ABSTRACT
J. M. Barrie’s striking identification of Thomas Hardy in 1889 as the ‘Historian of Wessex’ 1 continues to have a strong resonance, but the geographical and interpretive restrictions this construction generates are no longer tenable. Hardy’s powerful record of quickly fading or already extinct country folkways provides an attractive focus for analysis, and one that he manifestly viewed as an important element of his texts. The difficulties with confining him solely to such concerns, however, have become increasingly evident. As Peter Widdowson points out, critical reproductions of Hardy along these lines force a number of constraining perspectives,
most obviously, the reduction of his fictional oeuvre to a few key novels which focus on the rural world; the acceptance of the ‘character and environment’ criterion that his true forte is the depiction of nature and its human fauna; the notion of ‘timeless’ universality in the ‘elemental’ human drama played out in the rustic idyll of nineteenth-century Dorset; and the sense of Hardy’s nostalgia for a passing rural world, a world more ‘real’ than the sophisticated urban culture which is superseding it. His fiction thus comes to represent a mode of what we might call ‘humanist-realist’ pastoral. 2
Each of the items in this list has its own legitimacy in Hardy’s works, but as a whole they become deeply problematic when they are presented as the entirety of his achievement, so that an exploration of Hardy’s engagement with the non-rural popular culture of his Victorian era provides opportunities to explore his canon in ways that might otherwise be underappreciated or overlooked.