‘From the White Sea to Cape Horn’: Thomas Hardy and the Wider World

Abstract

Jude Fawley’s vision of a global community of adults caring collectively for a global community of children raises an interesting question about Hardy’s position in the development of fiction during the last part of the nineteenth century. Readers and critics of Hardy are accustomed almost automatically to think of him as the creator of Wessex, the half-real, half-imaginary land which it is so much our pleasure to recreate as we read his work, and to see him as an essential element in the pattern of local, regional fiction that spread widest during the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, and which includes as other major figures George Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But what has not often been remarked in studies of Hardy, I think, is that there was during approximately the same period, from the eighteen-seventies onwards, a new concern in fiction and in poetry about the relationship between England and the wider world beyond its shores. The major writers in this movement are Meredith, Stevenson, Gissing, Kipling, Conrad, Forster. The question this chapter attempts to respond to is whether there is any way in which it makes sense to bring Hardy, apparently the archetypal local writer, into relation with this outward-looking trend in English literature.