# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Discover 'Sword Exercises', an instruction book on the British Library's Discovering Literature website.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Instructions for the sword, carbine, pistol and lance exercises

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Explore 'Instructions for the sword, carbine, pistol and lance exercises', a book on the British Library's Discovering Literature website.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Google Forms - create and analyze surveys, for free.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Professor John Mullan explores the key features of realism and the different ways in which Victorian writers used them.

It is often thought that realism is a particular tendency of Victorian fiction, and it is certainly significant that the earliest uses of the word realism to refer to the faithful representation of the real world in literature or art date from the 1850s. The novelist of the period who most often uses the word (commonly in opposition to 'the ideal') to describe her own aims is George Eliot. In a review of a book by John Ruskin she defines realism as 'the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality'. Eliot was influential in her insistence on the modesty of true realism - its attention to what is 'ordinary'. In her first novel, (1859), she steps into her own story to liken the 'truthfulness', for which she aims, to the quality of 'many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise'. She finds 'delicious sympathy' in 'these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence'.

Manuscript of Adam Bede by George Eliot

In Chapter 17 of Adam Bede, titled 'In which the story pauses a little', Eliot writes that her 'strongest effort is... to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind'.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Cover to Middlemarch [Book I]

Middlemarch was published in eight instalments, between December 1871 and December 1872. This is the cover of Book I, 'Miss Brooke'.

Usage terms: Public Domain

By using this analogy, Eliot seems to put a special value on the accurate rendering of appearances. Yet she was clear that characterisation rather than description was the key to realism. In a now famous article in the Westminster Review in 1856 she criticised Dickens for having 'the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population' but being unable to pass 'from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness'. His 'frequently false psychology', she argued, was most evident when he led his reader into the company of the lower classes - 'his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and courtesans'. By her standards, Dickens was not a realist. Others would echo this. The young Henry James, reviewing Our Mutual Friend in 1865, described Dickens as 'the greatest of superficial novelists'.

James said of Dickens, 'the fantastic has been his great resource', meaning it as praise, but the question of Dickens's truth to reality troubled serious critics of his own day as it has troubled readers since. Dickens himself asserted the reality of his fiction, sometimes indignantly. In his 1841 preface to the third edition of Oliver Twist (1837-8), for instance, he responded to complaints about his treatment of criminals, and his sympathetic representation of Nancy, the prostitute, with the declaration that he had presented 'the stern and plain truth'. In Bleak House (1852-3) he turns from the body of Jo the crossing sweeper to address every more affluent member of his own society.

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. (ch. 47)

No novelist could be more convinced than Dickens that he was showing his readers the 'real' world.

Bleak House first edition with illustrations

In Bleak House, Charles Dickens confronts the depths of hardship, disease and loss suffered by the poor.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Contemporary life

In one respect, Dickens's fiction was closer to the world in which his readers lived than that of Eliot: many of his novels had contemporary settings. Most of Eliot's novels were set several decades back from the times in which they were first published as were a striking number of Victorian classics: Vanity Fair (1847-8), Wuthering Heights (1847), (1847), to name but a few. Some novelists, however, were explicitly concerned to address current social issues, and from the 1840s there developed a sub-genre known as 'the condition of England novel'. (This echoes a phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in a jeremiad about the human price paid for industrial and economic progress.) Dickens's (1854), Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854-5), Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850) and Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845) all fit this category. The latter had a subtitle - 'or The Two Nations' - that proclaimed the novel's analysis of the social cost of the growing affluence of one part of the nation.

Other successful novels of the period address particular social ills: Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) incorporated the scandal of the Yorkshire schools, where unwanted children were abandoned to cruelty and neglect; Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) dealt with the warring interests of workers and factory owners; Kingsley's Yeast (1848) exposed rural poverty; Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) showed the damage caused by alcoholism and the limitations upon the rights of an abused wife.

North and South: first instalment in Household Words

In North and South, published in instalments in the periodical Household Words, Gaskell contrasts the rural south with the harsh conditions of the industrial north.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Speech

One of the ways in which Victorian fiction displayed its interest in the real world was by making new efforts to represent the speech patterns of particular regions and social groups. In several of her novels, George Eliot tried to be accurate to the patterns of Warwickshire dialect. Chapter 6 of Silas Marner (1861), for instance, is a tour de force of dialect conversation. In novels like Mary Barton and North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell uses Lancashire dialect extensively, and in the first of these two novels she audaciously gives it to her primary characters. Emily Brontë was so conscientious in rendering Yorkshire dialect in Wuthering Heights that her sister Charlotte, overseeing publication of the novel after Emily's death, felt it necessary to rewrite some of the passages. Heathcliff's servant Joseph is still difficult to understand, even in the polished version.

