Miriam.

Chapter XIII. Nick is elected as Liberal Party member of parliament for Harsh. His mother wants him to marry Julia, who has financed his campaign. But Nick is reluctant, not really interested in politics, and wishes to retain his freedom. However, Lady Agnes argues that it would help her and his two unmarried sisters to establish themselves socially, and this touches his sense of family duty.

Chapter XIV. When Nick stays at Harsh with Julia and starts engaging with his political duties, he realises how they are enhanced by her presence.

Chapter XV. Nick rows out to an island on the lake at Julia’s estate at Harsh and proposes to Julia in a little Roman temple. They tease each other and he puts on a front of frivolity. Julia says his mother and sisters can live in one of her spare houses – Broadwood.

Chapter XVI. Nick visits his benefactor Mr Carteret at Beauclere and appreciate centuries of tradition that the house, grounds, and an old Abbey represents. Carteret is a liberal traditionalist with a well-informed but limited range of interests.

Chapter XVII. Next morning Carteret dispenses advice to Nick on his parliamentary responsibilities – which depresses Nick. But he approves of Nick’s marriage plans and promises to bestow money on him to give him financial independence. Nick however reveals that Julia wishes to wait for a year to be married.

Chapter XVIII. Peter feels that his ambition to succeed in his career is seriously compromised by his feelings for Miriam – who would be entirely unsuitable and unacceptable as a diplomat’s wife. He returns to Paris and encourages Mrs Rooth to take Miriam to London. She has meanwhile been taken up by admirer Basil Dashwood, who Peter claims to be keen to meet.

XIX. Peter follows Miriam and Dashwood to Madame Carré’s where she demonstrates that she has improved her skills. He befriends Dashwood and claims he has a potential engagement for Miriam arranged on the English stage.

Chapter XX. Peter takes Miriam and her mother to the Theatre Francais where he gives them a tour of its professional inner mechanisms and architecture – the theatre as seen from an actor’s point of view.

Le Théatre Francais

XXI Peter flirts with Miriam and offers to take her away from the theatre. They meet the star actress Mademoiselle Voisin, who takes them to her dressing room. Miriam is very impressed by her urbane style and the tradition of theatre that she represents. Peter repeats his offer to marry her – arguing that if she remains as an actress she will be excluded from polite society.

XXII Nick is frustrated by Julia’s making him wait to be married. She wishes to mingle with political society, whereas he wants to get away from it. They come close to arguing, but she finally agrees to marry him in five week’s time.

XXIII Nick retreats to his artist’s studio for the Easter holidays, where he is visited by Gabriel Nash, who expounds his theories of aestheticism once more. On seeing Nick’s paintings and drawings he insists that Nick has a talent it would be immoral to neglect.

XXIV Nash thinks Nick ought to give up parliament and devote himself to painting. Nick is flattered but sceptical. Nash suggests that Nick should paint Miriam’s portrait.

XXV Nick has begun to paint Miriam’s portrait. She has become successful on the stage and patronises Peter. Nick is determined not to fall in love with her.

XXVI Miriam recounts the events of her theatrical success to Nick. It has been made possible by Peter’s buying the rights to a play, then giving them to her as a source of income. He continues with the portrait – only to be suddenly be confronted by Julia, who is shocked by the intimate scene she stumbles upon.

XXVII That evening Julia explains in a jealous fit that she thinks Nick prefers art to the political life she has created for him. She feels he has betrayed her, breaks off their relationship, calls on her old friend Mrs Gresham, and goes off to Paris.

XXVIII Julia meets her brother Peter in Paris and encourages him to pay attention to Biddy Dormer. Peter goes to London and tries to locate Miriam without success, but when he goes to Nick’s studio, he finds Biddy there.

Sarah Bernhardt

XXIX Peter and Biddy discuss Nick and Julia’s problems, the fact that Lady Agnes is upset because none of her children are married. They also consider the value of art, for which Nick is going to give up his parliamentary seat. Biddy is sculpting and thinks she will never marry. They look at Nick’s portrait of Marian, which is very good.

XXX Peter takes Biddy and her friend to the theatre to see Miriam. He finds her transcendentally accomplished and develops grandiose visions of a publicly subsidised theatre. He discusses Miriam’s rise to fame with Dashwood, and feels patronised by him.

XXXI Peter spends the afternoon with Miriam and her arty hangers-on. She expands upon her ambitions. He becomes her regular coach and dramaturg. He regards Dashwood as a lightweight, but remains ambiguous in his feelings towards Gabriel Nash.

XXXII Mr Carteret becomes ill, and Nick is summoned to Beauclere. He feels ill at ease, partly because of his non-marriage to Julia, and partly because of his intention to quit parliament. Carteret summons him to tell him something important.

XXXIII Carteret want to know about Nick’s marriage to Julia, on which his promised financial settlement depends. Nick gives him an embarrassed explanation of that particular truth, which upsets the old man. Later the same day he demands the full story, and Nick is forced to reveal his plan to quit politics – as a result of which he will forfeit sixty thousand pounds.

XXXIV Nick is forced to reveal the whole story to his mother, who is mortified with disappointment. She feels that they might have to give up living at Broadwood following the rift with Julia and that Nick’s loss of Carteret’s legacy, plus giving up parliament is a shame the whole family must bear.

XXXV Nick is tempted to go abroad, but realises that he must stay and face the consequences of his actions. He is visited by Gabriel Nash, who reveals that Peter is in love with Miriam Rooth, who in her turn is in love with Nick – ever since the meeting and silent clash with Julia in the studio.

XXXVI Peter and Nash discuss Miriam’s prospects for success, and the fact that she is in love with Nick. Nash opines that she would give up the theatre for Nick – but that there would probably be a heavy price to pay.

XXXVII In Miriam’s bohemian late afternoon salon she bandies with Peter, flatters Nick, and treats Dashwood like a skivvy. Peter feels mildly jealous of her praise for his friend and cousin Nick.

XXXVIII Peter wonders why he feels any rivalry with his friend Nick when (theoretically) he has nothing at stake with Miriam. He applies for a new diplomatic posting and is given a position as ambassador to a state in Central America.

XXXIX Peter goes to see Lady Agnes, who is still eaten up with Nick’s giving up parliament and his loss of prospects. She takes an exaggerated interest in Peter’s career development and salary, which he realises is a poorly disguised wish that he should marry her daughter Biddy.

Sarah Benhardt as Cleopatra

XL Whilst Peter is preparing himself for a move to the tropics, he is summoned by Miriam to a dress rehearsal next morning. He goes, and is obviously under her spell.

XLI She summons him again the following day for a private assignation – but then forgets what she wished to discuss with him. He ends up confessing that he is leaving because he is desperately in love with her, and because he realises that a relationship with her is not possible.

XLII Nick has begun to regret giving up parliament, and doesn’t think he has any genuine artistic talent either. He is visited by Peter, who has conflicting social engagements with Miriam and Lady Agnes.

XLIII Biddy arrives at the studio and there is banter with Peter and Nick – then Miriam arrives with her mother. Peter and Biddy go shopping and discuss Miriam, on which topic Biddy full of practical good sense.

XLIV Arriving at the studio, Miriam and her mother flatter Nick – and themselves. Nick continues a second portrait of Miriam promised to Peter whilst Mrs Rooth evaluates his belongings. The two women have invited Biddy to visit them, and they discuss Miriam’s strategy for dealing with Peter.

XLV In the evening the first night of Miriam’s new play is a resounding success. Peter refuses to go back stage with Nick in the intervals, but at the final curtain he sends a request to Miriam on a visiting card – which she accepts.

XLVI Peter goes back to Miriam’s house, where she joins him. He offers to marry her if she will give up the theatre. She refuses. They argue about the social and moral merits of the theatre. In desperation he asks for re-consideration in a year’s time. Mrs Rooth then arrives and promises to help him.

XLVII Nick continues to drift morally, but when Julia returns from her travels abroad he feels that the family should give back the house they have borrowed from her. Julia accepts their offer, but then invites Biddy to live with her at Harsh. She then moves back into Broadwood and asks Lady Agnes and Grace to join her there again.

XLVIII Miriam continues to be more and more celebrated, but Nick’s second portrait of her is unfinished. She visits for a sitting, flirts and philosophises with him, then leaves for a theatrical tour of the provinces.

XLIX Gabriel Nash visits Nick’s studio and predicts that Nick will reach a compromise with Julia and will end up a painter of society portraits. Nick begins to paint Nash’s portrait, but Nash feels uncomfortable, argues that he is ‘indestructible’ and then suddenly disappears – never to return.

L Some months later Nick spends Xmas at Broadwood with his mother and sisters, then goes to Paris for six weeks. Biddy visits Nick’s studio to tell him that Julia wants him to paint her portrait. Miriam suddenly appears with Dashwood, ready for the first night of her new role as Juliet. She arranges a box for Nick and Biddy.

LI At the theatre that night Peter suddenly appears, back from his posting in the Americas. Nick reveals to him that Miriam has just married Dashwood. Peter immediately switches his attention to Biddy, then marries her and takes her on to his next posting abroad.

Henry James’s study

The Tragic Muse – principal characters

I	an un-named narrator who makes occasional appearances
Lady Agnes Dormer	a haughty and traditionalist widow
Percival Dormer	her eldest son, who never appears
Nicholas Dormer	her younger son, a reluctant politician and would-be painter
Grace Dormer	her eldest daughter
Bridget (Biddy) Dormer	her youngest daughter, and would-be sculptor
Peter Sherringham	a family cousin and diplomat, with an enthusiasm for the theatre
Mrs Julia Dallow	Peter’s sister, a rich widow
Gabriel Nash	an aesthete friend of Nick’s from Oxford
Miriam Rooth	a half-Jewish actress
Mrs Rooth	her mother, a widow
Rudolph Roth	Miriam’s father, an artistic stockbroker
Madame Carré	an old French actress
Mr Carteret	a family friend and financial supporter of Nick
Mts Gresham	a general factotum to Julia at Harsh
Basil Dashwood	actor and admirer of Miriam

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

More on Henry James
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The Turn of the Screw

February 19, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a classic ghost story which has defied conclusive interpretation ever since it was first published. A governess in a remote country house is in charge of two children who appear to be haunted by former employees, who are now supposed to be dead. But are they? The story is drenched in complexities – including the central issue of the reliability of the person who is telling the tale. This can be seen as a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the traditional theme of the haunted house, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease. Or is it simply, “the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read”?

Henry James – by John Singer Sargeant

The Turn of the Screw – critical commentary

The film versions and the opera are explicit interpretations of the novella – because both of them make physically manifest the figures of Peter Quint and Miss Jessell. The text of the novella offers no such manifestations. These two characters do not appear in the story at all: they are only described by the governess and discussed by her with others.

At no time does anyone else see the figures the governess claims to have observed. She is always alone at such moments as her sightings occur. There is no evidence in the text that anybody else sees the figures the governess claims to see.

The governess ‘discusses’ Peter Quint and Miss Jessel with Mrs Grose, but in an oblique and ambiguous manner whereby she elicits confirmation of her impressions from the housekeeper, who has known Quint and Jessel as former employees and is gullible enough to share the views of the governess.

Because the narrative is delivered entirely from the point of view of the governess, readers only have her opinions and impressions on which to make judgements. She convinces herself for instance that the two children are devoted to her, but a close reading of their rections to her reveal a growing irritation and hostility. She becomes psychologically oppressive to them, and eventually frightens Miles to death.

And because she never reveals the content of the letter which was sent to the house, we never learn why Miles has been expelled from his school.

Narrative structure

The novella appears to be that of a classic ‘framed narrative’ – which is normally a ‘story within a story’. It is introduced as a tale told by one guest (Douglas) to others at a weekend house party. It is one of the others (un-named) who presents the story. However, once the narrative begins, these intermediary narrators never reappear.

The story also comes to the reader via an extraordinarily oblique route. It is introduced by one (outer) narrator who is part of a group assembled for a weekend house party. He describes a fellow guest (Douglas) reading the manuscript of someone else’s story.

