In Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel, Carolyn Lesjak claims that following the decline of the industrial novel in the 1860s Victorian fiction rarely depicts workers at work, seldom considers the labor question directly, and presents work and pleasure as separate spheres. The Victorian novel, she argues, “works to make labor invisible,” severing the connection between labor and pleasure, and severely limiting “the kinds of pleasure available and the quality and range of activities associated with labor” (7). Lesjak cites Hardy’s fiction as a partial exception, acknowledging his novels’ frequent depictions of agricultural laborers, but claiming that Hardy “elid[es] industrial labor and its relations of production” and therefore does not address the divorce of pleasure from work (10).

It is certainly true that Hardy’s fiction neither depicts industrial labor nor explicitly considers how to reform its modes of production. Indeed, Marxist critics such as K. D. M. Snell, Roger Ebbatson, and George Wotton argue that Hardy does not even thoroughly examine the practices of agricultural labor, because he fails to portray the full immiseration and exploitation of rural workers or to propose reforms to the capitalist system responsible for their condition.@ Snell and Ebbatson blame class and commercial anxieties for Hardy’s reluctance to address the exploitation of agricultural laborers directly. In Annals of the Labouring Poor, Snell claims that Hardy’s wish to join the ranks of the bourgeois by becoming a successful novelist causes him to withhold candid depictions of laborers’ mistreatment so as not to offend bourgeois sensibilities (383-92). In “The Plutonic Master: Hardy and the Steam Threshing-Machine,” Ebbatson criticizes Hardy’s acquiescence to “readerly demands for the production of consumable bourgeois pathos” (67), which leads Hardy to ignore the emergent working class consciousness that enabled agricultural workers to develop strategies of resistance to the forces of capitalist production. Wotton argues that Hardy’s class position simply rendered him unable to comprehend the realities of labor as they existed outside the “rural petty bourgeois” to which his family belonged (43). See Wotton, Thomas Hardy: Towards a Materialist Criticism. But to whatever degree Hardy’s fiction avoids direct consideration of the labor practices of nineteenth-century capitalism, his representations of work do implicitly consider an essential question about the relationship between labor and pleasure, one that applies to industrial workers at least as much as rural ones. It is the same question Ruskin poses when considering the labor practices of Victorian manufacturing in The Stones of Venice: “What kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy[?]” (10: 196). Hardy’s answer bears a remarkable resemblance to Ruskin’s. Before examining these similarities, however, one must first consider both Ruskin’s labor values and the sources of Hardy’s own.

In The Stones of Venice (1851-53), Ruskin explains many conditions necessary for workers to derive pleasure from their labor. The most crucial, of course, is the worker’s capacity for autonomy, self-expression, and imaginative invention. In the chapter in which he delineates “The Nature of Gothic,” Ruskin contrasts the labor values expressed in Gothic ornament with those evident in Victorian manufactured goods. For Ruskin, the “irregularity” and “rudeness” of Gothic ornament expresses the “exquisite invention” and “original power” of workers whose labor allowed them a degree of autonomy and creative agency (10: 184-204). By contrast, the “smoothness” and “perfect finish” of the mass-produced goods issuing from British factories reveal that industrial workers have become little more than “animated tool[s]” compelled to perform repetitive tasks with machine-like speed and precision (10: 184-204). Ruskin condemns this division of labor by inverting Adam Smith’s example of the glorious efficiency of British manufacturing, citing pin-making as a prototypical instance of mechanistic production that causes workers to be “divided into mere segments of men,” each worker exhausting himself “in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail” (10: 196). Ruskin cites the manufacture of glass beads, which requires different workers to perform a single repetitive task—either drawing, cutting, chopping, or polishing, as another example of the debilitating effects of industrial labor (10: 197). Ruskin insists that workers who continually perform the same task in the same way cannot obtain pleasure from their labor, because the “Desire of Change,” evident in the spontaneous design of Gothic ornament, comprises an essential element of creative expression (10: 214). Work also becomes less pleasurable, Ruskin claims, when strict distinctions exist between those who perform the inventive work of design and those employed to execute it. Therefore, Ruskin urges masters and workers to labor together performing both types of work, for, he says, “it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy” (10: 201). Ruskin reaffirms this labor model in his analysis of political economy in Unto this Last (1862), where he explains that pleasurable work requires masters to labor alongside their workers, eschewing the relentless pursuit of profit and establishing bonds of affection that “make the various employments involved in production . . . most beneficial to the men employed” (17: 41).