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell, with Two Lectures on the Lancashire Dialect by William Gaskell

Many of the characters in Mary Barton speak in Lancashire dialect. The fifth edition of the novel included two lectures on Lancashire dialect by Elizabeth Gaskell's husband.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Anti-realist elements

Some Victorian novelists learned powerfully to combine realism with Gothic or melodramatic elements. Wilkie Collins's so-called sensation fiction, for instance, often relied on introducing uncanny terrors into the closely observed Victorian households. His settings are ordinary places made strange. Memorably, The Woman in White (1859) opens on the road from Finchley into London, where the narrator has his attention seized on a moonlit night by an apparent apparition: a woman dressed all in white who asks for directions into the city. There will be a natural explanation for these events, but the narrator's heightened and excitable consciousness transforms suburban normality into a haunting and disturbing vision.

Both Emily and Charlotte Brontë relish this combination of realism and supernaturalism. Wuthering Heights begins and ends with ghostly visions, even if they have supposedly natural explanations. The plot of Jane Eyre turns on an apparently supernatural event: the heroine 'hears' Mr Rochester's voice calling to her from many miles away. In Charlotte Brontë's last novel, Villette (1853), the heroine and narrator, Lucy Snowe, seems to believe that she has seen the ghostly nun who is supposed to haunt the girls' school where she is a teacher. These plot turns are all the more unsettling for coming in novels that attend minutely to the plain details of everyday life.

Illustrations to Wuthering Heights by Barnett Freedman

Emily Brontë combines realism with the supernatural in her novel Wuthering Heights. In his 1940 illustrations to the novel, Barnett Freedman emphasises its Gothic elements. Here, Lockwood breaks a window in order to reach through and grasp the hand of Cathy's ghost.

Usage terms: Some rights reserved
Held by: © Estate of Barnett Freedman

Narration

Despite Charlotte Brontë's use of supernatural motifs, it is striking that many of her Victorian readers praised her for what we might call realism. George Eliot's partner George Henry Lewes, a prolific critic and an eloquent advocate of realism, admired Jane Eyre in just these terms. 'Reality - deep, significant reality - is the great characteristic of the book'. He shrewdly recognised that Charlotte Brontë was interested in a psychological realism that often involved the apparent or temporary distortion of external reality. Jane Eyre, he said, was an autobiography 'not, perhaps, in the naked facts and circumstances, but in the actual suffering and experience'. This novel and Villette were first-person narratives that made audacious use of the narrator's confiding voice. The reader was to hear of feelings too private to be spoken.

Other leading novelists used omniscient third-person narration for realist purposes. The novelist who had most success representing contemporary social mores in this mode was Anthony Trollope. It was Trollope who, for perhaps his most ambitious novel, fashioned a title still used to refer to the ambition of fiction to reflect contemporary society back to the reader: The Way We Live Now (1875). It was George Eliot, however, who took omniscient third-person narration to an unprecedented level of sophistication. Her technique makes it seem as if she is approaching her characters rather than inventing them; she will probe and puzzle over their motives rather than simply state them. One might contrast this with a brilliant earlier example of omniscient narration: Thackeray's Vanity Fair. In Thackeray's novel, the characters are players in a satirical morality tale, each of them unchanging in their essential elements. The ironical, jaundiced narrator keeps stepping in to ruminate or lecture on the lessons to be drawn from their misadventures. Eliot's realism, however, depends on the changeability of her characters and their frequent inability to know their own next actions.

Footnotes

[1] The Westminster Review, April 1856.

[2] 'The Natural History of German Life', The Westminster Review, July 1856.

[3] The Nation, 21 December 1865.

[4] Fraser's Magazine, December 1847.

