Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is Thomas Hardy's fourth novel and his first major literary success. It originally appeared, anonymously, as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine, where it gained a wide readership; critical notices, too, were plentiful and mostly positive. Hardy revised the text extensively for the 1895 edition, and made further changes for the 1901 edition.^[1]

Plot summary

Gabriel Oak is an up-and-coming shepherd in the prime of life at twenty-eight years of age. With the savings of a frugal life, he has leased and stocked a sheep-farm. He falls in love with a newcomer eight years his junior, Bathsheba Everdene, a proud and somewhat vain young beauty who arrives to live with her aunt, Mrs. Hurst. She comes to like him well enough, and even saves his life once, but when he makes her an unadorned offer of marriage, she refuses; she values her independence too much and him too little. Gabriel's blunt protestations only serve to drive her to haughtiness. After a few months, she moves to Weatherbury, a village some miles off.

When next they meet, their circumstances have changed drastically. An inexperienced new sheepdog drives Gabriel's flock over a cliff, ruining him. After selling off everything of value, he manages to settle all his debts, but emerges penniless. He seeks employment at a work fair in the town of Casterbridge (a fictionalised version of Dorchester). When he finds none, he heads to another fair in Shottsford, a town about ten miles from Weatherbury.

On the way, he happens upon a dangerous fire on a farm and leads the bystanders in putting it out. When the veiled owner comes to thank him, he asks if she needs a shepherd. She uncovers her face and reveals herself to be none other than Bathsheba Everdene. She has very recently inherited the considerable estate of her uncle and is now a wealthy woman. Though somewhat uncomfortable with the situation, she hires him.

Meanwhile, Bathsheba has a new admirer; the lonely and repressed William Boldwood. Boldwood is a prosperous farmer of about forty whose ardour Bathsheba unwittingly awakens when – her curiosity piqued because he has never bestowed on her the customary admiring glance – she playfully sends him a valentine sealed with red wax on which she has embossed the words "Marry me". Boldwood, not realising the valentine was a jest, becomes obsessed with Bathsheba, and soon proposes marriage. Although she does not love him, she toys with the idea of accepting his offer; he is, after all, the most eligible bachelor in the district. However, she postpones giving him a definite answer. When Gabriel rebukes her for her thoughtlessness, she fires him.

Then her sheep begin dying from bloat. She discovers to her chagrin that Gabriel is the only man who knows how to cure them. Her pride delays the inevitable, but finally she is forced to beg him for help. Afterwards, she offers him back his job and their friendship is restored.

"She took up her position as directed." Troy courts Bathsheba; Cornhill illustration by Helen Paterson Allingham

Bathsheba soon discovers that her new husband is an improvident gambler with little interest in farming. Worse, she begins to suspect that he does not love her. In fact, Troy's heart belongs to her former servant, Fanny Robin. Before meeting Bathsheba, Troy had promised to marry Fanny; on the wedding day, however, the luckless girl goes to the wrong church. She explains her mistake, but Troy, humiliated at being left waiting at the altar, angrily calls off the wedding. When they part, unbeknownst to Troy, Fanny is pregnant with his child.

Fanny Robin on her way to the Casterbridge workhouse. Cornhill illustration by Helen Paterson Allingham

Troy then comes home from Casterbridge, where he had gone to keep his appointment with Fanny. Seeing the reason for her failure to meet him, he gently kisses the corpse and tells the anguished Bathsheba, "This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be." The next day, he spends all his money on a white marble tombstone with the inscription "Erected by Francis Troy in beloved memory of Fanny Robin..." Then, loathing himself and unable to bear Bathsheba's company, he leaves. After a long walk to the coast, he bathes in the sea to refresh himself, leaving his clothes on the beach. A strong current carries him away.

A year later, with Troy presumed drowned, Boldwood renews his suit. Burdened with guilt over the pain she has caused him, Bathsheba reluctantly consents to marry him in six years, long enough to have her husband declared legally dead.

Troy, however, is not dead. When he learns that Boldwood is again courting Bathsheba, he returns to Weatherbury on Christmas Eve to claim his wife. He goes to Boldwood's house, where a party is underway, and orders Bathsheba to come with him; when she shrinks back, he seizes her arm, and she screams. At this, Boldwood shoots Troy dead and tries unsuccessfully to turn the gun on himself. Although he is condemned to hang for murder, his friends petition the Home Secretary for mercy, citing insanity. This is granted and Boldwood's sentence is changed to "confinement at Her Majesty's Pleasure". Bathsheba, profoundly chastened by guilt and grief, buries her husband in the same grave as Fanny Robin and their child, and adds a suitable inscription to the marker.

Throughout her tribulations, she comes to rely more and more on her oldest and (as she admits to herself) only real friend, Gabriel. When he gives notice that he is leaving her employ, she finally realises how important he has become to her well-being. One night, she goes alone to visit him in his house, to find out why he is (in her eyes) deserting her. Pressed, he reluctantly reveals that it is because people have been injuring her good name by gossiping that he wants to marry her. She exclaims that it is "...too absurd - too soon - to think of, by far!" He bitterly agrees that it is absurd, but when she corrects him, saying that it is only "too soon", he is emboldened to ask once again for her hand in marriage. She accepts, and the two are quietly wed.