Ruskin’s conception of labor may have influenced Hardy’s. Evidence suggests that he knew The Stones of Venice well.@ I have previously considered Hardy’s knowledge of the labor theories Ruskin expresses in The Stones of Venice when examining Hardy’s representations of classical study in Jude the Obscure. See Rollins, “Another Way ‘The letter killeth’: Classical Study in Jude the Obscure,” 56-57. Hardy apprenticed under an architect who restored medieval churches, later became a Gothic draughtsman in his own right, and for a time even considered becoming a professional critic of architectural art.@ Hardy makes the latter claim in his autobiography. See The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Michael Millgate, 49. He certainly must have studied the most famous example of architectural criticism, particularly of Gothic architecture, of his time. J. B. Bullen asserts that as a young architect Hardy must have read The Stones of Venice, and Hardy suggests having done so when he mentions Ruskin’s description of the church of St. Mark in his autobiography (Bullen 23; Hardy, Life and Work 201). In another section of his autobiography, Hardy describes the “cunning irregularity” of his poetic style in a manner that closely resembles Ruskin’s analysis of this characteristic feature of Gothic architecture (323).@ Hardy’s claim that the “unforeseen” nature of his meters and stanzas resembles the transgression of “formal measurement” that typifies “the best period of Gothic art” echoes Ruskin’s description of the “surprise” caused by “the daring interruptions in the formal plan” that occur during “the best times of Gothic” (Hardy, Life and Work 323; Ruskin 10: 212). Evidence of Hardy’s familiarity with specific passages in The Stones of Venice occurs in other of his works as well, including the narrator’s description of the grotesque gargoyles on the Gothic church beside Fanny Robin’s grave in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874).@ The narrator’s assertion that “there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition” seems to paraphrase Ruskin’s claim that “there is no test of greatness in periods, nations, or men, more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque” (Hardy 306; ch. XLVI; Ruskin 11: 187). Charles Swann notes the similarity between the expansive, aerial perspective from which the Spirits view Europe in The Dynasts (1904-08) and Ruskin’s dramatic description of the changing geography as one moves from southern to northern Europe in the opening paragraphs of “The Nature of Gothic” (187-88). Bullen sees a resemblance between this same passage and the aerial perspective from which the narrator describes the sheep-washing pool in Far from the Madding Crowd (63).

If Hardy did know The Stones of Venice as well as it seems, his knowledge of the work performed by the tradesmen of his class of origin would have predisposed him to appreciate the labor values Ruskin advocates. Hardy’s father was a lifeholding rural stonemason and “manager of and contractor for all trades” (Millgate 25; Hardy, Life and Work 12). Like other members of the half-independent, “better-informed” class of rural tradesmen that Hardy describes in “The Dorsetshire Labourer” (Writings 188), Hardy’s father enjoyed greater autonomy, variety, and capacity for individual expression in his work than property-less agricultural laborers. As a result of their work experience, members of this class developed an ideology of labor that privileges individual agency over collective endeavor. As George Wotton and Raymond Williams have demonstrated, this tradesman’s ideology informs Hardy’s conception of labor.@ Wotton demonstrates that Hardy’s familiarity with the “material interests and social position of the rural small producer” affects his conception of labor and causes him to privilege this individualist ethos in his representations of work (46-59). In The Country and the City, Williams claims that as a professional novelist Hardy retained an “intense association” with the tradesmen’s class he left behind while obtaining an “educated understanding of [its] nature and behavior” (206).

Hardy’s labor values were also influenced by his own work experience as an architect’s apprentice and assistant, which contrasted sharply with that of skilled tradesmen such as his father. Hardy’s work for John Hicks in Dorchester included surveying and measuring churches to be restored, numbering stones to ensure precise reconstruction, and copying Hicks’s plans. His work for Arthur Blomfield in London offered little more creative stimulation, requiring copying and drafting with machine-like precision. Michael Millgate explains that Hardy’s work for Blomfield was “generally—and disappointingly—of a routine . . . mechanical kind” and “left him bored and unfulfilled” (Millgate 78-79, 93); Hardy labels such work “monotonous and mechanical” in his autobiography (49), and Hardy’s narrator in A Laodicean (1881) describes the work of an architect’s assistant as a “drudgery of measuring and figuring” (88; bk. I, ch. XI). Industrial laborers, it seems, were not the only Victorian workers denied the opportunity to exercise imaginative invention.