John Mullan is Professor of English at University College London. John is a specialist in 18th-century literature and is at present writing the volume of the Oxford English Literary History that will cover the period from 1709 to 1784. He also has research interests in the 19th century, and in 2012 published his book What Matters in Jane Austen?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Professor John Mullan explores the key features of realism and the different ways in which Victorian writers used them. It is often thought that realism is a particular tendency of Victorian fiction, and it is certainly significant that the earliest uses of the word realism to refer to the faithful representation of the real world in literature or art date from the 1850s.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sensation novels play on the nerves and thrill the senses. Matthew Sweet considers some of the key features of the genre, as well as its three founding texts, all published in the 1860s: The Woman in White, Lady Audley's Secret and East Lynne.

You don't need an academic essay to tell you that you're reading a sensation novel. The symptoms are obvious and self-diagnosis is easy. Does the heroine have a moustache? Has the hero turned himself blue by drinking silver nitrate to cure his epilepsy? Is your heart beating a little faster? Do you feel a sickly, neurotic kind of pleasure? Is there poison in that glass of lemonade?

Sensation fiction is populated by men who cannot bear loud noise and women who cannot digest cake. On its pages you will meet wives fixated on vengeance and husbands shamed by murder; a Byronic villain who terminates at the waist and leaps about on his hands like R2D2; a Hebridean cottager whom daylight burns like quicklime. ('If I were to draw the curtains,' she warns, 'I should feel the acutest pain all over my face.') In sensation fiction, sensory experience often comes with a side-effect like those knives in the feet of the Little Mermaid. Even soft furnishings can induce mental agony. 'The room,' winces the hero of Wilkie Collins's Basil (1852), 'would have given a nervous man the headache, before he had been in it a quarter of an hour.' (Part 1, ch.10)

Usage terms: Public Domain

Key texts

The genre was founded upon three novels: Collins's The Woman in White (1860), about the insanely complex machinations of a decayed British aristocrat and a bonbon-guzzling Italian Count; Ellen Wood's East Lynne (1861) about an adulterous woman disfigured in a railway crash, who returns, disguised, to the family home, in order to work in the nursery of her estranged children; and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), the story of a murderously ambitious Pre-Raphaelite beauty who secures a fortune by shoving her husband down the garden well.

Jangling the nerves

It was species of writing that, according to the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, aimed at 'electrifying the nerves of the reader' and, according to the satirists of Punch, was conceived for 'Harrowing the Mind, Making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on End, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System, Destroying Conventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life'. The critics and humourists were partly right. The sensation novel did jangle the nerves, and inspired a kind of pleasure that readers felt as much in their bodies as their minds. In this, it was attuned to the spirit of the popular culture of its moment.

The Belle of Belgrave Square

Front cover of music sheet for The Belle of Belgrave Square which was a parody of the book which was a sensation in the late 19th century.

A decade of sensation

The 1860s were the decade of sensation. They were the years of sensation preachers, sensation steamers, sensation scenes and sensation diplomacy - the latter said to be an Imperial Japanese phenomenon involving public execution and hara-kiri. The word was applied to thrilling stage dramas built around drownings, clifftop struggles and spectacular special effects; death-defying public entertainments involving lions and fireworks and trapeze artists. Above all these - literally, at least - were the performances of the highrope walker, Blondin, who, in the summer of 1861, scooted through the empty air 70 feet above the crowd at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. 'Thousands of us,' noted the novelist Charles Dickens, sitting below, 'have come to see an acrobat perform a feat of imminent danger [for the sake of] an exquisite and new sensation'.

The novels of Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Ellen Wood offer a richer and more nuanced experience than the sight of an airborne acrobat - even one who, like Blondin, was given to making his ascents dressed as a monkey, or wearing a suit of armour, or pushing a wheelbarrow containing a lion. Their fiction unsettles more profoundly. Its accounts of sickness, insanity, identity-theft and long-suppressed family secrets tell a story about the anxieties and uncertainties of 19th-century life - and our own lives, too. But they form a circuit with these sensational popular entertainments. Their plots are highrope walks; their pleasures, hopefully, are not entirely good for you.

Footnotes

[1] Wilkie Collins, The Two Destinies, 2 vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1876), ii, p. 3.

[2] H. L. Mansel, 'Sensation Novels', Quarterly Review, 113 (1863), pp. 488-9.

[3] 'Sensation Times', Punch, 44, (1863), p.193.

[4] Charles Dickens, All the Year Round, vol V (June 29 1861).

