Thomas Hardy at last attracted public notice as a novelist with his tale of pastoral simplicity, Under the Greenwood Tree, or the Mellstock Quire. It was his third novel. He had destroyed the first and written a second, Desperate Memories (1871), a mystery of which he was later embarrassed, at the suggestion of George Meredith. Working as a reader for Chapman & Hall, Meredith told Hardy his first manuscript, “The Poor Man and the Lady,” would not succeed, and told him to write a novel with “a purely aesthetic purpose” with a more complex plot.

In Under the Greenwood Tree, Hardy produced a love story but also focused on loss of ritual and dreams. Some felt the title had come from a Shakespeare song included in his play, As You Like It, but Hardy took the line from a ballad of the same title. The ballad features couples at play under a greenwood tree and was designed to be accompanied by choir pipe. While never considered one of Hardy’s great works, it remains important for advancing his career as a novelist.

Dick Dewey’s name calls to mind a damp pasture in spring or the tears sentimentality calls to one’s eyes. He is described as having “an ordinary-shaped nose, an ordinary chin, an ordinary neck, and ordinary shoulders,” emphasizing his lack of any special attribute to recommend him. Even his occupation as a tranter, a man who takes on additional work using his horse and cart, does not distinguish him.

He loves the fickle Fancy Day, whose symbolic name leads readers to understand her attraction for the opposite sex. She is described at her first appearance in a line with the local ladies as “a flower among vegetables.” Fancy’s charm touches several men as she begins her teaching job at the parish school. But strong foreshadowing alerts readers that she and Dick will end up together, as they are paired in a dance, moving down a row of other dancers “like two persons tripping down a lane to be married.”

Another plot aspect involves Fancy’s plan to become organist at Mellstock and the modernization of the church with the introduction of a cabinet-organ to replace the traditional traveling bands of musicians. Biographers point to Hardy’s love and appreciation for church music, gained partially through his father’s memories of choirs and orchestras, which performed in local churches. They had practiced in the Hardys’ home, served refreshments, and in turn provided welcome fellowship. That tradition ended when Hardy was still an infant, and his narrative captures his father’s longing for those times.

An early discussion between members of one such group includes the remark, “People don’t care much about us now! I’ve been thinking we must be almost the last left in the county of the old string players?” [sic].

Fancy does love Dick but is courted also by Farmer Shiner and Parson Maybold. Although she agrees to marry the parson, she later changes her mind and avoids her own personal tragedy by ending their engagement, leaving her free to marry Dick. The parson, a good man, is left with a broken heart, and a new order, through the new music, inhabits the church.

Both conditions add a tone of longing and regret to the novel, although Hardy’s brilliant presentation of Wessex as the setting makes the tone appropriate. He would later return to that setting for many of his tragic novels. As for structure, the plot is completed over a full turn of all four seasons, beginning with winter, then spring, summer, and fall — symbolic of death, birth, youthful exuberance, and a decrease of life forces.

The fact that Fancy misrepresents her agreement with Maybold to Dick, although the parson suggested, “Tell him everything; it is best. He will forgive you,” also takes away from the traditional happy ending. Fancy’s duplicity suggests possible future problems for the simple tranter.

Later readers complained about Hardy’s treatment of the peasants in Under the Greenwood Tree. His characterizations verge on stereotypes, rendering Dick and others low bred with little irony. This later bothered Hardy, and biographers feel his own maturation as a member of a lower social level contributed to his discomfort.

As Geoffrey Grigson reports, in later preparation for publication of Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Hardy wrote to Leslie Stephen, editor of The Cornhill Magazine, where the novel was first serialized, that “he hoped ‘that the rustics, although quaint, may be made to appear intelligent, and not boorish at all.’”

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 19th century English novel, Cornhill Magazine serialization, Dick Dewey character, English countryside, Fancy Day character, Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy and church traditions, Hardy and George Meredith, Hardy career beginnings, Hardy character analysis, Hardy character stereotypes, Hardy early works, Hardy literary criticism, Hardy novel symbolism, Hardy novels, Hardy plot structure, Hardy social class themes, Mellstock Quire, pastoral novel, rural life in literature, Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, Under the Greenwood Tree or the Mellstock Quire, Victorian church music, Victorian Literature, Victorian novel themes, Victorian pastoral fiction, Victorian romance novels, Wessex setting