In his study of visual perception in Hardy’s fiction, J. B. Bullen claims that reading Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843-60) likely “confirmed for Hardy a set of attitudes to visualization which he had already begun to discover through his own painting and drawing” (253). I find it equally plausible that reading The Stones of Venice had a similar effect on Hardy’s labor values, confirming ideas that he had already begun to formulate through his knowledge of rural tradesmen and his own work experience. But regardless of how strongly Ruskin’s labor theories influence Hardy’s representations of work, the similarities are striking, not only in the values and practices they affirm, but also in their larger function. Like Ruskin’s analysis of Gothic ornament and industrial manufacturing, Hardy’s representations of work address a fundamental aspect of the Victorian labor question: how can work be made more pleasurable? Hardy’s answers to this question remain remarkably consistent throughout his fiction, and occur far more frequently than can be considered in this paper. Partly in response to Lesjak’s claim that the Victorian novel renders labor invisible, I choose to examine representations of work in which Hardy makes labor especially visible through set piece descriptions that emphasize the emblematic nature of the work being depicted.

The narrator’s depiction of the shoemaker Robert Penny in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) provides one example. Penny’s work allows him a measure of agency and individual expression. He crafts each pair of shoes to the specific wearer. He considers his work to be as much an expression of himself as a means of earning a living, and he therefore does not care to mend boots he does not make. If Under the Greenwood Tree resembles “A Rural Painting of the Dutch School,” as its subtitle claims, then the narrator’s description of Robert Penny at work in his shop paints an emblematic portrait of the village tradesman:

[His shop window] was low and wide, and was open from morning till evening, Mr. Penny himself being invariably seen working inside like a framed portrait of a shoemaker by some modern Moroni. He sat facing the road, with a boot on his knees and the awl in his hand, only looking up for a moment as he stretched out his arms and bent forward at the pull, when his spectacles flashed in the passer’s face with a shine of flat whiteness, and then returned again to the boot as usual. (70; pt. II, ch. II)

This portrayal of Penny bent forward at the pull, framed as in a picture, invests the individual tradesman’s work with a symbolic quality. As he does in many of the of the pictorial depictions of labor present in his fiction, Hardy illuminates Penny’s shop with the light of the setting sun in order both to honor the work being performed and to suggest that such labor practices are passing away as landowners increasingly refuse to renew the lifeholds of workers not in their immediate employ and as technological advances in manufacturing and transportation overwhelm the production capacity of local tradesmen. Readers of Under the Greenwood Tree are meant to appreciate Penny’s tradesman’s ethos and to lament the changes that threaten the labor values he exhibits.

A similarly framed and illuminated scene occurs in Desperate Remedies (1871). The protagonist Edward Springrove’s father enjoys variety in his labor, working as an innkeeper, small farmer, and principal cider-maker for the village. He also performs the same tasks as those he employs, acting as “an employer of labour of the old school, who worked himself among his men” (125; vol. I, ch. VIII). Readers first encounter Springrove’s father beside the cider-press with his assistant, the two men framed beneath “two or three large, wide spreading elm trees” in the light of the setting sun (125; vol. I, ch. VIII). The pictorial quality of the narrator’s description of their labor resembles the emblematic depiction of the shoemaker Robert Penny:

[Springrove’s father] was now engaged in packing the pomace into horsehair bags with a rammer, and Gad Weedy, his man, was occupied in shoveling up more from a tub at his side. The shovel shone like silver from the action of the juice, and ever and anon, in its motion to and fro, caught the rays of the declining sun and reflected them in bristling stars of light. (125; vol. I, ch. VIII)

Like the reflection from Robert Penny glasses, the brilliant late afternoon sunlight shining like silver from Weedy’s shovel simultaneously symbolizes the decline of such labor practices and highlights the value of the work being lost, which the narrator seems to wish would continue “ever and anon.”

Another set piece depiction of a rural tradesman occurs in A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), where the narrator’s description of the master-mason John Smith reads almost as if taken directly from Ruskin’s description of medieval stoneworkers in “The Nature of Gothic”:

John Smith—brown as autumn as to skin, white as winter as to clothes—was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in stone. In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much individuality to be a typical “working-man”—a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a fraction of the unit Class.

