Endnotes

1  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.

2  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.

3  Hardy makes the latter claim in his autobiography. See The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Michael Millgate, 49.

4  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).

5  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).

6  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).

7  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).

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