Thomas Hardy

On the Western Circuit: Chapter 6

January 23, 2019 By Thomas Hardy in Serials Tags: marriage, Thomas Hardy, lawyer, disaster, london

Soon Raye wrote about the wedding. Having decided to make the best of what he feared was a piece of romantic folly, he had acquired more zest for the grand experiment. He wished the ceremony to be in London, for greater privacy. Edith Harnham would have preferred it at Melchester; Anna was passive. His reasoning prevailed, and Mrs. Harnham threw herself with mournful zeal into the preparations for Anna’s departure. In a last desperate feeling that she must at every hazard be in at the death of her dream, and see once again the man who by a species of [Read More]

On the Western Circuit: Chapter 5

January 22, 2019 By Thomas Hardy in Serials Tags: public domain stories, Thomas Hardy, lawyer, young love, disaster

The letter moved Raye considerably when it reached him. The intelligence itself had affected him less than her unexpected manner of treating him in relation to it. The absence of any word of reproach, the devotion to his interests, the self-sacrifice apparent in every line, all made up a nobility of character that he had never dreamt of finding in womankind. ‘God forgive me!’ he said tremulously. ‘I have been a wicked wretch. I did not know she was such a treasure as this!’ The whole of On the Western Circuit may be found in Hardy’s collection Life’s Little Ironies [Read More]

On the Western Circuit: Chapter 4

January 21, 2019 By Thomas Hardy in Serials Tags: Thomas Hardy, lawyer, young love, disaster, public domain stories

To return now to the moment at which Anna, at Melchester, had received Raye’s letter. It had been put into her own hand by the postman on his morning rounds. She flushed down to her neck on receipt of it, and turned it over and over. ‘It is mine?’ she said. So much in Hardy’s story happens unspoken, kept beneath the surface and out of sight according to the strict social mores of the era. This is so for the characters, who struggle against those rules, and it is so for Hardy himself as he writes around Anna’s situation and [Read More]

On the Western Circuit: Chapter 3

January 18, 2019 By Thomas Hardy in Serials Tags: public domain stories, Thomas Hardy, lawyer, young love, class

The calendar at Melchester had been light, occupying the court only a few hours; and the assizes at Casterbridge, the next county-town on the Western Circuit, having no business for Raye, he had not gone thither. At the next town after that they did not open till the following Monday, trials to begin on Tuesday morning. In the natural order of things Raye would have arrived at the latter place on Monday afternoon; but it was not till the middle of Wednesday that his gown and grey wig, curled in tiers, in the best fashion of Assyrian bas-reliefs, were seen [Read More]

On the Western Circuit: Chapter 2

January 17, 2019 By Thomas Hardy in Serials Tags: Thomas Hardy, lawyer, public domain stories

The square was overlooked from its remoter corner by the house of which the young girl had spoken, a dignified residence of considerable size, having several windows on each floor. Inside one of these, on the first floor, the apartment being a large drawing-room, sat a lady, in appearance from twenty-eight to thirty years of age. The blinds were still undrawn, and the lady was absently surveying the weird scene without, her cheek resting on her hand. The room was unlit from within, but enough of the glare from the market-place entered it to reveal the lady’s face. She was [Read More]

On the Western Circuit: Chapter 1

January 16, 2019 By Thomas Hardy in Serial Pilots, Serials Tags: public domain stories, Thomas Hardy, steam circus, carousel, cathedral, lawyer

The man who played the disturbing part in the two quiet lives hereafter depicted—no great man, in any sense, by the way—first had knowledge of them on an October evening, in the city of Melchester. He had been standing in the Close, vainly endeavouring to gain amid the darkness a glimpse of the most homogeneous pile of mediæval architecture in England, which towered and tapered from the damp and level sward in front of him. While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes; he could not see them, but [Read More]