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The scene of the action was suggested by two real spots in the part of the country specified, each of which has a column standing upon it. Certain surrounding peculiarities have been imported into the narrative from both sites.​— Thomas Hardy, "Preface," July 1895, page vi.

Passage Illustrated

The central feature of the middle distance, as they beheld it, was a circular isolated hill, of no great elevation, which placed itself in strong chromatic contrast with a wide acreage of surrounding arable by being covered with fir-trees. The trees were all of one size and age, so that their tips assumed the precise curve of the hill they grew upon. This pine-clad protuberance was yet further marked out from the general landscape by having on its summit a tower in the form of a classical column, which, though partly immersed in the plantation, rose above the tree-tops to a considerable height. Upon this object the eyes of lady and servant were bent. [pp. 1-2]

Although the pillar stood upon the hereditary estate of her husband the lady had never visited it, owing to its insulation by this well-nigh impracticable ground. The drive to the base of the hill was tedious and jerky, and on reaching it she alighted, directing that the carriage should be driven back empty over the clods, to wait for her on the nearest edge of the field. She then ascended beneath the trees on foot. The column now showed itself as a much more important erection than it had appeared from the road, or the park, or the windows of Welland House, her residence hard by, whence she had surveyed it hundreds of times without ever feeling a sufficient interest in its details to investigate them. The column had been erected in the last century, as a substantial memorial of her husband's great-grandfather, a respectable officer who had fallen in the American war, and the reason of her lack of interest was partly owing to her relations with this husband, of which more anon. It was little beyond the sheer desire for something to do — the chronic desire of her curiously lonely life — that had brought her here now. — Chapter 1, p. 2-4.

Commentary

Between the opening pages and the frontispiece the reader is prepared for the initial meeting of the handsome youth (with classical features and the complexion of Raphael's portrait of the son of Zacharias) and Lady Constantine, wife of Sir Blount Constantine, the owner of the estate. The comely visitor confidently asserts that, for the next year, the top of the column (known locally as "Rings-Hill Speer") will serve as his observatory on every clear night.

The beautiful Lady Viviette Constantine, the chatelaine of Welland House, is bored and lonely as her Hemingwayesque husband, Sir Bount, has taken himself off to Africa to shoot lions. She feels that climbing the tower would be an interesting expedition, but cannot take her carriage there in the wet season as there is no road access. When she is finally able to visit the tower, erected as a memorial to an eighteenth-century Constantine 1782, she discovers Swithin St. Cleeve at the top, watching a cyclone in the Sun through his telescope. The adolescent has been able to access the tower because the Constantines gave his great-grandfather a key so that he could show the column to visitors, none of whom ever materialised. The son of an educated parson and the daughter of farmer Giles Martin, Swithin has been to grammar school — like young Thomas Hardy, and has aspirations beyond his rural station; he yearsns to be nothing less than the Astronomer Royal.

In A Hardy Companion F. B. Pinion points out that

although Hardy's map of Wessex indicates that the village is located in or near Charborough Park, five miles west of Wimborne Minster, the setting for Two on a Tower is composite, and the village must be regarded as imaginary. The tower is not that of Charborough Park, or in the same direction. To reach it, Lady Constantine left the park, crossed the old Melchester Road, and walked across a field to Rings-Hill. The Speer or tower was suggested by the obelisk (or 'spire')​ on the wooded top of Weatherbury Castle, a hill, the upper part of which is ringed with earth-works, seven miles to the west. [p. 504]

Astronomer Swithin St. Cleeve could not have employed the gigantic obelisk (hardly of the "Tuscan" order as seen in the frontispiece) erected in 1761 as his observatory since it lacks the necessary staircase, but, as Denys Kay-Robinson describes the actual site, inside the ramparts of an Iron Age hill-fort, its physical setting is suitably atmospheric: “Notwithstanding a village less than a mile away, and plentiful sounds of birds and cattle, the place seems wrapped in perpetual solitude, and when the trees spread their summer canopy the great monument looms eerily through the semi-darkness” (Chapter 5, p. 72).

That Charborough was the model for this frontispiece, reports Kay-Robinson, is well demonstrated by the fact that Macbeth-Raeburn, acting under Hardy's supervision, produced an engraved frontispiece that incorporates the actual mansion and tower of Charborough.