The governess has written down her account of events and given the manuscript to Douglas. Some time later Douglas gives the outer narrator the original manuscript, and the narrator makes a copy of it. It is the copy which forms the main part of the narrative. No reason is given why the outer narrator didn’t present the original text.

The Turn of the Screw – study resources

The Turn of the Screw – Oxford Worlds Classics – Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw – Oxford Worlds Classics – Amazon US

The Turn of the Screw – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

The Turn of the Screw – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Turn of the Screw – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Turn of the Screw – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Turn of the Screw – the preface to the 1908 New York edition

www.turnofthescrew.com – a history of critical interpretations.

The Turn of the Screw – Text, Contexts, Criticism – at Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw – A Reader’s Guide – at Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw – The Collier’s Weekly Version

Henry James – biographical notes

The Turn of the Screw – a book review

The Turn of the Screw – audioBook version at LibriVox

The Turn of the Screw – unabridged audioBook version

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Turn of the Screw – plot summary

The plot summary that follows is deliberately brief – because it is difficult to give an account of the narrative without at the same time offering an interpretation of its deeper possible meanings.

An unnamed narrator listens to a male friend reading a manuscript written by a former governess whom the friend claims to have known and who is now dead. The manuscript tells the story of how the young governess is hired by a man who has found himself responsible for his niece and nephew after the death of their parents. He lives in London and has no interest in raising the children. The boy, Miles, is attending a boarding school whilst his sister, Flora, is living at the country home in Essex. She is currently being cared for by the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. The governess’s new employer gives her full charge of the children and explicitly states that she is not to bother him with communications of any sort. The governess travels to her new employer’s country house and begins her duties.

Miles soon returns from school for the summer just after a letter from the headmaster stating that he has been expelled. Miles never speaks of the matter, and the governess is hesitant to raise the issue. She fears that there is some horrid secret behind the expulsion, but is too charmed by the adorable young boy to want to press the issue.

Shortly after, the governess begins to see around the grounds of the estate the figures of a man and woman whom she does not recognize. These figures come and go at will without ever being seen or challenged by other members of the household, and they seem to the governess to be supernatural.

She learns from Mrs. Grose that her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and Miss Jessel’s illicit lover Peter Quint both died under curious circumstances. Prior to their death, they spent most of their time with Flora and Miles, and this fact takes on grim significance for the governess when she becomes convinced that the two children are secretly aware of the presence of the ghosts.

Later, Flora runs away from the house while Miles plays music for the Governess. They notice and go to find her. The governess and Mrs. Grose find her in a clearing in the wood, and the governess is convinced that she has been talking to Miss Jessel. When Flora is forced to admit this, she demands to never see the governess again. Mrs. Grose takes Flora away to her uncle, leaving the governess with Miles.

That night, they are finally talking of Miles’ expulsion when the governess sees the ghost of Quint at the window. The governess shields Miles, who screams at her as he attempts to see the ghost. The governess tells him that he is no longer under the control of the ghost, and finds that Miles has died in her arms.

Principal characters

Narrator	an unnamed outer narrator
Douglas	possessor of the original manuscript, who introduces the story to fellow guests
The uncle	unnamed guardian of two young children
The governess	unnamed young woman, who has written the original account of events
Mrs Grose	the housekeeper at Bly
Miles	a young schoolboy
Flora	his sister
Peter Quint	a former valet
Miss Jessel	a former schoolmistress

The Turn of the Screw – film version

The Innocents – 1961 adaptation by Jack Clayton (dir)

There are several film versions of the story – of which Jack Clayton’s 1961 version starring Deborah Carr is perhaps the most widely admired. The story was adapted for the screen by William Archibald and Truman Capote, with additional scenes by novelist and playwright John Mortimer, and the version was re-named The Innocents – the title alone of which is a form of ‘interpretation’.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Literary criticism

Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago University Press, 1983.

Robert Kinbrough, Henry James: ‘The Turn of the Screw’, New York: Norton Critical editions, 1966.

T.J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Shlomith Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James, University of Chicago Press, 1977.

John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

Gerald Willen (ed), A Casebook on Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969.

Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers, New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1976.

Henry James’s study

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

Other works by Henry James

Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

More on Henry James
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The Turn of the Screw & Other Stories

June 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on the theory and practice of information design

Towards the late period of his long and astonishingly productive life, Henry James wrote a number of mystery or ghost stories. In these he combined his skills at controlling narrative and point of view with his penchant for puzzling and ambiguous situations. This collection contains some of the most famous tales – ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, ‘Owen Wingrave’, ‘The Friends of the Friends’, and his best-known shorter work, the terrifying story of (apparent) demonic possession, ‘The Turn of the Screw’.

They all deal with ghosts (or the supernatural) in a non-conventional manner, in that they hold a narrative interest whether you find the ghosts believable or not. And none of them rely on any conventional notions of spookiness or ghastly apparitions for their credibility. As Leon Edel, James’s biographer observed, “A ghost was most ghostlike, James held, when it walked in broad daylight, shorn of all Gothic trappings. It was too obvious to have clanking chains, bloodstains, secret stairways and dead of night for one’s phantoms.”

But what these tales do have in common with many other ghost stories is a connection between the supernatural and death. There’s also a more-than-coincidental link to romantic liaisons between the characters. In Sir Edmund Orme for instance (without giving away too much of the story) a middle-aged lady has been haunted by apparitions of a man who took his own life many years before when she ‘wronged’ him. She wishes to protect her daughter from his influence, and does so with the aid of a narrator who falls in love with the daughter. But in the end there is a reversal of expectations and a dramatic price to pay.

Similarly in Owen Wingrave (which Benjamin Britten used as the basis for his opera) the eponymous hero is oppressed by family traditions of military service he is expected to uphold. He resists them on grounds of humane pacifism, and when challenged by a young woman with whom there is a romantic potential, he defies everyone by sleeping in a bedroom haunted by an ancestor. Once again the outcome is disastrous.

James rings quasi-humorous changes on this theme in The Friends of the Friends where he introduces the conceit of two characters who have both seen the ghost of a parent at precisely the moment they have died in a completely different location. When the narrator (a mutual friend and unusually for James, a woman) becomes engaged to the male character she is determined to introduce him to her friend who has had the same experience. But the female character dies first. Her ‘influence’ however, lives on to have a dramatic effect on the proposed marriage.

But of course the most famous story of all is The Turn of the Screw (another Britten opera) which has attracted widespread comment and a number of different interpretations. A governess has the job of looking after two loveable and innocent young children. She is hampered in her endeavours by the repeated appearances of a former gamekeeper and Miss Jessell (her predecessor) who are both supposed to be dead. It seems that these ghosts are seeking to exercise a malign influence over the children, and the governess is driven to desperate measures to protect them. Each step she takes winds the dramatic tension ever higher, right up to the last page and its horrible finale.

This tale was described at the time of its first publication as ‘the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient or modern.’ (the Independent 1899) and it has remained a tantalising puzzle ever since. Like the other stories in this collection it is delivered to us in a very oblique manner, and recounted by a narrator who may or may not be telling the complete truth. Readers are presented with a literary experience not unlike a hall of mirrors, in which nothing is quite what it seems. This is what makes the stories worth reading over and over again.

This is a particularly good edition, since it includes an editor’s introductory essay and explanatory notes to the text, a brief history of its publication, and James’s own introductions in which he explains the origins of the stories and how he decided to treat them – all without giving away their specific outcomes, just as I have tried to do above.

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Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp.266, ISBN 0192834045

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The War of the Worlds

August 10, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The War of the Worlds (1897) was the fourth of the novels which catapulted H.G. Wells to fame as a writer of science fiction during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The idea for the story was given to him by his brother Frank, and it was one of the first stories to feature conflict between mankind on earth and extraterrestrial beings. Like his other science fiction novels The Time Machine (1888), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and The Invisible Man (1897) it explores a single, original idea in a simple narrative that is backed up with a pseudo-scientific rationale. The book has remained in print ever since its first publication over one hundred years ago.

The War of the Worlds – a note on the text

The novel first appeared as an illustrated monthly serial in Pearson’s Magazine and simultaneously in New York Cosmopolitan magazine between April and December 1897. Early in the following year two pirated versions began to appear in New York and Boston newspapers with the locations of the action changed so that the Martian invasion was directed at the American city concerned. The story first appeared in single volume novel format published by William Heinemann in London and Harpers in New York in 1898. For a full account of its publishing history and revisions to subsequent editions, see the note by Patrick Parrinder in the Penguin Classics edition (2005)

The War of the Worlds – critical commentary

H.G. Wells was certainly not short of memorable ideas at the start of his writing career – The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The First Men in the Moon (1901) have retained their popularity ever since they first appeared. These works have passed into general cultural consciousness, aided by their adaptations for other forms of media such as film, television, and comic books.

The War of the Worlds is no exception to this cross-media adaptation. Most famously, it was produced as a documentary-style radio play by Orson Welles in 1938, and such was the authenticity of the production (and the credulity of the American listening public) that it caused wholesale panic. People actually believed Martians had invaded the eastern seaboard of the USA, to which area the locations had been changed.

After these early successes with novels he himself called ‘scientific romances’, Wells became quite famous, and his opinions on science, technology, and politics were taken quite seriously. Following the influence of modernist writers such as James Joyce, D.H. Larence, and Virginia Woolf, his reputation declined and since the end of the twentieth century it has never risen again above that of a popular minor writer.

The prophetic element

Despite all the Boys Own Adventure elements of the novel and the creepy monsters from outer space that have become the stock-in-trade of science fiction, there is one element of the novel in which Wells excels himself. That is the amazingly prophetic way in which he writes about mechanised warfare and and creates scenes which were to become commonplace less than two decades after the publication of the novel.

The descriptions of devastation following the Martians’ initial attacks are amazingly prescient. of the images of carnage and obliteration which resulted from trench warfare in Flanders from 1914 to 1918.

In one night the valley had become a valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where flames had been there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees that the night had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn. .. Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and universal.

Moreover the Martians fight with the very weapon that seems to sumarize the barbarity and unthinking inhumanity of the first world war – poison gas. Their use of the Heat-Ray also features very prophetically as what we now call laser beams. And just to give Wells a further accolade for predicting the future, the evacuation of refugees on the eastern coast could be a description of the spirit and the physical conditions of the Dunkirk evacuations of 1940:

For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came up onto the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards to Foulness and and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They lay in a great sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist somewhere towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks – English, Scotch, French, Dutch and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts, electric boats, , and beyond were ships of large burden, a multitude of filthy colliers, trim merchantmen, cattle-ships passenger boats, petroleum tanks, ocean tramps an old white transport even, neat white and grey liners from Southampton … A dense swarm of boats chaffering with the people on the beach, a swarm which extended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon.

The novel also touches on issues of evolutionary biology raised in Wells’ notion that the Martians are overcome not by mechanical force but by their vulnerability to disease from which the human beings have become immune as part of their history in the evolutionary process. This is a positive and realistic piece of social philosophy which Wells summarises in an almost Biblically succinct expression.

By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

The War of the Worlds – study resources

The War of the Worlds – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

H.G. Wells Classic Collection – five novels – Amazon UK

H.G. Wells Biography – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds – DVD movie adaptation- Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds – chapter summaries

Book I – The Coming of the Martians

1. An un-named narrator speculates that the cosmological development of the planet Mars makes it probable that its inhabitants would have justifiable grounds for invading a nearby planet. With his colleague the astronomer Ogilvy he observes astronomical activity and watches gaseous projections heading towards earth.

2. Some time later what seems to be a large meteorite lands near Woking. Ogilvy inspects it and finds a huge metal cylinder with sounds of activity inside. He alerts journalist Henderson, but on returning to the pit the object has made they find nothing new.

3. The narrator then visits the site. He believes that there are men on Mars but thinks the cylinder (the Thing) will contain objects. Following newspaper reports of ‘A Message from Mars’ Ogilvy and the Astronomer Royal inspect the site.

