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Far From the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. Here is one of Thomas Hardy’s most popular novels, soon to be released as a major motion picture in May 2015.‘I shall do one thing in this life – one thing certain – that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die’Independent and spirited, Bathsheba Everdene owns the hearts of three men. Striving to win her love in different ways, their relationships with Bathsheba complicate her life in bucolic Wessex – and cast shadows over their own. With the morals and expectations of rural society weighing heavily upon her, Bathsheba experiences the torture of unrequited love and betrayal, and discovers how random acts of chance and tragedy can dramatically alter life’s course.The first of Hardy’s novels to become a major literary success, Far from the Madding Crowd explores what it means to live and to love.
FAR FROM
THE
MADDING CROWD
Thomas Hardy
Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com
This eBook edition published in 2010
Life and Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd Gerard Cheshire asserts his moral right as author of the Life and Times section Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary
Cover image © Trevillion Images
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007395163
Ebook Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007424818
Version: 2015-03-30
History of Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Contents
Cover (#u159d7aba-59e5-5275-9774-f45401a4ff66)
Title Page (#ud188452e-8364-5c12-825b-adec10585c0c)
Copyright
History of Collins
General preface to the Wessex Edition of 1912
Chapter 1 - Description of Farmer Oak – An incident
Chapter 2 - Night – The flock – Interiors
Chapter 3 - A girl on horseback – Conversation
Chapter 4 - Gabriel’s resolve – The visit – The mistake
Chapter 5 - Departure of Bathsheba – A pastoral tragedy
Chapter 6 - The fair – The journey – The fire
Chapter 7 - Recognition – A timid girl
Chapter 8 - The malthouse – The chat – News
Chapter 9 - The homestead – A visitor – Half confidences
Chapter 10 - Mistress and men
Chapter 11 - Outside the barracks – Snow – A meeting
Chapter 12 - Farmers – A rule – An exception
Chapter 13 - Sortes sanctorum – The valentine
Chapter 14 - Effect of the letter – Sunrise
Chapter 15 - A morning meeting – The letter again
Chapter 16 - All Saints’ and All Souls’
Chapter 17 - In the market-place
Chapter 18 - Boldwood in meditation – Regret
Chapter 19 - The sheep-washing – The offer
Chapter 20 - Perplexity – Grinding the shears – A quarrel
Chapter 21 - Troubles in the fold – A message
Chapter 22 - The great barn and the sheep-shearers
Chapter 23 - Eventide – A second declaration
Chapter 24 - The same night – The fir plantation
Chapter 25 - The new acquaintance described
Chapter 26 - Scene on the verge of the hay-mead
Chapter 27 - Hiving the bees
Chapter 28 - The hollow amid the ferns
Chapter 29 - Particulars of a twilight walk
Chapter 30 - Hot cheeks and tearful eyes
Chapter 31 - Blame – Fury
Chapter 32 - Night – Horses tramping
Chapter 33 - In the sun – A harbinger
Chapter 34 - Home again – A trickster
Chapter 35 - At an upper window
Chapter 36 - Wealth in jeopardy – The revel
Chapter 37 - The storm – The two together
Chapter 38 - Rain – One solitary meets another
Chapter 39 - Coming home – A cry
Chapter 40 - On Casterbridge highway
Chapter 41 - Suspicion – Fanny is sent for
Chapter 42 - Joseph and his burden – Buck’s Head
Chapter 43 - Fanny’s revenge
Chapter 44 - Under a tree – Reaction
Chapter 45 - Troy’s romanticism
Chapter 46 - The gurgoyle: its doings
Chapter 47 - Adventures by the shore
Chapter 48 - Doubts arise – Doubts linger
Chapter 49 - Oak’s advancement – A great hope
Chapter 50 - The sheep fair – Troy touches his wife’s hand
Chapter 51 - Bathsheba talks with her outrider
Chapter 52 - Converging courses
Chapter 53 - Concurritur – Horae momento
Chapter 54 - After the shock
Chapter 55 - The March following – ‘Bathsheba Boldwood’
Chapter 56 - Beauty in loneliness – After all
Chapter 57 - A foggy night and morning – Conclusion
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
Life & Times - About the Author
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
General preface to the Wessex
Edition of 1912
In accepting a proposal for a definite edition of these productions in prose and verse I have found an opportunity of classifying the novels under heads that show approximately the author’s aim, if not his achievement, in each book of the series at the date of its compositon. Sometimes the aim was lower than at other times; sometimes, where the intention was primarily high, force of circumstances (among which the chief were the necessities of magazine publication) compelled a modification, great or slight, of the original plan. Of a few, however, of the longer novels, and of many of the shorter tales, it may be assumed that they stand to-day much as they would have stood if no accidents had obstructed the channel between the writer and the public. That many of them, if any, stand as they would stand if written now is not to be supposed.