Yet [B. C. A.] Windle [in The Wessex of Thomas Hardy, 1902, rpt. 1978] and [C. G.] Harper [in The Hardy Country, 1904] both identified "Welland House" with the remnant of the manor house (the greater portion of which had been demolished in 1802) at Milborne St. Andrew ('Millpond St. Jude' in The Madding Crowd). The explanation lies with the tower of the title. Hardy wrote to [his New York publisher, Henry J.] Harper that this had 'two or three originals — Horton, Charborough, etc. The​etc. is the column close to Milborne, standing on an anciently-fortified hill called Weatherbury Castle of Ring's-Hill Speer; this is not open to doubt, because Hardy uses the latter name in the narrative. [Kay-Robinson, p. 72]

The Strawberry-Hill Gothic tower upon which Hardy based his description was heightened in 1839, and recently repaired. In contrast, the 1761 obelisk of brick, dressed with stone, is in such a sad state of disrepair that only the creepers appear to be holding it up. The village of Swithin St. Cleeve​has long since been demolished, leaving only the church, which was radically restored in 1878 — only four years prior to the novel's being published by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington (London). However, Hardy's July 1895 preface reflects ​the writer's concerns with the sexual impropriety of the 1882 novel rather than the serious interest in astronomy​that he shares with his young protagonist​. In 1895 Hardy was still apparently smarting from the hyper-moralistic reviews that the tragic romance received:

This slightly-built romance was the outcome of a wish to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater to them as men.

But, on the publication of the book people seemed to be less struck with these high aims of the author than with their own opinion, first, that the novel was an 'improper' one in its morals, and, secondly, that it was intended to be a satire on the Established Church of this country. I was made to suffer in consequence from several eminent pens, such warm epithets​as 'hazardous,' 'repulsive,' 'little short of revolting,' 'a studied and gratuitous insult,' being flung at the precarious volumes.

That, however, was thirteen years ago, and, in respect of the first opinion, I venture to think that those who care to read the story now will be quite astonished at the scrupulous propriety observed therein on the relations of the sexes; for though there may be frivolous, and even grotesque touches on occasion, there is hardly a single caress in the book outside legal matrimony, or what was intended so to be.​[v]

The original 1882 serialisation in the Atlantic Monthly was unillustrated, soi that the story's appearance in the Osgood, McIlvaine Uniform Edition of the Wessex Novels marks its first publication as an illustrated book, if a single frontispiece is sufficient to confer such a status. The illustration emphasizes the natural world of Hardy's Wessex over the constructed world of the great landowners. Hardy early on derived his impression of such a relationship between the world of fields and woods and the manor house through his rambles from his parents' cottage at High Bockhampton to the Kingston Maurward estate. Indeed, his relationship with the owner of Kingston Maurward may have provided him with the raw material for Lady Constantine's interest in the young, intellectually gifted village boy, Swithin St. Cleeve. During Hardy's boyhood, Julia Augusta Martin, wife of Francis Pitney Brouncker Martin, having purchased the great house of Portland stone, Kingston Maurward, in 1844, took a great deal of interest in young Thomas.

Text associated with the Half-Title and Title-Pages

The "Welland House and Park"
of the Story
Drawn on the spot

"Welland House, her residence
hard by . . . the column." —
Page 3.

'Ah, my heart her eyes and she
Have taught thee new astrology.
Howe'er Love's native hours were set,
Whatever starry synod met,
'Tis in the mercy of her eye,
If poor Love shall live or die.'
[Richard] Crashaw: Love's Horoscope.

Bibliography

Gatrell, Simon. Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.

Hardy, Thomas. Two on a Tower. Illustrated by Henry Macbeth-Raeburn. Volume Five in the Complete Uniform Edition of the Wessex Novels. London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1895.

Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2004.

Pinion, F. B. A Hardy Companion. Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Macmillan, 1968.

Purdy, Richard L. Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study. Oxford: Clarendon, 1954, rpt. 1978.

Seymour-Smith, Martin. Hardy. London: Bloomsbury, 1994.

Turner, Paul. The Life of Thomas Hardy. A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

Vann, J. Don. "Two on a Tower in Atlantic Monthly, May—December 1882." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Page 86.

Wright, Sarah Bird. Thomas Hardy A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2002.

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Last modified 10 February 2017