There was not the speciality in his labour which distinguishes the handicraftsmen of towns. Though only a mason, strictly speaking, he was not above handling a brick, if bricks were the order of the day; or a slate or tile, if a roof had to be covered before the wet weather set in, and nobody was near who could do it better. Indeed, on one or two occasions in the depth of winter, when frost peremptorily forbids all use of the trowel, making foundations to settle, stones to fly, and mortar to crumble, he had taken to felling and sawing trees. Moreover, he had practiced gardening in his own plot for so many years that, on an emergency, he might have made a living by that calling.

Probably our countryman was not such an accomplished artificer in a particular direction as his town brethren in the trades. But he was, in truth, like that clumsy pin-maker who made the whole pin, and who was despised by Adam Smith on that account and respected by Macaulay, much more the artist nevertheless. (87-88; ch. X)

John Smith possesses the individuality common to most rural tradesmen and foreign to the typical working man of the urban laboring classes. He displays the same “independence of character” that Ruskin attributes to Gothic masons (10: 241). His rough work may lack the perfect finish of “an accomplished artificer,” but this only demonstrates his capacity to exercise his inventive agency. He is “much more the artist” than the highly specialized urban laborer, for his work is an expression of himself and not merely a demonstration of what Ruskin calls the “best and most perfect manual skill” (10: 191). As his own master, Smith uses his head as well as his hands, and he avoids the division of labor that Ruskin condemns for dividing men into mere segments of men, Hardy’s narrator using the same example of pin-making that Ruskin cites to emphasize this point. Smith also enjoys greater variety in his labor. “Though only a mason, strictly speaking,” he also turns his hand to brick-working, roof-tiling, felling and sawing trees, and gardening.

Hardy provides contrasting depictions of work as well. Rural tradesmen who migrate from the country to the city often lose the opportunity for variety and self-expression in their work, as the carpenter Sol Chickerel experiences in The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) when he leaves Wessex for London in search of opportunity. In Wessex, Sol performs a variety of tasks, ranging from heavy structural work to delicate finishing. In London, he is warned, “where limitation is all the rule in labour,” he might be allowed to turn the screw but not drive the nail (111; vol. I, ch. XVI).@ The narrator of Jude the Obscure makes a similar observation about how tradesmen lose the opportunity for variety and self-expression in their work when they migrate from the country to the city. Jude Fawley employs a variety of skills as a rural stonemason, “including monumental stone-cutting, gothic free-stone work for the restoration of churches, and carving of a general kind” (71; pt. II, ch. I), and he “take[s] pleasure in the change of handiwork” (91; pt. II, ch. IV). “In London,” the narrator explains, “he would probably have become specialized and have made himself a ‘moulding mason,’ a ‘foliage-sculptor’—perhaps a ‘statuary’” (71; pt. II, ch. I), for in the city the division of labor is so severe that “the man who carves the boss or knob of leafage declines to cut the fragment of moulding which merges in that leafage, as if it were a degradation to do the second half of one whole” (91; pt. II, ch. IV). His experience bears this warning out. He finds work in a musty joiner’s shop, where no employers labor beside their workers, and where the division of labor is absolute: some men planning, some fitting, and some chiseling. Sol’s body displays the debilitating effects of his repetitive labor, as he angrily explains to his sister Ethelberta:

Look at my hand. . . . Look how my thumb stands out at the root, as if it were out of joint and that hard place inside there. Did you ever see anything so ugly as that hand—a mis-shaped monster, isn’t he? That comes from the jack-plane, and my pushing against it day after day and year after year. If I were found drowned or buried, dressed or undressed, in fustian or in broadcloth, folk would look at my hand and say, “That man’s a carpenter.” (376; vol. II, ch. XLVIII)

Denied variety in his labor and forced to execute only a small segment of someone else’s design, Sol not only loses the capacity for thought in his work. He suffers permanent disfigurement as well.

