ABSTRACT

Hardy probably wrote 'A Legend of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Four', as it was originally entitled, in the summer of 1882 in Wimborne, while he was completing work on Two on a Tower. His earliest surviving reference to it is in a letter to R.R. Bowker, Harper's London representative, dated 12 July 1882: 'Tile Club MS. was sent some days ago' (Letters, I, 106). The story first appeared later that year in Harper's Christmas, an annual composed of 'Pictures & Papers done by the Tile Club & its Literary Friends'} 'A Tradition' draws on Hardy's reading and research in the British Museum in 1878 and 1879 which contributed to The Trumpet-Major (1880), another tale set in Napoleonic times. Two specific entries in the 'Trumpet-Major Notebook' provide details for 'A Tradition': the first concerns a report from the True Briton of 2 November 1803 which Hardy transcribed about an elevated signal post some four miles from Deal:

Nothing new has been observed from thence lately, except a review of troops on the French coast, which occupied the whole of Thursday & Friday last. The Officer states that both those days the horizon was so very clear, that he could distinctly see with glasses an immense body of troops. (Taylor, p. 118)

In the original serial version of the story, which was set in Sussex, Selby the narrator remembers how, 'our house being so high on the down, on fine days we could see this drilling actually going on - especially with a spy-glass'. The second entry in the Notebook describes how 'the autumn of 1804 was one of alarm at the expected invasion, equally with 1803, though perhaps not to such an intense degree' (Taylor, p. 142). This note is perhaps the basis for Selby's comment that 'of all those years of my growing up the ones that bide clearest in my mind were eighteen hundred and three, four, and five' (serial version). Another source for the story was Hardy's childhood memories, and S.M. Ellis recalled in 1928 that 'Hardy told me how as a boy he had delighted in hearing from his father and aged people, such as "Solomon Selby," stories of the war times when troops were encamped on the downs above Weymouth' (p. 398).