4. An inquisitive crowd gathers. The cylinder opens and the first Martian emerges – a leathery bear-like creature with tentacles. The narrator recoils in horror and disgust.

5. The narrator feels a fascinated horror for the pit in which the cylinder lies. A deputation arrives waving a white flag. A ‘heat-ray’ emerges from the cylinder and exterminates everything before it.

6. The heat-ray attack causes panic amongst the spectators. Some people are trampled to death in the confusion.

7. The narrator escapes and goes home, convincing himself that everything is normal again. He thinks that increased gravity and the presence of more oxygen on Earth will slow down the Martians.

8. Life beyond a small radius round these events goes on as normal, but back at the cylinder the Martians are busy preparing for the next phase of their attack, and they kill anyone who comes near. A second cylinder arrives in the region.

9. Next day the cylinder has been surrounded by troops from a nearby barracks.. Heavy shelling breaks out in the evening.. The narrator evacuates his home and leaves with his wife and servant to stay with relatives.

10. The narrator returns home alone at night. A third cylinder lands during a storm, and he sees a giant tripod emerge from it. He arrives back home during a thunderstorm.

11. From his study window he observes the whole countryside on fire. A soldier arrives and relates details of the fight against the mechanised tripods and heat rays, which have defeated the soldiers completely.

12. The-narrator and the artilleryman decide to move towards London. They encounter people being evacuated by the military. The army attacks, and one mechanised tripod is hit, collapsing into the river. Other Martian machines arrive to rescue it.

13. The. Martians retrench, and the narrator drifts in a boat downstream. He meets a clergyman whose whose religious convictions have been shattered by the sudden attacks and devastation.

14. In central London there are incomplete and misleadingly tepid reports of events in the newspapers. Over-optimistic proclamations are issued. South-Western train services are disrupted. Heavy deployments of troops are organised. By the following morning there is mass panic.

15. The Martians attack again. One is damaged, but repairs itself. The narrator sees the Martian firing poisoned gas out of black tubes. A further cylinder lands.

16. In central London there is a mass exodus heading north and east. The narrator’s brother steals a bicycle and heads towards Chelmsford. He rescues two women in a pony and trap, and they decide to head for Harwich . People all round them are desperate and are trampled under foot.

17. The following day the Martians reach central London. Further cylinders arrive from space. The narrator’s brother reaches the coast and secures passage on a boat going to Ostend. There is a sea battle in which three Martian tripods are beaten off by an ironclad torpedo ram

Book Two – The Earth Under the Martians

1. The narrator is hiding from the black gas in a house with the clergyman They are making their way towardds London amidst destruction, dead horses, and human corpses. They encounter a Martian which is ‘collecting’ live human beings. They hide in a house in Mortlake which is struck and destroyed by the arrival of another cylinder

2. From his place of hiding the narrator observes the Martians. They compose largely a huge head, with tentacles acting as hands. They do not eat, but ingest blood directly from other creatures. They do not sleep, and reproduce sexlessly. They do not wear clothes, and have no knowledge of the wheel.

3. The clergyman is selfish, greedy, and morally spineless. The Martian machines begin making aluminium tubes.. They then bring human beings into the pit and kill them for their blood.

4. The curate loses control and is in conflict with the narrator, who knocks him unconscious. When a Martian invades the house he takes away the curate. The narrator lives in fear, hiding in the house .

5. He stays in the house for several days without food, then realises that the Martians are no longer outside. The pit is littered with the bodies of their victims. All around are scenes of devastation.

6. The whole of south-west London is covered by the Red Weed, but this gradually succumbs to a disease. and leaves behind nothing but rotting debris. The narrator moves on amongst total desolation.

7. On Putney Heath he meets the artillery man again, who reports that the Martians have been making flying machines. The soldier takes the view that humanity is currently beaten, and proposes to establish a desperate band of resisters to keep the human race and its knowledge alive – living in underground sewers and railway tunnels. They retire to his hide-out, where he is digging a secret escape route. But the grandiose plans for disciplined resistance suddenly evaporate, and he organises a grand dinner with Champagne and cigars. The narrator is disillusioned, and decides to push on into London.

8. The narrator finds the streets of London empty except for the occasional dead body. But he comes across Martian tripods and handling machines that are out of action. He realises that the Martians are dead and have been killed by the diseases and bacteria they have ingested from the blood of their victims to which humans have become immune during their evolution.

9. Realising that London has been saved, the narrator has a mental breakdown for a few days, then returns to his own house in Woking – where he is reunited with his wife.

The Epilogue. The narrator speculates on the lessons that have been learned from the invasion. It is possible that another attack could take place, and lessons in terrestrial humility should be learned. It is also possible that at some future date people from the Earth will need to travel to other planets in order to survive.

The War of the Worlds – further reading

Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H.G. Wells, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961.

Michael Draper, H.G. Wells, London: Macmillan, 1987.

John Hammond, An H.G. Wells Companion, London: Macmillan, 1979.

Roslynn D. Haynes, H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future, London: Macmillan, 1980.

John Huntington, The Logic of Fantasy: H.G. Wells and Science Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Brian Murray, H. G. Wells, New York: Continuum, 1990.

Patrick Parrinder, H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1972.

Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.

More science fiction by H.G. Wells

The Time Machine (1895) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Invisible Man (1897) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Wheels of Chance (1896) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The First Men in the Moon (1901) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Shape of Things to Come (1933) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

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The Well-Beloved

July 17, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Well-Beloved was first serialized in the London Illustrated News in 1892. It was then published as a complete novel in 1897 by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. The full title was originally The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament, which emphasises the protagonist’s fixation on the ‘ideal woman’.

The Well-Beloved – critical commentary

Sex in the novel

Despite all Jocelyn’s romantic idealism and his incontinent fixations on younger and younger women, he actually spends the whole novel with no sexually consummated adult relations at all.

This is strange, because the events of the narrative begin with a typically Hardyesque appeal to old folk traditions of pre-marital sex. Jocelyn arranges to meet the first Avice at night in the castle, presumably with a view to taking advantage of this tradition. But she sends him a note canceling the rendezvous specifically on the grounds that she does not agree to the idea – which certainly confirms that she was conscious of this being the reason for their nocturnal meeting.

Jocelyn goes off instead with Marcia, a woman who just happens to be walking past at the time, and he proposes marriage to her as soon as they reach London. It’s true that he spends a few days in a hotel with Marcia when he is supposed to be arranging their marriage. This would have been unthinkable in his native environment, but could pass in the more socially advanced mores of the capital. Yet there is nothing in the text to suggest that they enjoy a sexual relationship.

Just as he thinks he is going to secure the second Avice, she reveals that she is already married to someone else, and there is a suggestion that as a couple they have taken advantage of the island custom, which rubs salt into Jocelyn’s emotional wound at the time.

The same happens with the third Avice, who when confronted by his offer of marriage, runs off with someone else of her own age. Jocelyn thus spends the whole novel (forty years plus) pursuing phantoms. It is to presumably part of Hardy’s purpose to reveal this emotional absurdity. Then in the end Jocelyn settles for a marriage of convenience with his old friend Marcia Bencomb in a union which he rather tastelessly points out to her is based on friendship and certainly not love.

Hardy explored the consequences of sexual desire and activity in many of his novels (as frankly as was permitted at the time) most notably in Jude the Obscure which he wrote only a few years later in 1895. But The Well-Beloved appears to explore nothing more than the futility of pursuing idealised concepts of the opposite sex, which Jocelyn does – three times over.

The result of Jocelyn’s experiences might be thought as Hardy’s warning against romantic idealization – yet there is very little evidence in the text to support this idea. Jocelyn’s life trajectory is not held up as a failure or an example of emotional under-development. He is simply driven by this impulse until his last attempt fails and he is prepared to settle for a sexless relationship based on an old friendship.

Readers embarking on psychological interpretations of novels and their authors might like to keep in mind that not long after the publication of The Well-Beloved Thomas Hardy married a woman (Florence Dugdale) who was forty years younger than him – possibly an instance of what Oscar Wilde claimed was ‘life imitating art’?

Social background

The practical working background of the novel is sensitively observed. Just as every aspect of woodcutting and the timber business informs The Woodlanders, and agriculture permeates Tess of the d’Urbervilles, here in The Well–Beloved the stone industries of Portland are carefully incorporated. The business of mining and cutting stone is the enterprise on which the Bencomb and Pierston businesses were founded, and Hardy pointedly reminds us in one part of the story that the local stone was used to build St Paul’s cathedral.

This is Hardy the son of a stonemason and himself an architectural designer underscoring the commercial life of Wessex out of which these lives have emerged. It is unfortunate that the fictional integration of the commerce and the business dynasties are not so well incorporated as they are in the other novels. They do not form essential parts of the narrative in the same way as the destinies of Giles Winterbourne and Tess are determined by their occupations in the rural industries in which they participate.

Moreover, Jocelyn rises to fame as a sculptor, a shaper of this local stone – but without any credible evidence of his artistic talents or activity. None of his work is discussed, and the twenty year periods between each version of Avice are skipped over without comment. This reinforces the idea that all Hardy’s attention was focused onto Jocelyn’s obsession with his ideal woman, and it contributes to the overwhelming sense of weakness in The Well-Beloved compared with his other great novels.

The Isle of Slingers

Hardy chose to re-name the location of the novel, as he did in so many of his other works. But ‘The Isle of Slingers’ is actually an old name for Portland Island – given to it because of the habit of the local population to hurl stones at unwanted visitors – or ‘kimberlins’ or ‘foreigners from the mainland of Wessex’ as they are called in the text.

The total population of the island around that time was only about eighty households, which coupled with the xenophobia enshrined in its popular name, resulted in a great deal of inter-marriage and the fact that everybody knew everybody else’s business. These social factors are well reflected in the novel .

Avice Caro marries a cousin (which was legally controversial at the time); all three generations of women have the same first name (Avice); and the grand-daughter eventually marries someone with the surname Pierston – which is that of the protagonist, Jocelyn.

The three Avices, the second something like the first, the third a glorification of the first, at all events externally, were the outcome of the immemorial island customs of intermarriage and prenuptial union, under which conditions the type of feature was almost uniform from parent to child through generations.

The Well-Beloved – Study resources

The Well-Beloved – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Well-Beloved – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Well-Beloved – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Well-Beloved – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

The Well-Beloved – eBooks at Project Gutenberg

The Well-Beloved – audiobook at LibriVox.org

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

The Well-Beloved – plot summary

Part First

Chapter I. Would-be sculptor Jocelyn Pierston returns to his native Isle of Slingers [Isle of Portland] in Dorset to visit his father after three years living in London. He is greeted enthusiastically with a kiss by his childhood friend Avice Caro.

Chapter II. Jocelyn reassures the embarrassed Avice, and proposes marriage to her, then immediately regrets it. He has a romantically idealised image of Woman which is constantly shifting from one object to another. Avice has become a cultivated woman, and after a month’s sojourn they are understood to be engaged.

Chapter III. At the end of his holiday Jocelyn goes to meet Avice at night to say farewell, but she does not show up at the appointed place.

Chapter IV. She sends him a note excusing herself because she does not approve of the local tradition of pre-marital sex. He leaves nevertheless and meets Marcia Bencomb, who is running away from home and her father, who is a rival to Jocelyn’s father in the stone quarrying trade.

Chapter V. Jocelyn and Marcia shelter from a sudden storm under a boat, then they are forced to stay overnight at a hotel in Budmouth.

Chapter VI. They travel together to London where, having decided that Marcia is the latest incarnation of his ideal woman, Jocelyn asks her to marry him. They book into a hotel, and he goes to make the necessary marriage arrangements, then visits his friend Somers who is a painter.

Chapter VII. Jocelyn explains to Somers his personal theory of the idealised woman, up to his recent experiences with Avice and Marcia. He rationalises his fickleness, them temporises with Marcia regarding the marriage arrangements.