Written by Matthew Sweet

Matthew Sweet presents Free Thinking and Sound of Cinema on BBC Radio 3 and The Philosopher's Arms and The Film Programme on BBC Radio 4. His books and TV programmes include Inventing the Victorians, Shepperton Babylon, The Rules of Film Noir, Me, You and Doctor Who and Silent Britain. His most recent book, The West End Front, was serialised on Radio 4 and is in development as a drama for BBC One. His journalism appears in the Guardian, Intelligent Life and Art Quarterly. He is a consultant on the Showtime/Sky Atlantic drama Penny Dreadful.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sensation novels play on the nerves and thrill the senses. Matthew Sweet considers some of the key features of the genre, as well as its three founding texts, all published in the 1860s: The Woman in White, Lady Audley's Secret and East Lynne.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in a brick and thatch two-storey cottage in the hamlet called Higher Bockhampton, in the parish of Stinsford, about three miles east of Dorchester, the county town of Dorset. With the exception of five years, Hardy lived all his long life in his home county.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wessex functions as an imagined place based on a real region with actual places which Hardy knew well and observed closely. He creates his own place-names which correspond to actual place-names.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time Archive: Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time Archive: Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Elizabeth James traces the development of Thomas Hardy's fourth novel, from inspiration to post-publication revisions.

Far from the Madding Crowd marked a turning point in Thomas Hardy's career. It was the first of his novels to be written after he had decided to give up his work as an architect, the first to be written for a prestigious literary magazine closely supervised by a meticulous editor and, famously, the first to use the term 'Wessex' to identify the 'partly real, partly dream-country' setting in south west England. It was also his first commercial success. As Michael Millgate has demonstrated, it is 'unmistakably a major work', a novel of 'astonishing confidence', richness and vitality. Hardy himself came to recognise its special qualities, admitting in 1901 that it had 'a growing tendency to appear as the work of a youngish hand, though perhaps there is something in it which I could not have put there if I had been older'.

Map of Thomas Hardy's Wessex

The literary geographical term 'Wessex', which Hardy used as a setting for his novels, is first used in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).

Usage terms: Public Domain

Origins and composition of the novel

In November 1872 Hardy was surprised and delighted to receive a letter from Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, inviting him to contribute a serial. Realising that this was an important opportunity, Hardy proposed a pastoral story to be called 'Far from the Madding Crowd', in which 'the chief characters would probably be a young woman-farmer, a shepherd, and a sergeant of cavalry'. Almost a year later, in September 1873, he submitted the first 10 or so chapters of the novel and arrangements were made to begin publication in the January issue of the magazine. From then until the following summer he secluded himself at Bockhampton, the Dorset village where he had been born and brought up and where his parents still lived. Here, he told Stephen, he could write 'within a walk of the district in which the incidents are supposed to occur', jotting down ideas on large leaves or pieces of wood or stone if he had no paper to hand, and neatly tailoring the monthly instalments to the seasons of the year. The final chapters were written 'at a gallop' in July, and the novel published in book form on 23 November 1874, shortly before the appearance of the last magazine instalment.

The Dorset Farm Labourer by Thomas Hardy

Hardy's settings and characters were drawn from observation - in this pamphlet he argues against the stereotyping of farm labourers, proposing that this amounts to a caricature.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Editorial influence

Far from the Madding Crowd began conventionally. The characters Hardy had outlined were familiar from popular fiction and melodrama; the lyrical opening chapters promised a traditional narrative on the pastoral theme which Stephen had requested, and city readers craved. As the novel progressed, however, it evolved into a more complex and challenging story, bringing with it unexpected and far-reaching editorial difficulties.

Stephen provided expert guidance throughout, from the division of chapters to the use of dialect. He took care to praise certain passages, such as the Great Barn chapter, but had no hesitation in recommending cuts. Some of these were necessary to reduce the material to the length of the magazine instalment; others - the conversation at the shearing supper, for example (ch. 23) - were intended to speed up the action. More significant were the cuts Stephen felt obliged to make out of 'excessive prudery'. Acutely aware of the religious and moral sensibilities of the Cornhill's highly respectable, upper middle-class subscribers, he altered the proofs to remove potentially offensive words or phrases. He advised Hardy to treat Troy's seduction of Fanny 'in a gingerly fashion', and instructed him to tone down the treatment of Fanny's death (ch. 43), eliminating all reference to the illegitimate baby.

This treatment gave Hardy a taste of the editorial censorship he would experience regularly in the future. Despite the damaging effect on his overall design, at this early stage in his career he was prepared to compromise. 'Perhaps I may have higher aims one day, and be a great stickler for the proper artistic balance of the completed work, but for the present circumstances lead me to wish merely to be considered a good hand at a serial'.