In the classification of these fictitious chronicles – for which the name of ‘The Wessex Novels’ was adopted, and is still retained – the first group is called ‘Novels of Character and Environment’, and contains those which approach most nearly to uninfluenced works; also one or two which, whatever their quality in some few of their episodes, may claim a verisimilitude in general treatment and detail.
The second group is distinguished as ‘Romances and Fantasies’, a sufficiently descriptive definition. The third class – ‘Novels of Ingenuity’ – show a not infrequent disregard of the probable in the chain of events, and depend for their interest mainly on the incidents themselves. They might also be characterized as ‘Experiments’, and were written for the nonce simply; though despite the artificiality of their fable some of their scenes are not without fidelity to life.
It will not be supposed that these differences are distinctly perceptible in every page of every volume. It was inevitable that blendings and alternations should occur in all. Moreover, as it was not thought desirable in every instance to change the arrangement of the shorter stories to which readers have grown accustomed, certain of these may be found under headings to which an acute judgement might deny appropriateness.
It has sometimes been conceived of novels that evolve their action on a circumscribed scene – as do many (though not all) of these – that they cannot be so inclusive in their exhibition of human nature as novels wherein the scenes cover large extents of country, in which events figure amid towns and cities, even wander over the four quarters of the globe. I am not concerned to argue this point further than to suggest that the conception is an untrue one in respect of the elementary passions. But I would state that the geographical limits of the stage here trodden were not absolutely forced upon the writer by circumstances; he forced them upon himself from judgement. I considered that our magnificent heritage from the Greeks in dramatic literature found sufficient room for a large proportion of its action in an extent of their country not much larger than the half-dozen counties here reunited under the old name of Wessex, that the domestic emotions have throbbed in Wessex nooks with as much intensity as in the palaces of Europe, and that, anyhow, there was quite enough human nature in Wessex for one man’s literary purpose. So far was I possessed by this idea that I kept within the frontiers when it would have been easier to overlap them and give more cosmopolitan features to the narrative.
Thus, though the people in most of the novels (and in much of the shorter verse) are dwellers in a province bounded on the north by the Thames, on the south by the English Channel, on the east by a line running from Hayling Island to Windsor Forest, and on the west by the Cornish coast, they were meant to be typically and essentially those of any and every place where
Thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool
– beings in whose hearts and minds that which is apparently local should be really universal.
But whatever the success of this intention, and the value of these novels as delineations of humanity, they have at least a humble supplementary quality of which I may be justified in reminding the reader, though it is one that was quite unintentional and unforeseen. At the dates represented in the various narrations things were like that in Wessex: the inhabitants lived in certain ways, engaged in certain occupations, kept alive certain customs, just as they are shown doing in these pages. And in particularizing such I have often been reminded of Boswell’s remarks on the trouble to which he was put and the pilgrimages he was obliged to make to authenticate some detail, though the labour was one which would bring him no praise. Unlike his achievement, however, on which an error would as he says have brought discredit, if these country customs and vocations, obsolete and obsolescent, had been detailed wrongly, nobody would have discovered such errors to the end of Time. Yet I have instituted inquiries to correct tricks of memory, and striven against temptations to exaggerate, in order to preserve for my own satisfaction a fairly true record of a vanishing life.