Chapter VIII. Jocelyn and Marcia squabble over their uncertain social status. She writes to her father, who refuses to endorse her proposed marriage on grounds of rivalry between the two families. Marcia leaves the hotel, and is subsequently taken back home by her father. Jocelyn later hears that Avice has married a cousin and that Marcia is to go on a world tour with her father.

Chapter IX. The years pass. Jocelyn becomes a successful sculptor, but he continues to flit from one example of his idealised woman to another.

‘The Isle of Slingers’

Part Second

Chapter I. When Jocelyn is middle-aged his father dies, leaving him quite wealthy. He attends a fashionable party, still in search of his ideal woman, and thinks he might have found her in the form of Mrs Nicola Pine-Avon, an intellectual widow.

Chapter II. But when he visits Mrs Pine-Avon he finds her rather remote, so he insults her and leaves. At another social event he reads a letter telling him that Avice has died.

Chapter III. This news inflames his old feelings for Avice, who he now realises he has undervalued, and he bitterly regrets the loss. He goes back to the island in time to see her buried in the local churchyard.

Chapter IV. He meets Avice’s daughter Ann, whose family fell on hard times, leaving her to work as a laundress. Jocelyn thinks of her as the reincarnation of her mother; he calls her by her mother’s name; and wishes he could live locally and pay court to her.

Chapter V. Back in London he meets Avice (Ann) at the docks and feels powerfully attracted to her, even though she is only a laundress. He decides to rent a manor-house on the island so as to be near her.

Chapter VI. He arranges for Avice to visit his house daily to do his laundry. He thinks of her as the original Avice – and realises that he is hopelessly in thrall to a woman who he ‘despises’ intellectually.

Chapter VII. Jocelyn pursues Avice in her daily life on the island. She reveals her knowledge of her mother’s sad history (deserted by her intended) and even though she seems indifferent to him, Jocelyn decides he wants to marry her.

Chapter VIII. When he next confronts her she reveals that she rapidly tires of men after first finding them attractive. But he still intends to pursue his plans.

Chapter IX. Jocelyn is jealously watching Avice take washing to a soldier-lover when his friend Somers suddenly arrives. Jocelyn admits he is completely in thrall to Avice. He is then visited by Mrs Pine-Avon, who pays court to him, but he is completely consumed by his current obsession.

Chapter X. Somers sees Mrs Pine-Avon and wants to marry her. Avice is upset about something, and Jocelyn offers to take her on as a temporary help in London.

Chapter XI. When they get there his housekeepers have drunk his wine and absconded. Avice keeps herself separate from him, even though he feels completely responsible for her welfare.

Chapter XII. Eventually he asks her to marry him. She refuses, revealing that she has already married Isaac Pierston, with whom she has quarrelled and separated. Jocelyn reveals his former relationship with her mother, and he takes Avice back to the island.

Chapter XIII. Isaac is brought back and reconciled with his wife, who then has a baby she christens Avice. Jocelyn goes back to London, where Somers is due to marry Mrs Pine-Avon.

‘The Isle of Slingers’

Part Third

Chapter I. Twenty years later Jocelyn is in Rome, having sent Avice money from time to time. He receives a letter from her telling of her husband’s death, and he decides to visit the island. She is living in his old house, and he immediately entertains the idea of marrying her – until he sees her daughter, who he regards as the reincarnation of her grandmother.

Chapter II. Jocelyn has misgivings that the old curse is still upon him. He rescues the young Avice when she is stuck on some rocks and feels that he detects a direct connection running from grandmother to grand-daughter.

Chapter III. He revisits young Avice’s mother and proposes to marry the girl. She agrees to help him in such a plan. They all visit the castle where Jocelyn was supposed to meet young Avice’s grandmother. Avice’s mother encourages her daughter to favour Jocelyn, but the girl is not really interested – and so far she has only ever seen him at night.

Chapter IV. An aged Somers suddenly appears along with his matronly wife (Mrs Pine-Avon) and several children. Jocelyn stays away from young Avice during their visit. Mother Avice falls ill, but she persuades her daughter to accept Jocelyn because he is kind, rich, and upper class. Jocelyn reveals to her his connections with her mother and grandmother – and at the same time he begins to think that the marriage might not be a good idea.

Chapter V. Jocelyn takes Avice and her mother to his new house and studio In London, but Avice is still not enthusiastic about him. He goes back to the island on what is supposed to be the eve of his wedding day.

Chapter VI. Mother Avice is ill, but glad to have her plans for her daughter’s wedding almost fulfilled. However, young Avice elopes with young Henri Leverre the same night, and her mother dies with the shock of events.

Chapter VII. Marcia Bencomb (Leverre’s stepmother) arrives [after forty years] to seek out Jocelyn via the odd connection between them. Jocelyn accepts what has happened, and promises to settle a handsome dowry on young Avice.

Chapter VIII. Mother Avice is buried, then Jocelyn falls ill, after which he loses his interest in aesthetics. Marcia nurses him, and reveals herself as the older woman she now is. They move back to the island and eventually get married (as old friends, not lovers). Jocelyn devotes himself to improving local living conditions.

Hardy’s WESSEX

The Well-Beloved – principal characters

Jocelyn Pierston	a young would-be sculptor
Avice Caro	his childhood friend
Mrs Caro	a widow, her mother
Marcia Bencomb	daughter of rival family to Pierstons
Alfred Somers	Jocelyn’s friend, a painter
Mrs Nicola Pine-Avon	a young intellectual widow
Ann Avice Caro	Avice’s daughter, a laundress
Avice Pierston	Avice Caro’s daughter, a governess

Hardy’s study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is probably the most popular of Hardy’s late, great novels. The sub-title is ‘A Pure Woman’, and it is a story which explores the tragic consequences of a young milkmaid who becomes the victim of the men she encounters. First she falls for the spiritual but flawed Angel Clare, and then the physical but limited Alec Durberville takes advantage of her. This novel has some of the most beautiful and the most harrowing depictions of rural working conditions which reveal Hardy as a passionate advocate for those who work the land. It also has a wonderfully symbolic climax at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. There is poetry in almost every page.
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The Woodlanders (1887) Giles Winterbourne, an honest woodsman, suffers with the many tribulations of his selfless love for Grace Melbury, a woman above his station in this classic tale of the West Country. She marries the new doctor, Edred Fitzpiers, but leaves him when she learns he has been unfaithful. She turns instead to Giles, who nobly allows her to sleep in his house during stormy weather, whilst he sleeps outside and brings on his own death. It’s often said that the hero of this novel is the woods themselves – so deeply moving is Hardy’s account of the timbered countryside which provides the backdrop for another human tragedy and a study of rural life in transition.
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Wessex Tales Don’t miss the skills of Hardy as a writer of shorter fictions. None of his short stories are really short, but they are beautifully crafted. This is the first volume of his tales in which he was seeking to record the customs, superstitions, and beliefs of old Wessex before they were lost to living memory. Yet whilst dealing with traditional beliefs, they also explore very modern concerns of difficult and often thwarted human passions which he developed more extensively in his longer works.
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Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
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The Wings of the Dove

February 24, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

The Wings of the Dove (1902) is one of James’s late, great masterpieces. Quite apart from the famous baroque prose style, it features many of his recurrent themes. American innocence pitched against European cunning. The plot is a complex love triangle which strains at the limits of what is morally acceptable. Even for modern readers, the scheming and motivations will seem quite shocking.

The heroine Kate Croy is in love with a man who hasn’t enough money to offer her a fashionable marriage. She thinks she can enhance her lover’s financial prospects by pushing him into the arms of a rich American heiress who is dying – but she doesn’t count on the unexpected results.

The setting is a Venice that includes the usual correlatives of disease and death. And a social depth which is more-than-usually concerned with issues of money, social status, and class mobility. Be prepared for long and complex sentences which strain many readers’ patience.

Venice

The Wings of the Dove – plot summary

Kate Croy and Merton Densher are two engaged Londoners who desperately want to marry but have very little money. Kate is constantly put upon by family troubles, and is now living with her domineering aunt, Maud Lowder. Into their world comes Milly Theale, an enormously rich young American woman who had previously met and fallen in love with Densher, though she didn’t reveal her feelings. Her travelling companion and confidante, Mrs. Stringham, is an old friend of Maud’s. Kate and Aunt Maud welcome Milly to London, and the American heiress enjoys great social success.

With Kate as a companion, Milly goes to see an eminent physician, Sir Luke Strett, because she’s afraid that she is suffering from an incurable disease. The doctor is noncommittal but Milly fears the worst. Kate suspects that Milly is deathly ill. After the trip to America where he had met Milly, Densher returns to find the heiress in London. Kate wants Densher to pay as much attention as possible to Milly, though at first he doesn’t quite know why. Kate has been careful to conceal from Milly (and everybody else) that she and Densher are engaged.

With the threat of serious illness hanging over her, Milly decides to travel to Venice with Mrs. Stringham. Aunt Maud, Kate and Densher follow her. At a party Milly gives in her Venice palazzo (the older Palazzo Barbaro, called “Palazzo Leporelli” in the novel), Kate finally reveals her complete plan to Densher: he is to marry Milly so that, after her presumably soon-to-occur death, Densher will inherit the money they can marry on. Densher had suspected this was Kate’s idea, and he demands that she consummate their affair before he’ll go along with her plan.

Aunt Maud and Kate return to London while Densher remains with Milly. Unfortunately, the dying girl learns from a former suitor of Kate’s about the plot to get her money. She “turns her face to the wall” and grows very ill. Densher sees her one last time before he leaves for London, where he eventually receives news of Milly’s death.

Milly does leave him a large amount of money despite everything. But Densher won’t touch the money, and he won’t marry Kate unless she also refuses the bequest. Conversely, if Kate chooses the money instead of him, Densher offers to make the bequest over to her in full. The lovers part on the novel’s final page with a cryptic exclamation from Kate: “We shall never be again as we were!”

Study resources

The Wings of the Dove – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Wings of the Dove – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Wings of the Dove – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove – 1997 film adaptation on DVD

The Wings of the Dove – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

The Wings of the Dove – authoritative text

The Wings of the Dove – audioBook at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Principal characters

Kate Croy	a talented but scheming young woman
Merton Densher	a Fleet Street journalist with aspirations
Milly Theale	an American orphan and heiress
Aunt Maude Lowder	Kate’s aunt, who maintains her – at a price
Susan Stringham	a Vermont widow and companion to Milly
Lord Mark	a fortune-hunting aristocrat who Maude ‘intends’ for Kate

The Wings of the Dove – film version

1997 film adaptation

This is a lush and beautiful film version of the novel from director Iain Softley. His London scenes are successful, but the film really comes alive visually in Venice, though it has to be said that the explicit sexual content is somwhat at odds with Jame’s original text, where everything is implied and suggested rather than made overt. Helena Bonham Carter gives a typically pouting and sexy performance as the emotionally scheming Kate Croy, and Alison Elliot is convincingly consumptive as the heiress Milly Theale. Even the costumes were nominated for an Academy award in this outstanding production which captures faithfully the spirit of the original novel.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Other works by Henry James

The Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man from the South to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

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What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.

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The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

More on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Woman in White

November 2, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, further reading

The Woman in White (1861) was one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century. It not only sold in thousands of copies but also created what we would now call a ‘franchise boom’. It was so popular that manufacturers produced Woman in White perfumes and clothing, and proposals of marriage were made to the courageous (but fictitious) heroine Marian Halcombe.

The publication introduced two new elements into the novel genre. It was a ‘sensation novel’ or a ‘novel with a secret’ as they came to be known. It was also tightly plotted and intricately organised in a manner that makes powerful intellectual demands on the reader. And, it should be noted – it was structured and related by a multiplicity of narrative voices in a remarkably successful manner.

The Woman in White – a note on the text

The Woman in White first appeared as a serial in All the Year Round, the weekly newspaper owned and edited by Charles Dickens. The novel ran between November 1859 and August 1860, and enormously increased sales of the newspaper.