One final example shows how much Hardy shares Ruskin’s belief that pleasurable labor depends upon masters who “make the various employments involved in production . . . most beneficial to the men employed” (17: 41). Or women, in this case. Tess Durbeyfield’s work at times proves every bit as servile and debilitating as factory work. At Marlott, Tess binds sheaves with “clock-like monotony,” and her arm becomes “scarified by the stubble, and bleeds” (101; pt. II, ch. XIV). At Talbothays, her dairy work often becomes a “mechanical occupation” (292; pt. V, ch. XLI). And at Flintcomb-Ash, Tess labors with “mechanical regularity” and “joyless monotony” at a variety of tasks (304; pt. V, ch. XLIII; 334; pt. VI, ch. XLVI), including swede-grubbing, reed-drawing, turnip-slicing, and slavishly feeding the “inexorable wheels” of the steam threshing-machine (346; pt. VI, ch. XLVII). Despite the nature of her labor, Tess nevertheless manages to derive some pleasure when the farmer she works for establishes bonds of affection with his workers. At Talbothays, Dairyman Crick treats his “little battalion of men and maids” in the manner Ruskin advocates (124; pt. III, ch. XVII). This master-dairyman is also a “working milker and buttermaker” who milks his own cows and assists with the cheese making (123; pt. III, ch. XVII), and his fair treatment of his workers ensures that his “household of maids and men lived on comfortably, placidly, even merrily” (144; pt. III, ch. XX).

The farmer’s treatment of his workers also explains the contrast between Tess’s work at Marlott and Flintcomb-Ash, though initially it may seem that this is due to the degree of mechanization present on each farm. The wooden, horse-drawn reaping machine at Marlott seems almost a part of the landscape as it ticks “like the love-making of the grasshopper,” and because the “rickety machine” revolves slowly at a steady pace, the harvesters have time to rest and converse (99-100; pt. II, ch. XIV). By contrast, the steam threshing-machine at Flintcomb-Ash appears as a blight on the landscape. The narrator describes it as a “red tyrant . . . which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves” (345), and the workers who serve this “Plutonic master” work far more frantically than those at Marlott (346; pt. VI, ch. XLVII). They are allowed only half-an-hour for breakfast, eat lunch where they stand, and work long into the night. However, the difference between the two machines affects the workers’ labor far less significantly than the difference between the farmers who direct it. Roger Ebbatson claims that the steam threshing-machine merely renders explicit the economic exploitation present on both farms (64-65). It seems clear, though, that the workers at Marlott enjoy better treatment than those at Flintcomb-Ash. The farmer at Marlott may not labor beside his workers, but he enables them to work at their own pace and to experience a sense of “sweet independence” in the fields (103; pt. II, ch. XIV). By contrast, Farmer Groby at Flintcomb-Ash places his economic interests above the welfare of his workers. He initially hires Tess only because female field-labor is cheaper than men’s, and this same concern for costs compels his workers to labor into the night so the rick may be cleared in one day.

Groby makes Tess work hardest of all. Placed upon the machine by his orders, Tess’s work resembles that of the industrial labors Ruskin describes in “The Nature of Gothic.” She works ceaselessly at the same repetitive task. For Tess, “there was no respite; for, as the drum never stopped, the man who fed it could not stop, and she, who had to supply the man with untied sheaves, could not stop either” (347; pt. VI, ch. XLVII). Bound to the machine and “shaken bodily by its spinning” (353), Tess loses her capacity for thought: “the incessant quivering in which every fibre of her frame participated had thrown her into a stupefied reverie, in which her arms worked on independently of her consciousness” (353-54; pt. VI, XLVIII). Tess shakes uncontrollably like the factory workers Ruskin describes whose production of glass beads sends “their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy” (10: 197), and she becomes merely an “animated tool” for untying sheaves (10: 192). Like the worst industrial employers, Farmer Groby transforms Tess and her fellow workers into “leathern thongs to yoke machinery with,” and this, Ruskin claims, “is to be slave-masters indeed” (10: 193).

The prevalence of labor in Hardy’s fiction is readily apparent. His novels depict all manner of workers at work, including architects, farmers, masons, merchants, carpenters, shoemakers, shepherds, bailiffs, tranters, hagglers, copse workers, dairy workers, field workers, furze cutters, reddlemen, and more. For Raymond Williams, this determination to center his novels “in the ordinary processes of life and work” is Hardy’s most distinctive quality as a novelist (211). And yet, despite the acknowledgement of the centrality of work in Hardy’s novels, the degree to which his fiction also address an essential concern of the Victorian labor question has not been fully recognized. Through the representations of work I have considered, and many others involving working protagonists such as the architects Edward Springrove and George Somerset, the farmers Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak, the corn merchants Michael Henchard and Donald Farfrae, the copse workers Marty South and Giles Winterborne, and the stonemason Jude Fawley, Hardy’s fiction demonstrates that labor need not be divorced from pleasure and exposes the conditions that make it so.

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