From manuscript to print

As he wrote, Hardy's original, simple outline developed into a carefully interwoven tale in which the lives of the principal characters are played out against the backdrop of a close-knit community and the wider natural world. The light-hearted, expansive tone of the opening chapters gradually sharpened and intensified; the stock figures with which he began became living individuals with human weaknesses and passions.

Hardy made many alterations in his manuscript as he went along - to the plot, to the language and imagery, and especially to his characters. Gabriel, whom we meet as a boyish, slightly bumbling, somewhat comic figure, becomes more of a hero, addressed as 'Mister Oak' by the villagers, and a worthier partner for Bathsheba; Troy, on the other hand, becomes less so. Dangerously attractive at first, he is dismissed abruptly only to reappear as a pantomime villain playing Dick Turpin, the popular hero of W. H. Ainsworth's Rookwood, a favourite book from Hardy's childhood. Both were gentrified - Oak by his progressively standardised speech, Troy through repeated references to his noble connections - to bring them into closer rivalry with Boldwood, the wealthy loner who is increasingly portrayed as a tormented victim. There are even attempts to make Bathsheba appear more ladylike, less assertive, in response to the hostility of contemporary critics.

Hardy's manuscript revisions have been discussed in detail by Rosemarie Morgan, Robert Schweik and Simon Gatrell.

Later revisions

Hardy continued to make revisions in later editions. The most significant were undertaken for the first collected edition of the Wessex Novels, published in 1895. By this time Wessex, mentioned for the first time in Chapter 50 of Far from the Madding Crowd, had been taken up and transformed into a tangible region. The topographical details were fine-tuned: place names made consistent across all the novels, distances and directions specified, and an explanatory Preface added. By now Hardy also felt able to restore some of the expurgated elements of the vigil over Fanny's coffin, and further emphasize Troy's illegitimate birth and higher social status.

In 1901 he again made extensive revisions for a sixpenny paperback edition: the proofs, with Hardy's manuscript corrections, are now in the British Library. Most important were two small changes made to the tense Christmas party scenes to suggest that Bathsheba strongly suspected Troy was still alive (ch. 52 and 53). This impression was strengthened in the 1902 Uniform Edition, and in the 1912 Wessex Edition, the title of the chapter describing Bathsheba's reaction to Troy's disappearance now changed from 'Doubts arise; doubts vanish' to 'Doubts arise; doubts linger' (ch. 48). In all these later editions Hardy continued to refine topographical details, adjust the use of dialect words, and make subtle changes to meaning or emphasis; even in the last years of his life he was still making notes for future revisions.

Footnotes

[1] Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: his career as a novelist (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 79.

[2] Hardy to Frederick Harrison, 29 July 1901. The collected letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. by Richard L. Purdy and Michael Millgate, 8 vols (1978-2012), ii (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 294.

[3] [F. E. Hardy] The Early Life of Thomas Hardy ([S.I.]: Macmillan, 1928), p. 125.

[5] Leslie Stephen to Hardy, 8 Jan., 17 Feb., 12 Mar., 15 April 1874. In Richard L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy, a bibliographical study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954, repr. 1979), pp. 336-341.

[7] Rosemarie Morgan, Cancelled words: rediscovering Thomas Hardy (1992); Robert C. Schweik, 'Hardy's shifting narrative modes' in Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. by R. C. Schweik, Norton edition (1986); Simon Gattrell 'Hardy the creator: Far from the Madding Crowd', in Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, ed. by Dale Kramer (1979).

[8] Simon Gattrell, Hardy the Creator: a textual biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) is a study of the textual history of Hardy's novels, including the Wessex Novels edition of Far from the Madding Crowd.

Written by Elizabeth James

Elizabeth James was formerly Head of British Collections, 1801-1914 at the British Library where she curated a number of exhibitions on literary themes. She has published on Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, 19th century popular literature, and the Victorian book trade, especially the publishing houses of George Routledge and Macmillan. She is currently working on an edition of Nicholas Nickleby.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the making of far from the madding crowd

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Writing, publishing and revising Far From The Madding Crowd

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Elizabeth James traces the development of Thomas Hardy's fourth novel, from inspiration to post-publication revisions. Far from the Madding Crowd marked a turning point in Thomas Hardy's career.