It then appeared in what (at that time) was a conventional three-volume format, published by Sampson Low, and was an immediate success. Its initial printing of 1,000 copies sold out on the first day, despite a relatively high cost of 31s 6d.

The success of the novel led to further editions and printings in America, Australia, France, and Germany. For all of these productions Wilkie Collins tweaked and supplemented the text. The most ‘stable’ and reliable version of the novel is generally considered to be the ‘New Edition’ created for the single-volume publication of the book in 1861.

For a full account of the composition, publication, and reception of the novel, see the bibliographic essay by John Sutherland in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the book

The Woman in White – critical commentary

The detective novel

Wilkie Collins is often credited with the invention of the detective novel – which is not quite true. The first real detective hero in fiction was Auguste Dupin, the super-rationalist of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories, who solves crimes largely by a combination of creative imagination and what Poe called ‘ratiocination’. The second major fictional detective was Inspector Bucket in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852) who is a superior sort of Scotland Yard dogged sleuth-investigator.

The Woman in White is in one sense a detective novel without a detective. The central character Walter Hartright acts as a form of solicitor-cum-sleuth. He assembles what we would now call ‘witness statements’- letters, depositions, diaries, and memoirs to provide a body of evidence supporting his case against the villains ‘Sir’ Percival Glyde and Count Fosco.

This ‘case’ never reaches a formal trial. We the readers are the unstated jury, and Walter‘s evidence proves the case he is making against the two accused men and their accomplice, the sinister Countess Fosco.

Wilkie Collins flags up at the start of the novel the originality of this quasi-legalistic approach – for which he justly deserves credit. The ‘hero’ Walter Hartright points out that his collection of personal testimonies will constitute the voices normally heard in a court of law:

Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness – with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect, and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.

Multiple narrators

Wilkie Collins’ genius lies in making his collection of narrators credible, yet partial, flawed, and even downright deceptive – yet he does so in such a manner that the reader can piece together a coherent account of what has taken place.

The framing narrative perspective comes from Walter Hartright, who is baffled by events, but is truthful in what he relates. Whilst absent from events, he hands over to Marian Halcombe, who is a more complex character. She is initially impressed by both Percival Glyde and Count Fosco, even though it will be clear to most readers that they are devious and villainous.

The housekeeper Eliza Michelson is even more gullible: she is taken in completely by Fosco’s oleaginous flattery. The solicitor Gilmore is accurate but short-sighted, and he too is taken in by Glyde and Fosco. The narrative even includes a supposedly full ‘confession’ from Fosco himself. This is a literary masterpiece (on Collins’ part) of lies, half-truths, self-justification, and evasiveness, all dressed up in his flamboyant, vainglorious style of speech and writing.

It is often observed that the use of multiple narrators had been pioneered by writers such as Tobias Smollett in Humphry Clinker (1771) and Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights (1847) – but Wilkie Collins pushed this literary device along a few stages further.

In Fosco’s contributions to the narrative for instance, he throws up factual smokescreens, he lies, and he even offers taunting satirical comments on other people’s evidence. Both his entries in Marian’s diaries and his last-minute ‘confession’ are superb examples of Wilkie Collins’ multi-layered approach to the construction of a narrative.

Fosco is contributing to the account of events; he is passing comment on them; he is attempting to distort the record of what happened, and he is also mischievously aware of being an actor in the narrative of the drama – making him almost a self-conscious fictional character.

The sensation novel

Wilkie Collins is generally regarded as the inventor of the ‘sensation novel’ – and The Woman in White is seen as the first and classic example of this particular genre, the influence of which lingered until the end of the nineteenth century. At that later point its vogue in popular fiction was overtaken by the even more extreme Gothic horror story.

The sensation novel made its impact by introducing issues such as sexual scandal. murder, disguise, bigamy, madness, blackmail, fraud, theft, kidnapping, incarceration, and disputed wills. It also relied heavily on mysteries and secrets underpinning events – which is certainly true of The Woman in White, which has a number of mysteries, but ultimately rests on one Big Secret.

This is the fact that ‘Sir’ Percival Glyde is bogus throughout the whole novel – because he does not legitimately hold the title of Baronet. His parents are not married, and the legitimate title belongs to someone else. Glyde is a fraud – and that is the source of his Secret. He is guilty of false identity – technically ‘personification’

This leads to another typical element of the sensation novel – forgery. Glyde illegally inserts details of his parents’ non-existent marriage into the parish register. He does this for three reasons: he wishes to assume right to the Baronetcy; he wants to inherit the Fairlie estate; and he needs legitimacy to give himself the legal possibility of borrowing money against the Fairlie ‘name’.

Imprisonment

The Woman in White involves not just one but two instances of illegal imprisonment. Anne Catherick (The Woman) is placed in a lunatic asylum against her will by Glyde – because he fears she might reveal his Secret. She escapes, goes into hiding, and tries to warn Laura about him.

When Glyde learns that there has been contact between the two women, he assumes that his Secret has been revealed (which it has not) and he then imprisons his own wife in the asylum – but does so under Anne Catherick’s name. This is a sort of ‘double imprisonment’ for Laura.

Subsequent to this, as part of what we might now call ‘identity theft’, Anne Catherick (who dies) is buried not in her own name but in Laura’s.

The other shocking elements of ‘sensation’ should be fairly obvious to modern readers. Glyde becomes a psychologically and physically abusive husband to Laura; letters are intercepted, stolen, and re-written; a death certificate is forged; there is a great deal of spying; and Count Fosco and his sinister wife drug their victims using what he a euphemistically refers to as an interest in ‘chemistry’.

The legal problem

There is however something of a puzzling issue at the base of the plot line of The Woman in White. As a fake Baronet badly in need of money, the villain Glyde goes to extraordinary lengths to secure Anne’s inheritance of twenty thousand pounds. He will not marry her unless she agrees to the condition, and he has the gullible solicitor Gilmore draw up legal agreements to secure it.

Yet under the law obtaining at the time the novel is set (and was written) all of a woman’s property and money automatically passed into the control of the man she married. This was one of the scandalous iniquities of English law which was much debated and eventually changed with the passing of the Married Woman’s Property Act in 1882.

Even worse at that time, a woman ceased to be a legal or moral entity when she married. It was not until the Act of 1882 that these conditions were changed.

So there was no need for ‘Sir’ Percival Glyde to resort to solicitors: Laura’s money would come to him automatically – unless Collins was suggesting that Glyde’s false legal status could invalidate the process, but there is no consideration of this point in the text.

Characterisation

In terms of literary characterisation, The Woman in White poses some interesting problems. The positive characters – hero and heroines – are thin and unprepossessing, whereas some of the negative characters are quite vivid, memorable, and even amusing.

The protagonist and main narrator Walter Hartright is honourable, loyal, and indefatigable in his pursuit of the truth regarding the mystery. But as a character he is rather bland and unmemorable. Similarly, the ostensible ‘heroine’ of the novel, Laura Fairlie, is like a child’s doll. She might be pretty, but she is an agent who is acted upon but makes no positive impression of any kind.

Laura’s half-sister Marian starts out as a more interesting creation – with un-corsetted haunches and mannish behaviour – but this side of her character is not developed. She becomes merely the stoic tomboy who climbs onto a verandah in the rain, and eventually endures typhoid fever. The most interesting thing about her is that she ends up living in a ménage a trois with her married half sister and brother-in-law.

Yet amongst the negative characters, Wilkie Collins creates two inspired characters. The first is self-obsessed aesthete Frederick Fairlie who hides from the world behind a wall of hypochondria which is so advanced he would rather not be bothered talking to anybody, and wants doors closed quietly so as not to upset his nerves.

The acute nature of his avoidance of all responsibility becomes quite comic. He is a similar character to Horace Skimpole in Bleak House (1852) – a man who has elevated self-interest into a philosophy and an art form. When Count Fosco tries to reassure Fairlie that Marian’s typhoid fever is not contagious, he recoils with shock and horror:

Accept his assurances! I was never farther from accepting anything in my life. I would not have believed him on his oath. He was too yellow to be believed. He looked like a walking West-Indian-epidemic. He was big enough to carry typhus by the ton, and to dye the very carpet he walked on with scarlet fever.

The other stand-out character is his fellow villain Count Fosco, a fat, witty, sophisticated, larger-than-life character who is quite obviously not at all that he seems. He flatters everybody he meets, dabbles in ‘chemistry’ (which is his euphemism for poison) and has pet mice and birds about his person, He turns out to be not only a charlatan but a spy who in his ‘confession’ at the end of the novel gives a boastfully frank account of his criminality in a typically oblique fashion:

If Anne Catherick had not died when she did, what should I have done? I should, in that case, have assisted worn-out Nature in finding permanent repose. I should have opened the doors of the Prison of Life, and have extended to the captive (incurably afflicted in mind and body) a happy release.

The Woman in White – study resources

The Woman in White – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Woman in White – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Woman in White – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Woman in White – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Woman in White – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Woman in White – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Woman in White – York Notes – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins – Kindle eBook

The Woman in White – 1982 BBC film

Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White – plot synopsis

The First Epoch

Artist Walter Hartright saves Professor Pesca from drowning at Brighton. Pesca passes on to Walter the request for a private tutor in drawing in Cumbria.

Walter meets the Woman in White late at night on Hampstead Heath. She has connections with Limmeridge House in Cumbria where he is going. She claims to have been ill-used by a Baronet, and has escaped from an Asylum.

Walter travels to Limmeridge House, meeting the shapely but mannish Marian Halcombe. He tells her about the Woman in White’s association with the house. He is interviewed by Frederick Fairlie who is an aesthete and a valetudinarian.

He meets Laura Fairlie and immediately falls in love with her. Marian reads from her mother’s letter and a connection is established between Laura and Anne Catherick (the Woman in White) because of similarities in their dress.

Marian explains to Walter that he must leave, because Laura is engaged to be married to Sir Percival Glyde. She produces an anonymous letter, warning Laura not to marry Glyde, who is a Baronet from Hampshire.

Walter meets Anne Catherick and her friend Mrs Clements in the graveyard. Anne has no father, and is at odds with her mother. At the mention of Sir Percival Glyde she goes into a seizure of fear.

Walter and Marian go to the farm where Anne is staying, but she has left the same morning. Sir Percival Glyde is the visitor expected at Limmeridge House.

The solicitor Gilmore arrives and reassures Walter that Glyde is completely honourable. Marian and Laura thank Walter for his help – and he leaves Limmeridge.

Glyde arrives and persuades Gilmore that he has acted on Mrs Catherick’s own wishes in ‘providing’ a private Asylum for her daughter Anne. He also persuades Marian to write to Mars Catherick for proof of his claim.

A response from Mrs Cathherick supports Glyde, who gives Laura every latitude in coming to her decision about the marriage. She asks for more time, and Gilmore supports her.

A week later Gilmore gets a letter saying Laura will marry Glyde before she is twenty-one. Glyde (who has no money) insists on receiving Laura’s twenty thousand pounds as part of the marriage settlement.

Gilmore appeals to Laura’s guardian Fairlie to let her retain the twenty thousand pounds, but Fairlie refuses to take any interest in the case.

Laura wishes to tell Glyde that she is in love with Walter, but Glyde refuses to call off the engagement, claiming he loves Laura all the more because of her fine principles.

Glyde prides himself on his absence of any jealous feelings. Laura capitulates, and Walter leaves for Honduras.

Glyde sets a date. Laura complies passively. Marian finds more and more positive qualities in Glyde, who is still searching for Anne. Marian has presentiments that something will prevent the marriage, but it takes place.

The Second Epoch

Six months later Marian has arrived at Blackwater Park; Walter is in Honduras; Gilmore is ill; and Laura is on honeymoon in Europe. Marian visits the ominous Black Lake, then finds Mrs Catherick’s dog which has been shot by the park keeper.