Characters

• Bathsheba Everdene is an intelligent, independent young beauty, poor but well-educated. She rises in the world when she inherits her uncle's farm, then shocks everyone by deciding to manage it herself. She has three suitors: Gabriel Oak, William Boldwood, and Francis Troy.
• Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba's first suitor, is an honest, reliable farmer who loses his smallholding (and all pretensions to her hand) when a new sheepdog drives his flock over a cliff. He loves Bathsheba unselfishly; although she rejects his offer of marriage, he remains her loyal friend and right-hand man through many difficulties.
• William Boldwood, the second suitor, is a respected middle-aged farmer who – despite his reserved character and impressive personal dignity – falls madly in love with Bathsheba. Eventually, he can't bear not being with Bathsheba. He shoots Francis Troy when he "comes back from the dead" to retake Bathsheba as his wife.
• Sergeant Francis (Frank) Troy, the third suitor, is a handsome, superficially charming young man of great natural ability but little character. Bathsheba elopes with him after a brief courtship.
• Fanny Robin is a simple country girl who leaves her post on Bathsheba's farm to follow the man she is in love with, Sergeant Troy, who has promised to marry her. The marriage never takes place, and she later dies in childbirth at the Casterbridge workhouse.
• Liddy Smallbury, Bathsheba's servant and confidante, a light-hearted young country girl.

Other than the characters mentioned above, there are many others in the book, who principally work on Bathsheba's farm and generally have little effect on the course of the plot. They are an important feature of Hardy's writing as they show the opinions of the ordinary people and how the main characters would be judged by the public. They include characters like Joseph Poorgrass, as well as those who are unnamed, and are sometimes referred to as the rustic chorus.

Analysis

Far from the Madding Crowd offers in ample measure the details of English rural life that Hardy so relished.^[2] Hardy took the title from Thomas Gray's poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751):

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife

Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;

Along the cool sequester'd vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

"Madding" means "frenzied" here. ^[3] The title may be ironic: the five main characters – Bathsheba, Troy, Boldwood, Oak, and Fanny Robin – are all passionate beings who find the "vale of life" neither quiet nor cool.

Hardy's growing taste for tragedy is also evident in the novel: Fanny, Troy, and Boldwood all come to bad ends. Certain incidents, such as Fanny's pregnancy with a bastard child and Boldwood's sudden lapse into murderous violence, foreshadow events in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, where (as in Jude the Obscure) the protagonist is plagued by relentless misfortunes, and dies young at the end. In Madding Crowd, however, the fates still favour the lead character, who escapes two unfortunate entanglements, survives the mistakes of her youth, and finally finds contentment.

The book might also be described as an early piece of feminist literature, since it features an independent woman with the courage to defy convention by running a farm herself. Although Bathsheba's passionate nature leads her into serious errors of judgment, Hardy endows her with sufficient resilience, intelligence, and good luck to overcome her youthful folly. However, it is important to note the many misogynistic comments about women that are frequent in the novel, especially in the parts that are not narrative but are instead philosophy.

Finally, in Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy explores the proper basis for a happy marriage. Bathsheba's physical attraction to the broadsword-wielding Troy leads to a disastrous marriage that might have ended in financial ruin. A marriage to the strait-laced Boldwood, to whom she is bound only by feelings of guilt and obligation, would have meant emotional suffocation. Gabriel Oak is her colleague, friend, and advocate. He offers her true comradeship and sound farming skills; and, although she initially spurns him, telling him she doesn't love him, he turns out to be the right man to make her happy.

The novel and Hardy's Wessex

• Hardy first employed the term "Wessex" in Far from the Madding Crowd to describe the "partly real, partly dream-country" that unifies his novels of Southwest England. He found the word in the pages of early English history as a designation for an extinct, pre-Norman Conquest kingdom.^[4] In the first edition, the word "Wessex" is used only once, in chapter 50; Hardy extended the reference for the 1895 edition.^[5]
• The village of Puddletown, near Dorchester, is the inspiration for the novel's Weatherbury. Dorchester, in turn, inspired Hardy's Casterbridge.^[6]
• In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy briefly mentions two characters from Far from the Madding Crowd– Farmer Everdene and Farmer Boldwood, both in happier days.

References in popular culture

• The Danish metal band Wuthering Heights released an album named after the novel.
• British musician Nick Bracegirdle, better known as Chicane also released an album named after the novel.
• The band Nine Days, known for their song "Story of a Girl", released an album with the title "The Madding Crowd".
• Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum wrote a book titled Far from the Madding Gerund

Adaptations

An 1882 stage adaptation, written by Hardy with J. Comyns Carr starred Marion Terry.

There are several films based on this book. The best known is John Schlesinger's 1967 adaptation starring Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, Peter Finch, and Alan Bates. The others are:

• Far from the Madding Crowd (1998)

There have also been several radio plays, a musical (2000) and an opera, Far from the Madding Crowd by Andrew Downes (2006).

As of 2008, David Nicholls is adapting the novel for BBC Films.^[7]

Tamara Drewe is a comic strip serial based upon a modern reworking of the novel by Posy Simmonds. The mischievous valentine becomes an e-mail, while death in childbirth becomes death from a drug overdose.

In Autumn 2008, English Touring Theatre (ETT) toured the UK with a new stage adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd directed by Kate Saxon.

• ETT

References

External links

• Pictures, maps, and other resources for Puddletown, Hardy's Weatherbury.
• Helen Paterson Allingham's illustrations for the serial edition, with extensive commentary, from Victorian Web.
• Andrew Downes opera Far from the Madding Crowd on DVD http://www.andrewdownes.com

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