Far From the Madding Crowd

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.