On return Laura will not discuss her new marriage, yet asks about Walter. Glyde is even more distant and short-tempered. Marian gives a positive account of the fat and sleek Count Fosco, with his pet birds and tame mice. Glyde’s solicitor Merriman suddenly arrives from London.

Marian overhears news of Glyde’s money problems. She and Laura suspect that Fosco knows the details. On an excursion to the Lake they discuss Crime and its detection. Glyde learns about Mrs Catherick’s dog and is alarmed.

Glyde wants Laura to sign a legal document but will not reveal its content. She refuses, and there is a violent disagreement. Marian writes to Gilmore’s office for advice, but Fosco reads the letter.

Laura reveals to Marian that she knows Glyde married her for her money, and that he has learned of her love for Walter. He threatens to persecute both of them. They think they see a woman walking round the Lake.

A solicitor’s letter from London recommends not signing the document. Marian dreams about Walter in Honduras. Laura meets a distraught and dying Anne in the boat house. Anne wants to impart Glyde’s ‘secret’ to her – but doesn’t.

Laura is due to meet Anne in the boat house, but is intercepted by Glyde. He interrogates her then imprisons her in the House. Fosco’s spying is exposed, yet he persuades Glyde to release Laura.

Marian writes to the solicitor and to Mr Fairlie, trying to arrange a temporary refuge for Laura. She gives the letters to Fanny who has been dismissed and is returning to Limmeridge House.

Marian climbs out onto a verandah roof in the rain to overhear Glyde and Foco plotting to get money from Laura, and the search for Anne Catherick. Glyde assumes that Hartright and Laura know his ´secret´, which is also known by Anne Catherick and her mother.

Marian falls ill. Fosco confiscates and reads her diaries, even writing a mock-complimentary entry in them.

Fanny arrives at Limmeridge House with Marian´s letter. She has been intercepted and drugged by Countess Fosco. Count Fosco arrives to announce that Marian has a fever and to suggest that Fairlie should avoid a scandal by receiving Laura. Fairlie takes the line of least resistance and accepts.

The naive housekeeper Eliza Michelson gives an admiring view of Fosco, who plants an accomplice Mrs Rubelle in the sick room. Marian’s illness grows worse, and proves to be typhoid fever. When she recovers, the doctor is dismissed and Glyde sacks all the servants.

Mrs Michelson is sent away on a pointless errand to Torquay. On her return, Marian has been taken away by Fosco. Laura leaves Blackwater Park next day for London and Cumbria. Mrs Michelson discovers that Marian is still at Blackwater Park, and resigns her post. Mrs Rubelle leaves, and so does Glyde, in a great hurry.

Laura is taken to St John’s Wood in convulsions. She gets worse and appears to die of a diseased heart Walter Hartwright returns from abroad. He visits Laura’s grave, where he is met by Marian and Laura herself.

The Third Epoch

Count Fosco sends a letter to Marian announcing Laura’s death. Marian asks her solicitor to check, but he finds no suspicious circumstances. Count Fosco attends the funeral and writes that Anne Catherick has been recaptured and sent back to the Asylum.

Marian goes to the Asylum where the patient turns out to be Laura. Marian bribes a nurse to release her, and they go to Cumbria where her uncle refuses to recognise her [Fosco has kidnapped Laura, drugged her, and taken Laura to the Asylum as the recaptured Anne.]

Walter sets up in hiding with Marian and Laura. He begins to assemble evidence and accounts of events from participants (which constitute the text of the novel).

He consults the solicitor Kyle who warns him that he has no legal case. Walter is being followed by Glyde’s agents.

Walter tracks down Anne’s friend Mrs Clements, who relates that she took Anne to Grimsby for safety, but when Anne fell ill she wanted to communicate something to Laura. At Blackwater Park Mrs Clements meets Fosco who deceives her, prescribes drugs for Anne, and suggests their going to London. Once there, Fosco and his wife kidnap Anne.

Mrs Clements then relates the history of the Catherick family. Mrs Catherick refused to marry until she suddenly became pregnant by someone else. Percival Glyde came to live near them and began an intrigue with Mrs Catherick. When her husband discovered this, he beat Glyne, then emigrated. He pays his wife an allowance, which she does not touch, living instead off payments from Glyde.

Walter questions Mrs Catherick, who remains implacably opposed to answering any of his questions about Anne and Glyde. Walter assumes that Glyde is not Anne’s father.

Walter inspects the marriage records in an old vestry for evidence of Glyde’s parents’ marriage and finds a dubious entry. When he inspects a duplicate set of records he finds no entry. On his way back to the vestry he finds it on fire, with Glyde trapped inside. Walter organises a rescue, but it fails, and Glyde is killed.

Walter receives a letter from Mrs Catherick that reveals how Glyde forged the entry in the register of marriages. His parents were not married, and he needed a certificate in order to raise money on the estate. Mrs Catherick does not get on well with her daughter Anne, who learns that there is a secret but does not know its details. Nevertheless Glyde locks her up in an asylum with her mother’s consent.

Marian recounts meeting Fosco, who makes vague threats but reveals a vague sexual ‘interest’ in her. Consequently, Marian and Laura move house. Walter conjectures that Anne and Laura might have the same father.

Walter feels that to protect Laura from Fosco he must marry her. He wishes to establish her true identity against all the false evidence of her death. They get married.

Walter concludes from the existing evidence that Fosco must be a spy. He takes Pesca to identify Fosco at the opera – but Fosco is terrified by the sight of Pesca, who then reveals that he is a member of a secret revolutionary brotherhood.

Walter concludes that Fosco has a price on his head. He writes a letter to Pesca to be acted on if necessary the following morning, then goes to interview Fosco.

They challenge and threaten each other, but finally Walter gives Fosco a chance to escape in exchange for a written confession.

The confession relates how Fosco and Glyde arrived in England, both of them short of money. Fosco conceives the plan of extracting money out of Laura via her close resemblance to Anne.

His interest in ‘Chemistry’ is used to justify administering drugs to people, and he intercepts their mail. He kidnaps Anne, who dies in his house, then he conveys Laura under sedation to the asylum.

Walter gathers further documentary evidence, then Laura is taken back to Limmerage House where she is reinstated, despite the resistance of her uncle Fairlie. Walter organises a public statement of events, and then they return to London.

Walter receives a commission in Paris, where he learns about the assassination of Fosco. Walter and Laura have a child, who on the sudden death of his relative Frederick Fairlie inherits the Limmerage estate.

The Woman in White – principal characters

Walter Hartright	a teacher of drawing (28)
Sarah Hartright	his sister
Professor Pesca	a dwarf teacher of Italian
Anne Catherick	the Woman in White
Marian Halcombe	shapely, poor, mannish
Laura Fairlie	rich, pretty, Marian’s half-sister
Frederick Fairlie	an aesthete and valetudinarian
Mrs Vesey	a vapid former governess to Laura
Percival Glyde	a fake and impoverished ‘Baronet’
Vincent Gilmore	the Fairlie family solicitor
Mrs Clements	a friend to Anne Catherick
Mr Merriman	Glyde’s solicitor
Count Fosco	an Italian aesthete and spy
Countess Fosco	Fairlie’s sister, Laura’s aunt
Eliza Michelson	housekeeper at Blackwater Park
Mrs Rubelle	nurse employed by Fosco
Mr Kyle	solicitor in Gilmore’s office

The Woman in White – further reading

William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, London: Ivan R. Dee, 1988.

Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship, New York: AMS Press, 1982.

Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists, New York: Library of Congress, 1919.

Lynn Pykett, Wilkie Collins: New Casebooks, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1998.

Nicholas Rance, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1991.

More on Wilkie Collins
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The Woodlanders

October 10, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, commentary, and study resources

The Woodlanders. There were no less than ten versions of this novel during Hardy’s lifetime. The first appearance of the text was as a serial which ran in the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar between May 1886 and April 1887 and in Britain in Macmillan’s Magazine at the same time. It was then published as a one-volume novel later in 1887. There followed subsequent editions in England, America, and a ‘colonial’ edition – all of which Hardy edited, making small changes in locations and emphases to the story. There were also numerous pirated editions in America – because International Copyright agreements did not come into effect until 1891.

The Woodlanders – commentary

Melodrama

The crucial dramatic scene in which Grace goes to seek help from Giles is a classic instance of Victorian melodrama writ very heavily indeed. Modern readers can be forgiven for feeling that the situation in the novel at this point has been especially constructed to wring every last drop of pathos from the story.

We know that Giles has been in love with Grace from their earliest days – and has remained loyal to his feelings of respect for her. He has seen her choose Fitzpiers as a husband for reasons of social aspiration, and has simultaneously lost his own precarious social status because his house has been ‘repossessed’. He lives as an outcast, on the fringes of Hintock society, and the repossession of his home is symmetrically in favour of Mrs Charmond, his rival’s lover.

But at this point in the narrative Grace realizes that Giles is a worthy man who she loves after all. Fitzpiers has deserted her with the seductive Felice Charmond and Grace has nobody else to turn to. Fitzpiers returns to Hintock (Felice having been shot in the meantime) hoping for a reconciliation and Grace is in flight from him.

Grace is taken in and protected by Giles, but he is so scrupulous about protecting her reputation he offers to give up his own primitive lodgings and to sleep somewhere else himself. To emphasize his recognition of social boundaries, he even locks her in the house and gives her the key.

Moreover, since Giles is in fact very ill, he protects Grace from the knowledge of his condition by talking to her through a window, so that she will not see his emaciated face. And the somewhere else he goes to sleep is no more than a rustic bivouac which offers him no protection from the storm. As a result of exposure to the rain (on top of his already fevered condition) he dies.

This saintly self-sacrifice may be regarded as a form of voluntary martyrdom on Giles’s part, or alternatively as an almost pathological degree of masochism. The result in either case is the logical extension of such attitudes – which is death.

Literature and morality

It is worth noting that whilst Hardy generally accepted the censorship imposed by publishers, he manages to work into the novel what would be considered at the time a number a risqué scenes.

When Grace meets Felice Charmond when they are both (symbolically?) lost in the woods, Felice reveals the true state of her relations with Grace’s husband Fitzpiers. Hardy has Felice whisper the information (quite unnecessarily) into Grace’s ear – whereupon Grace exclaims ‘O my great God! … He’s had you! Can it be – can it be!’

When Fitzpiers elopes with Mrs Charmond and her divorce is refused, Grace ‘realises’ that she loves Giles after all. So when they meet to consider their bleak future prospects she decides that it would not be wrong to enjoy some sort of physical intimacy with him after all, and she offers herself to him in a manner which would undoubtedly be seen as sexually provocative at the time: “Why don’t you do what you want to?”

Then when Grace is hiding in the cottage she drags Giles’s dying body back into the hut, removes his wet clothes, and puts him into the bed – a scene of intimacy which Hardy emphasises by calling it ‘her bed’.

When Grace miraculously (improbably?) avoids getting caught in the man-trap at the end of the novel, she is forced to remove her skirt in order to escape – immediately after which she decides to give herself up to Fitzpiers again.

Textual history

The genesis of the text presents an interesting picture of authorship and publishing history at the end of the nineteenth century. Hardy might have been frustrated by the prudishness of his publishers (which is one reason why he eventually gave up writing novels) but he took every opportunity to revise his work and to sharpen the focus of his stories, and he was also a practical businessman so far as exploiting the commercial value of his work was concerned. The Woodlanders went through a number of versions before the text was stabilized.

1. The original conception was planned as what he called ‘a woodland story’ in 1874 as a successor to Far from the Madding Crowd, but Hardy put the idea to one side whilst he was writing The Hand of Ethelberta, The Return of the Native, The Trumpet Major, Two on a Tower, and The Mayor of Casterbridge.

2. Ten years later Macmillan’s Magazine wanted a new novel to be serialized. Hardy produced the original manuscript, which is now in the Dorset County Museum.

3. But after revising the galley proofs for Macmillan, Hardy astutely sold the novel to the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar. He revised the version which they serialized and then made more substantial changes to the one-volume version of the novel produced by the parent company Harper and Brothers in 1887.

