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Passage Illustrated

Having escaped both trees and hedge, he could now be distinctly seen rising against the sky, his profile appearing on the light background like the portrait of a gentleman in black cardboard. It assumed the form of a low-crowned hat, an ordinary-shaped nose, an ordinary chin, an ordinary neck, and ordinary shoulders. [Part the First, "Winter," Chapter 1, "Mellstock Lane," p. 4]

Commentary

Whereas Dick's love interest in the novella, Fancy Day, is very much an individual, the operative word in Hardy's initial description of the male protagonist is "ordinary." A countryman born and bred, Dick like hapless Tony Kytes in the framed-tale sequence A Few Crusted Characters (1891) is a young rural carrier, but is dressed in Knight's illustration in the urban style of the 1870s rather than the more traditional fustian and smock frock of the carter in Alfred Parson's Casterbridge-set street scene headpiece for Wessex Folk in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (March 1891). Thus, although he is more akin to Hardy's rural young men such as Gabriel Oak of Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Dick is dressed in the 1875 illustration which Tinsley commissioned for his single-volume edition as if he is a young Hardy clone, a professional man such as the somewhat bland young architect Stephen Smith, protagonist of​ ​ A Pair of Blue Eyes, which ran in Tinsley's​ ​ Magazine serially from September 1872 through July 1873. Since the story of the demise of the Mellstock Quire is a reflection of actual events in the parish of Stinsford in the early 1840s, when the new vicar, the Reverend Arthur Shirley, replaced the musicians with a barrel organ, the illustrator's clothing Dick in the fashion of the 1870s is somewhat anachronistic.​The frustrated and long-suffering Dick Dewy the tranter h ere resembles the urbanite Stephen Smith, another "ordinary" young man in love with a tantalizing beauty in A Scene in The Belvedere (March 1873).

Paul Turner stipulates that there is a strong connection between the young writer and his masculine protagonist in this early novel:

As a product of Hardy's life, Under the Greenwood Tree was an expanded version of 'Domicilium'. The home sketched in the poem became the Tranter's in the novel, 'a long low cottage with a hipped roof of thatch, having dormer windows breaking up into the eaves'; and in one of those windows, which belonged in real life to Hardy's bedroom, much of the book had been written. [29]

However, Knight's portrait of Dick Dewy here bears no particular resemblance to thirty-five-year-old Thomas Hardy, nor is he seen in Mellstock Lane, as he is apparently entering the story, so to speak, through a gate. His costume is hardly consistent with cold, snowy weather with which Hardy opens the story. Admittedly, Hardy gave his illustrator little to go on, having been more interested in painting a word picture of the woodland scene than the solitary walker who speaks standard English rather than Dorset dialect.

Bibliography

Hardy, Thomas. Under The Greenwood Tree. A Rural Painting of the Dutch School (1870). Il. R. Knight. London: Chatto and Windus, 1878.

All citations from the 1878 Chatto and Windus edition have been checked against the following readily available paperback edition:

Hardy, Thomas. Under The Greenwood Tree, or, The Mellstock Quire — A Rural Painting of the Dutch School (1872). Ed. Anna Winchcombe. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and London: Macmillan Education, 1978.

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

Purdy, Richard Little. Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1954, rpt. 1965.

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 24 June 2014