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| Thomas Hardy |
Wednesday 6 August 2003
Where can a writer go for a good story? Shakespeare went to whatever he last read; Thomas Hardy seems to have gone to his local newspaper - the Dorset County Chronicle. In a notebook held by the Dorset county museum in Dorchester, soon to be published, he transcribed dozens of articles under the heading "Facts from Newspapers, Histories, Biographies and Other Chronicles". Among these is the original source of the incident in Tess of the d'Urbevilles when Tess's horse, Prince, is killed in a collision with a mail coach, ruining her family's fledgling business. Another article, against which Hardy has written "Used in The Mayor of Casterbridge", is the basis for Michael Henchard's "sale" of his wife and child to a sailor near the beginning of that novel.
Hardy savoured the special power of local stories and the special immediacy of local calamities. He went to the Dorset County Chronicle, not the Times, for his material. What would he have made of today's Dorset Echo, the descendant of the Chronicle? Would the ambitious novelist have found suitable material for his fiction in its pages (or web pages) now?
No doubt about it. First of all, he might have needed material for a narrative of aspiration overturned by cruel circumstance. He could have alighted on a small item of Dorchester news. Headteacher Dr Iain Melvin stirred up controversy after writing to parents of pupils at Thomas Hardye School urging them to encourage their offspring to give up part-time jobs or risk poor exam results.
Here is a Jude-ish tale in embryo: now Hardy's protagonist would be Judith, the gifted daughter of a single parent, her academic progress frustrated by the need to work at a Weymouth (Budmouth Regis) amusement arcade, despite letters or protest from her stern but encouraging schoolmaster.
Meanwhile, 10 students from Thomas Hardye School popped open the champagne after gaining places at the prestigious Oxford and Cambridge universities. One of these 10 would be Theo, son of a local doctor, his achievement a consequence of expensive private tuition. He, of course, loves our heroine across the class divide.
Hardy likes to raise hopes in order to dash them. Judith's (large) family receives an unexpected bequest from a relative and invests the money in a riding school. Judith starts evening classes. But then, catastrophe. Hardy's rural disasters still take place and the accident with the Durbeyfield horse would still serve. A quick search through recent issues of the Dorset Echo reveals several collisions between vehicles and horses. One of these, with Judith riding and thinking on her set texts, ruins the family when it is discovered that her mother has not insured against claims for damages.
There have to be ironies too, like that bringing Judith and Theo together. The Dorset Echo has its stories of that special doom of English provincial life: "disgrace". Hardy might surely have made something of the Dorchester doctor, a pillar of the community, sentenced to prison for a massive fraud. This would be Theo's father. Brought low, Theo is finally admitted by Judith as a suitor, though he is probably too depressed to take advantage of her new willingness.
There is a family subplot. Judith has a ne'er-do-well elder brother (Rick) to whom she is devoted. Here Hardy might have used a recent Dorset Echo story in which proceedings for traffic offences oddly revealed a Budmouth man (reportedly "addicted to driving") to be a bigamist. The man's solicitor pleaded that a custodial sentence would prevent his client's planned marriage. "The fact which is most emotive about Mr Cosworth going into custody is that his wedding is booked and organised for next week," were the lawyer's exact words.
A local woman reading a report of these proceedings in the very same Dorset Echo was shocked - for the driving addict with the forthcoming nuptials was already married to her daughter. (A nice touch that the local paper is the agent of discovery.) "The magistrates did him and his fiancée a favour by sending him to prison because if they hadn't he would have been committing bigamy," was her verdict. If there is one lesson of Hardy's fiction, it is that the past always catches up with you. And, like all Victorian novelists, he loved bigamy stories. Judith devotes all her time and intellectual energy to fruitless attempts to exonerate Rick, abandoning her studies once more.
Theo, unable to escape local gossip, emigrates. Angel Clare went to Brazil, which would be a good destination for the samba-loving Theo. Judith marries a local merchant to pay for her improvident family. Hardy's eyes might catch the feature on the grocer from Cerne Abbas (Abbot's Cernel) who has "defied 'pointless' European regulations by continuing to use pounds and ounces". This conservative burgher - "prepared to make a stand to protect what he saw as an integral part of British life" - would surely be a suitable model for Judith's prosperous but incompatible husband. (Judith is a Guardian reader.)
Theo returns years later, his health broken. After a traumatic meeting, he leaves once more and Judith, her disappointed hopes cruelly reanimated, wanders off to die in a miserable way. There are plenty of gruesome reports in the Dorset Echo that Hardy could have used for the ghoulish circumstantial detail of her.
Hardy, unwilling that his sources be known, wanted the notebook destroyed after his death. (Plenty of Victorian novelists, like Wilkie Collins, were only too happy that their sensational borrowings from newspapers should be recognised). Yet, in his secretiveness, Hardy took a measure that any would-be Wessex fiction-maker would do well to follow. The issues of his local paper that he read most closely were more than half a century old. Today he would be examining stories of ration-book scams or excesses at local VE-Day celebrations. Thus he would also be avoiding the possibility that some novelists (Roth, Bellow, both Amises) have relished, but that he appears to have dreaded: one of his own local readers saying, "That's me - that's my story, not his."
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