4. Hardy made further revisions to the galley proofs before returning a third set to Macmillan for their first UK publication between May 1886 and April 1887. [It should be noted that at the time, nobody would be keeping track of all these revisions, ‘improvements’, and changes. That sort of literary scholarship would only come much later.]

5. The first three-volume UK edition of the novel was published by Macmillan in 1887, and at the same time a ‘Colonial’ edition was prepared for sale in the English-speaking colonies such as Canada, Australia, and South-Africa. The purpose of these editions was to reach these outlets first, before the American editions could capture the market.

6. A number of pirated editions also appeared in America – which proves the popularity of Hardy’s work on both sides of the Atlantic. The establishment of International Copyright agreements did not take place until 1891, which helped to put an end to this practice. Hardy naturally had no hand in the preparation of these editions.

7. Hardy changed publisher to Osgood, McIlvaine, who in 1896 issued the collected edition of Hardy’s work called the Wessex Novels. This enabled Hardy to make yet further revisions to the text.

8. But in 1903 Hardy returned to his previous publisher Macmillan, who also wanted to produce a ‘definitive’ edition of Hardy’s work, which they called the ‘Uniform Edition’. Once again, Hardy took the opportunity to revise the text.

9. This process of revisions and new editions continues through Macmillan’s ‘Wessex Editions issued between 1912 and 1914. These are now considered the more or less definitive editions. There was also a commemorative ‘Mellstock Edition’ issued in 1920, but Hardy did not revise the Woodlanders volume.

10. There were two levels of revision made to the work at each of these stages. The first were minor issues of emphasis to the story which Hardy made in response to reader’s criticism. In editing terms, these are called substantives. The second level is matters of punctuation and text presentation (such as capitalization, spelling, speech marks, and italics). These might have been Hardy’s revisions, but they would often be governed by the publisher’s house style.

The Woodlanders – study resources

The Woodlanders – (xford Classics – Amazon UK

The Woodlanders – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Woodlanders – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Woodlanders – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

The Woodlanders – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Woodlanders – audiobook version at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

The Woodlanders – principal characters

Mrs Dollery	a horse drawn van driver
Mr Percomb	a master barber
Marty South	a young woman who is in love with Giles
John South	her father (55)
Mrs Felice Charmond	a rich landowner, mistress of Hintock House, a former actress
Giles Winterborne	a dealer in apple trees and cider pressing
George Melbury	a timber merchant
Grace Melbury	his young and educated daughter (20)
Mrs Lucy Melbury	his second wife, Grace’s ex-nurse
Grammer Oliver	old servant of the Melburys
Edred Fitzpiers	a country doctor and would-be scientist
Robert Creedle	assistant worker to Giles
Suke Damson	a hoyden
Tim Tangs	her fiancé, a wood turner
Fred Beaucock	an ex lawyer’s clerk

The Woodlanders – plot summary

Chapter I. Master-barber Percomb gets a lift in Mrs Dollery’s van to Little Hintock.

Chapter II. Percomb tries to persuade Marty South to sell her long chestnut hair, which has been seen and requisitioned by rich landowner Mrs Charmond. He offers Marty two guineas, but she refuses, because she thinks her hair is an essential asset in trying to attract Giles Winterborne.

Chapter III. At night Marty takes the spars she has made to the local timber dealer, George Melbury. There she overhears his worries about his daughter Grace and his plans to marry her to Giles. She goes home and cuts off her hair. In the morning Giles calls for her and they load up the spars.

Chapter IV. Melbury despatches Giles to collect his daughter Grace, who is returning from college. Melbury would like her to marry Giles, even though he doesn’t think him high enough in class terms. He thinks of this as compensation for having won his first wife from Giles’s father.

Chapter V. Giles gives Marty a lift to Sherton Abbas, then is met by Grace. On her way back on foot, Marty is given a lift by Mrs Charmond.

Chapter VI. Giles drives Grace home, trying to revive their past relationship as sweethearts – without success. Grammer Oliver tells Grace about Fitzpiers, a doctor who experiments in science and anatomy who has moved into the locality.

Chapter VII. Giles follows Melbury and Grace into the woods where there is a sale of Mrs Charmond’s timber. Wishing to energize their ‘understood’ engagement, he calls to see Grace, but she is busy getting dressed for a visit to Mrs Charmond.

Chapter VIII. Grace visits Mrs Charmond in her gloomily placed house and makes a very good impression. Mrs Charmond invites her to be a traveling companion on her planned European tour. Meanwhile, Giles plants fir trees with Marty South.

Chapter IX. Giles invites the Melburys and Grace to a Christmas party in the hope of advancing his unofficial engagement with Grace. But his planning is inept, and they turn up far too early.

Chapter X. The party is a mixture of homespun friendliness and social disasters. Giles is chagrined at his failure to impress Grace, and Mr Melbury is ambivalent about Giles as a partner for his daughter.

Chapter XI. Mr Melbury continues to think that having invested a lot of money in Grace’s education, she could marry somebody socially superior to Giles. Yet his conscience troubles him regarding the debt of honour he feels he owes to Giles’s dead father.

Chapter XII. After being insulted by a passing huntsman, Melbury forbids Grace to meet Giles any more. Mrs Charmond is due to leave on her foreign tour, but has not contacted Grace. Meanwhile, Marty’s father John South is dying.

Chapter XIII. John South is worried that a tall tree in his garden might fall on the house and kill him, so Giles prunes the tree. Grace breaks off their engagement, and Mrs Charmond sets off for Italy, without Grace.

Chapter XIV. John South gets worse, so Dr Fitzpiers insists that the tree be cut down. It is done overnight, so as not to alarm South. But next morning the shock of its disappearance kills him.

Chapter XV. Because of old conditions in the house lease (and his father’s negligence) Giles looses the right to his house, which reverts to Mrs Charmond. Giles accepts that his engagement is no longer possible, just as Grace begins to take a renewed romantic interest in him again.

Chapter XVI. Giles meets Dr Fitzpiers and accepts a ride in his gig. Fitzpiers quizzes him about Grace, who he finds attractive. Giles gives away very little information.

Chapter XVII. Grammer Oliver falls ill and reveals to Grace that she has sold her brain to Dr Fitzpiers for ten pounds. Grace is sent to the doctor to cancel the arrangement. Fitzpiers is deeply bored and frustrated with the stagnant social life in the district.

Chapter XVIII. Grace finds Fitzpiers asleep and leaves. He brings her back and agrees to cancel the arrangement with Grammer Oliver. He shows her a fragment of John South’s brain under a microscope.

Chapter XIX. Fitzpiers plans to marry in his own class, but he is attracted to Grace. He thinks she is a rarity with whom he can temporarily amuse himself. He joins the bark-stripping workers, helps Grace find her lost purse, and learns that she as had an ‘admirer’.

Chapter XX. At the Midsummer”s Eve folk rituals Fitzpiers lays ‘claim’ to Grace, displacing Giles. After this he pursues Suke Damson and spends the night with her.

Chapter XXI. Giles is in retreat from the midsummer celebrations when he meets a mysterious stranger from South Carolina who wants to be directed to Mrs Charmond in secrecy.

Chapter XXII. Melbury visits Fitzpiers and agrees to let him pay court to Grace, based on nothing more than a snobbish regard for the doctor’s family name and reputation.

Chapter XXIII. Melbury pressures Grace to accept Fitzpiers so as to enhance her social status. Fitzpiers is accepted by Grace, but he wants a registry office wedding so as to keep her lower class origins quiet.

Chapter XXIV. Grace sees Suke Damson coming out of Fitzpiers’ house at dawn. When confronted by her, he claims it was an emergency medical visit for a tooth extraction. Grace accepts the explanation, but insists on a church wedding. Her wedding dress arrives – and she is married to Fitzpiers.

Chapter XXV. Returning from her honeymoon, Grace meets Giles at an inn, working his cider press. She is upset by the encounter. Grace and Fitzpiers live with the Melburys, but Fitzpiers thinks they ought not to mix socially with her parents. Mrs Charmond sends for Fitzpiers after a fall from her carriage.

Chapter XXVI. Fitzpiers attends Mrs Charmond, who is not hurt at all. She has sent for him because she is bored. It transpires that they have met before, when Fitzpiers was a student in Heidelberg.

Chapter XXVII. Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond flirt with each other, and he pulls out of the purchase of a medical practice in Budmouth so that he can stay in the vicinity. She decides to go away, but first learns of Giles Winterborne’s plight and feels sympathetic towards him.

Chapter XXVIII. Fitzpiers rides late at night to visit Mrs Charmond in a nearby town. Grace’s suspicions about her husband’s infidelity are confirmed when she meets Giles returning from Middleton Abbey where he has seen both Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond.

Chapter XXIX. Grace learns that Fitzpiers has lied about extracting Suke Damson’s tooth. Fitzpiers stays out until dawn. Grace retreats from him emotionally, and returns into the parental home. Melbury regrets not having stuck to his original plan of marrying Grace to Giles Winterborne.

Chapter XXX. Melbury begins to spy on Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond on his daughter’s behalf. Grace bears Fitzpiers’ infidelity without jealousy, largely because she has decided that she loves Giles after all.

Chapter XXXI. Melbury discusses his problems with Giles, revealing his sense of guilt about having been disloyal to the memory of Giles’s father, and wishing that Grace had married Giles. It emerges that Mrs Charmond has been an actress.

Chapter XXXII. Melbury goes to see Mrs Charmond and asks her to have pity on Grace, and to befriend her again so as to quash the scandalous rumours about an illicit relationship with Fitzpiers.

Chapter XXXIII. Grace meets Mrs Charmond in the woods. They argue about Fitzpiers, and Grace predicts that Mrs Charmond will suffer from her love with Fitzpiers. They both get lost in the woods, then find each other again. Mrs Charmond confesses that she loves Fitzpiers and that they are lovers.

Chapter XXXIV. Grace goes to visit friends and falls ill. Her father follows Fitzpiers when he goes to visit Mrs Charmond, but doesn’t get a chance to reproach him for neglecting Grace. Fitzpiers falls off his horse in the dark and is rescued by his father-in-law.

Chapter XXXV. Whilst on Melbury’s horse, Fitzpiers is befuddled by the rum Melbury has given him. He ‘confesses’ his wish to be free to claim Mrs Charmond. Melbury pushes him off his horse, whereupon he bangs his head. Hearing that Fitzpiers has had an accident, Grace, Suke Damson, and Mrs Charmond all assemble in Fitzpiers’ bedroom at the house – but he does not come back home.

Chapter XXXVI. Fitzpiers, his head bleeding, retreats to Mrs Charmond’s house, where she hides him in her attic. He makes plans to ‘disappear’ from Hintock altogether.

Chapter XXXVII. Fitzpiers leaves Hintock, followed closely by Mrs Charmond, and they are later reportedly seen together in Baden. Melbury hears that easier divorce is now possible, and goes to London to arrange a termination of Grace’s and Fitzpiers’ relationship. He also rather precipitately encourages both Giles and Grace to recommence their romance.

Chapter XXXVIII. Giles and Grace meet in Sherton. They re-open their relationship in the Abbey, but are both cautious regarding Grace’s legal position. Giles then blunders socially by ordering her lunch in a workman’s tavern.

Chapter XXXIX. Back in Hintock Giles and Grace are both worried that they might be doing the wrong thing morally. Then Giles gets a letter telling him that the divorce application has failed. He does not reveal this to Grace and accepts her invitation to kiss her. Melbury returns from London with the news that Grace must remain wife to Fitzpiers.

Chapter XL. Three months later, Giles is ill. Grace receives a letter from Fitzpiers asking her to meet at the coast and return with him to France. She refuses, so he comes back to Hintock, where Melbury is prepared to accept him. Grace flees the house and goes to Giles for help.

Chapter XLI. Grace wants to go to the house of a friend, but rain drives them back. She stays in Giles’s cottage whilst he sleeps in a lean-to shelter in the pouring rain. They decide that Grace should hide there. Autumn storms and rain arrive, but Giles remains outside to protect her social reputation.

Chapter XLII. Giles does not appear one morning, and by nightfall Grace is driven out to find him in a delirious state in his shelter. She puts him to bed, then goes to summon the nearest doctor – who is Fitzpiers.

Chapter XLIII. Fitzpiers arrives at the cottage and confirms that Giles is dying – which he does. Grace lets Fitzpiers believe that she has been living in the cottage with Giles as lovers. He reveals to her that Mrs Charmond is dead. [She was shot by a jealous lover.] Marty South appears, and the two women pray for Giles. Mr and Mrs Melbury arrive and take Grace back home – on her condition that Fitzpiers leaves.

Chapter XLIV. Grace and Marty visit Giles’s grave, and Fitzpiers visits Hintock, learning from Marty the truth about Grace’s occupation of the cottage.

Chapter XLV. Some months later Fitzpiers writes to Grace asking to see her again. When they meet he wants to be forgiven and live together again. She does not accede to the idea, and asks her father for advice. He says she is better off without Fitzpiers.

Chapter XLVI. Fitzpiers visits Grace in her garden and presses his case again. She tells him she will remain loyal to the memory of Giles. Meanwhile Tom Tangs is suspicious of Suke’s interest in Fitzpiers, and wishes to strike back against him on the eve of his departure for New Zealand.

Chapter XLVII. Tangs sets a huge man-trap for Fitzpiers on the night he is due to visit Grace. But Grace’s skirt is caught in it when she gets to the spot first. Fitzpiers has bought into a medical practice in the midlands with money from an inheritance. He presses his argument for reconciliation harder than ever.

Chapter XLVIII. Grace submits and returns to Sherton with Fitzpiers. Melbury goes with friends in search of his daughter and finds her at the inn. On their return to Hintock, they pass Marty who is tending Giles’ grave alone, now ‘united’ with the man she loved.

Hardy’s study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum

The Woodlanders – bibliography

John Bayley, ‘A Social Comedy’ On Re-Reading The Woodlanders, Thomas Hardy Annual, 5 (1987), 3-21.

Penny Boumelha, ‘The Patriarchy of Class: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Woodlanders‘. in Dale Kramer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 130-44.

Peter Casagrande Jr., ‘The Shifted “Centre of Altruism” in The Woodlanders: Thomas Hardy’s Third “Return of the Native”‘, Journal of English Literary History 38 (1971), 104-25.

Annette Frederico, ‘Pathalogical Gentlemen: Far from the Madding Crowd and The Woodlanders‘, in her Masculine Identity in Hardy and Gissing (London and Toronto, Associated University Presses, 1991), 55-75.

Frank R. Giordano, ‘The Martyrdom of Giles Winterborne’, Thoma Hardy Annual, 2 (1984), 61-78.

Patricia Ingham, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, ed. P. Ingham (London: Penguin, 1998).

Mary Jacobus, ‘Tree and Machine: The Woodlanders‘, in Dale Kramer (ed.), Critical Approaches in the Fiction of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1979), 116-34.

Rosemary Sumner, A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1982).

Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the Minor Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

Hardy’s WESSEX

The Woodlanders – further reading

John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Brighton: Harvester, 1982.

Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1982.

L. St.J. Butler, Alternative Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Raymond Chapman, The Language of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1990.

R.G.Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Ralph W.V. Elliot, Thomas Hardy’s English, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

James Gibson (ed), The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, London, 1976.

Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1962. (This is more or less Hardy’ s autobiography, since he told his wife what to write.)

P. Ingham, Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading, Brighton: Harvester, 1989.

P.Ingham, The Language of Class and Gender: Transformation in the English Novel, London: Routledge, 1995,

Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, London: Bodley Head, 1971.

Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. (This is the definitive biography.)

Michael Millgate and Richard L. Purdy (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-

R. Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge, 1988.

Harold Orel (ed), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, London, 1967.

F.B. Pinion, A Thomas Hardy Companion, London: Macmillan, 1968.

Norman Page, Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1977.

Rosemary Sumner, Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, London: Macmillan, 1981.

Richard H. Taylor, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, London, 1978.

Merryn Williams, A Preface to Hardy, London: Longman, 1976.

Other works by Thomas Hardy

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Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

More on Thomas Hardy
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Thomas Hardy biography

September 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

his life and major writings

1840. Thomas Hardy born in Dorchester – father a bricklayer, later a builder, musical easy-going; mother hardworking, ambitious, and very literate. Both parents, despite later prosperity, shared class anxiety and fear of being pulled back down into poverty. Dorset at this period still had remnants of pre-industrial revolution. Hardy therefore witnessed first-hand the death of old pastoral traditions and the rise of industrialisation.

1848-. Educated in Dorset schools – including Latin and French, plus applied mathematics and commercial studies. Strong auto-didactic impulse. Influenced by schoolmaster Horace Moule – a classicist and dipsomaniac.

1856. Articled to Dorchester architect – then employed as an assistant. Hardy witnesses the hanging of a young woman – a scene he was to use thirty years later in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

1862. Travelled to London to seek work – employed as a architectural draughtsman. Prizewinner in competitions and elected to the Architectural Association. He explores the cultural life of London, visiting museums, attending plays and operas, and begins writing poetry in earnest.

1863. Literary ambitions begin – begins to write poetry and continues studies. Poems rejected.

1866. Gradual loss of religious faith.

1867. Returns to Dorset and writes first novel – The Poor Man and the Lady, which is rejected by publishers.

1869. Disappointed by literary rejections – returns to work as an architect in Weymouth. Re-writes first novel as Desperate Remedies.

1870. Hardy travels to St. Juliot to work on the restoration of the church. He meets Emma Gifford in Boscastle, Cornwall – marries her four years later.

1871. Desperate Remedies published at Hardy’s own expense – then remaindered.

1872. Under the Greenwood Tree – copyright sold for £30. Hardy’s first success as a writer. Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father) commissions writing for the Cornhill Magazine.

1873. A Pair of Blue Eyes is published in three volumes. Hardy now relinquishes architecture as a career to write full-time. Horace Moule, his close adviser and friend, commits suicide in Cambridge.

1874. Far from the Madding Crowd begins as serial in the Cornhill Magazine. Hardy marries Emma Gifford – honeymoon in Paris – then returns to live in Tooting, London. Lives the life of a literary lion.

1875. The Hand of Ethelberta serialised in the Cornhill Magazine. The Hardys return to live in Dorset.

1878. The Return of the Native serialised in Belgravia and then published in three volumes – to which Hardy attached a map of ‘Wessex’ to show the novel’s locations. With the success of this novel, he begins to experience life as a celebrity. He joins the Saville Club.

1879. Began to write short (and long) stories with ‘The Distracted Young Preacher’.

1880. The Trumpet Major. Hardy begins to design and supervises the building of his own home at Max Gate in Dorset.

1881. A Laodicean is written mostly in bed, where Hardy is recovering from a serious illness.

1882. Two on a Tower is serialised in the Atlantic Monthly then issued in three volumes.

1884. Hardy is made a Justice of the Peace and begins to receive visits from aristocracy.

1886. The Mayor of Casterbridge is serialised in the Graphic then brought out in two volumes the same year.

1887. The Woodlanders is issued in three volumes. The Hardys visit France and Italy – but the marriage is not very successful. When they return, he begins habit of visiting London for ‘the season’. Hardy actually discourages Emma’s own literary ambitions.

1888. Hardy’s first collection of stories published as Wessex Tales – and Hardy publishes the first of three essays on the theory of fiction – The Profitable Reading of Fiction.

1889. Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau commissions a novel (Tess) but then rejects it on grounds of blasphemy and obscenity. It is also rejected by other publishers.

1891. Tess of the d’Urbervilles serialised in the Graphic. Copyright Bill passed in the United States – which turns out to be financially beneficial to Hardy.

1892. Hardy’s father dies. The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved is serialised in the Illustrated London News

1893. Meets Florence Henniker in Dublin – the subject of his most intense romantic attachment to artistic ladies. He writes The Spectre of the Real in collaboration with her.

1894. The third volume of short stories – Life’s Little Ironies – published in one volume.

1895. Osgood-Mcilvaine begins bringing out the first collected edition of Hardy’s works. The set includes the first edition of Jude the Obscure. The novel receives harsh criticism, prompting Hardy to give up novel writing.

1898. Hardy’s first collection of verse published as Wessex Poems – comprising work from the 1860s and 1890s, and illustrated by Hardy himself.

1899. Boer war begins. Growing physical separation between Hardy and Emma.

1901. Another collection of verse – Poems of the Past and Present – is published.

1903. Part One of The Dynasts appears. This is Hardy’s extended verse-play about the Napoleonic wars which he intends as his masterpiece.

1905. Meets Florence Dugdale, who is forty years younger than Hardy and becomes his secretary.

1908. The Dynasts is completed. Death of George Meredith and Swinburne leave Hardy most celebrated English writer.

1910. Awarded the Order of Merit – having previously refused a knighthood. Receives the freedom of Dorchester. Relationship with Florence Dugdale deepens.

1912. A ‘definitive’ edition of Hardy’s works, the Wessex Edition, is published by Macmillan. It is a chance for Hardy to thoroughly revise his body of work. Emma suddenly dies in November.

1913. Hardy visits Cornwall in search of his and Emma’s youth, and begins to write poems about her. Awarded a D.Litt at Cambridge University and became an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College – fulfilling partially one of his early aspirations.

1914. Marries Florence Dugdale [who is forty years younger]. Burns all his notebooks and private papers. Hardy’s pessimism strengthened by the outbreak of First World War.

1917. Moments of Vision Hardy’s fifth collection of verse published. Begins work on dictating to Florence what was to become The Life of Thomas Hardy.

1923. Visited by the Prince of Wales, friendship with T.E.Lawrence. Second marriage as disappointing as the first.

1924. Hardy adapts Tess for the stage, and become romantically attached to Gertrude Bugler, who plays the title role.

1928. Hardy dies – and is buried with full honours in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. However, his heart, which had been cut out of his body first, was put in a biscuit tin and buried alongside his first wife in Stinsford churchyard, Dorset.

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy is a good introduction to Hardy criticism. It includes a potted biography of Hardy, an outline of the stories, novels, and poetry, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early influential full length study by D.H. Lawrence to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Hardy journals.

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19C Authors

tutorials, major writers, biographies, literary criticism

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The Time Machine – a note on the text

The Time Machine – critical commentary

The Time Machine – study resources

The Time Machine – chapter summaries

More science fiction by H.G. Wells

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The Tragic Muse – critical commentary

The Tragic Muse – study resources

The Tragic Muse – plot summary

The Tragic Muse – principal characters

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Turn of the Screw – critical commentary

The Turn of the Screw – study resources

The Turn of the Screw – plot summary

Principal characters

The Turn of the Screw – film version

Literary criticism

Further reading

Ghost stories by Henry James

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

essays on the theory and practice of information design

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The War of the Worlds – a note on the text

The War of the Worlds – critical commentary

The War of the Worlds – study resources

The War of the Worlds – chapter summaries

The War of the Worlds – further reading

More science fiction by H.G. Wells

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Well-Beloved – critical commentary

The Well-Beloved – Study resources

The Well-Beloved – plot summary

The Well-Beloved – principal characters

Hardy’s study

Further reading

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy – web links

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

The Wings of the Dove – plot summary

Study resources

Principal characters

The Wings of the Dove – film version

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, further reading

The Woman in White – a note on the text

The Woman in White – critical commentary

The Woman in White – study resources

The Woman in White – plot synopsis

The Woman in White – principal characters

The Woman in White – further reading

tutorial, characters, commentary, and study resources

The Woodlanders – commentary

The Woodlanders – study resources

The Woodlanders – principal characters

The Woodlanders – plot summary

Hardy’s study

The Woodlanders – bibliography

The Woodlanders – further reading

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy – web links

his life and major writings

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