When Is “Far From The Madding Crowd” Set?

A speculation about the dates of the novel, and a request for two pins.

[Terence Stamp and Julie Christie in Schlesinger’s 1967 movie version of Hardy’s novel]

Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd was serialised in 1872–3 and published in book-form in 1874. Is it set contemporaneously? Or is it, after the manner of so many Victorian novels, from Middlemarch to Great Expectations, set some ‘twenty years or so’ earlier? Commentators suggest the former; the action of the novel is dated by scholars to the 1860s, or else in the early 1870s. Here’s Christine Winfield, in her notes to the ‘New Wessex Edition’ of the novel (1975):

Five characters from Far From The Madding Crowd reappear elswhere in Hardy’s work. Keeper Day … [in] Under The Greenwood Tree, Long, the Casterbridge Lawyer, … in chapter 37 of The Mayor of Casterbridge, while Farmers Everdene and Boldwood are among the creditors present at Michael Henchard’s bankruptcy. Lastly Parson Thirdly, the vicar of Weatherbury, makes a brief appearance in ‘Channel Firing’, a poem composed in 1914 about the dead who are awakened in their coffins by the gunnery practice at sea just before the First World War. These cross-references to other novels suggest that Hardy imagines the action as taking place in the early 1860s (though C J Weber, on calendar evidence, has proposed the later date of 1869–73).

Digging out Weber’s article [Carl J. Weber, ‘Chronology in Hardy’s Novels’, PMLA 53:1 (1938), 314–320] I find that he confidently assigns the following dates to the novel: ‘1841 birth of Gabriel Oak; 1849 birth of Bathsheba; 1845 birth of Troy; 1850 birth of Fanny’, and that he pegs the opening chapter of the novel to ‘Dec 1869’. Since the novel itself includes no specific timescale (the closest it comes are the dates mentioned on Troy and Fanny’s tombstones at the end, both of which take the form ‘18 — ’) his confidence might, just conceivably, be misplaced.

As against the idea that the novel is set in the 1869/1870s we might say: the connections with the named Hardy novels only peg the book to that era if those other books are assumed to be set contemporaneously, which they very well may not be. And poor old Parson Thirdly, disturbed by ‘Channel Firing’, could just as easily have been buried in the ground eighty as forty years earlier. And otherwise the novel contains no reference to historical specifics. Wessex is, in many ways, a rural location, out of time. 1869 saw the opening of the Suez Canal; 1870 the death of Dickens and the Franco-Prussian War; 1871 the Tichborne trial — none of these are mentioned in the novel. That’s not Hardy’s way.

There’s one piece of evidence, which I’m not sure anyone has noticed, to suggest the novel is actually set many decades earlier. In chapter 15 Fanny writes to Gabriel Oak, to thank him for an act of charity earlier in the story (Boldwood opens the letter first, he says by accident):

DEAR FRIEND, — I do not know your name, but I think these few lines will reach you, which I wrote to thank you for your kindness to me the night I left Weatherbury in a reckless way. I also return the money I owe you, which you will excuse my not keeping as a gift. All has ended well, and I am happy to say I am going to be married to the young man who has courted me for some time — Sergeant Troy, of the 11th Dragoon Guards, now quartered in this town. He would, I know, object to my having received anything except as a loan, being a man of great respectability and high honour — indeed, a nobleman by blood.

Of course, Fanny doesn’t end up married to Troy: on her wedding day, by one of those cruel Hardyesque chances, she goes by mistake to the wrong church. Thereafter Troy angrily (and foolishly) repudiates her and goes on to marry Bathsheba. But I don’t mean to tell you the story of Madding Crowd, which of course you know.

Here’s the thing: — Troy’s regiment. Troy wears his bright red tunic, proud of what it signifies and how handsome it makes him look (and also, in Hardy’s scheme, identifying him as scarlet — as sin and sex and devilish danger. I mean, just look at Terence Stamp, at the head of this post. Was there ever a more beautiful man in UK moviedom? Who would blame Julie Christie for passing over dull Peter Finch for such a dish?)

So, before the Cardwell Reforms of 1868, only officers — including senior NCOs like Sergeant Troy (though not corporals) — wore the brightest scarlet uniforms, lower ranks wearing uniforms of a less intense ‘madder red’ colour. [Cardwell abolished the distinction such that all troops wore the same shade of red: British soldiers continued to wear scarlet until World War 1, although the last actual battle in which troops wore the colour in combat was the Battle of Ginnis in 1885].

But the real tell is Troy’s regiment. ‘11th Dragoon Guards’. It’s a real division, originally raised at Colchester in July 1715 as ‘Honeywood’s Regiment of Dragoons’, and renamed after 1751 (when regiments were first numbered) the 11th Regiment of Dragoons. The regiment was renamed again in 1840 as the ‘11th (Prince Albert’s Own) Hussars’, after Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, who became regimental colonel. It was thereafter always Hussars — never Dragoons — renamed the ‘11th Hussars’ in 1861 and again the ‘11th Hussars (Prince Albert’s Own)’ in 1921, which it remained until amalgamated with the ‘10th Royal Hussars (Prince of Wales’s Own)’, to form the ‘Royal Hussars’ on 25 October 1969.

Here’s another datum: after fighting in Spain and at Waterloo, the 11th Dragoons were posted to India in 1819, and remained there until 1836. Clearly Sergeant Troy could not have been gadding about Wessex in his spare time if stationed in India, so the story must be set after the regiment’s return home. In 1836, back in Britain, the regiment was under the command of the Earl of Cardigan.

This would situate the novel as happening in the late 1830s (specifically between 1836 and 1840) and would imply that Troy had previously spent some time serving in India which, if so, might be interesting on several levels. More, the splendour of his scarlet uniform in the novel would be very much on point. The Earl of Cardigan, a hot-tempered bully of a man in almost every way unsuited to military command — as his infamous record leading the (as they then became) 11th Hussars during the Crimean War suggests — was obsessive about the outward appearance and presentation of his soldiers. ‘George Ryan, a writer otherwise highly critical of Cardigan, estimated that he spent about £10,000 a year (equivalent to £1,000,000 in 2021) towards remounts and distinctive uniform for his troops. In purchasing brilliant new uniforms for his men, Cardigan caused resentment among his professional officers; they had to match the men’s attire with even more costly uniforms (a Dragoon officer’s jacket, for example, cost £40 — equivalent to £3,900 in 2021—and officers had to buy their own). Cardigan wished his officers to be as aristocratic, flamboyant and stylish as he was himself and as a consequence, he had no time for those men — “Indian officers” — who had learnt their profession over many years of service with the 11th during its long posting to India.’ This accords, I think, with Troy: as an NCO he would not have had to pay for his exceptionally fine scarlet uniform, but he would of course have been proud of it, and would have worn it whenever he could. Plus Hardy would have known that Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ was a poem about Cardigan’s 11th. That’s fitting, where Troy’s character is concerned, I think.

[Not to get too deep into the weeds on this, but Weber’s dating relies on the fact that there is precisely one date in the novel of which we can be sure: ‘Fanny’s death, the exact day of which is recorded upon her tombstone, is definitely assigned to a Sunday.’ This is true, but the date in question (‘Fanny Robin/Who died/October 9, 18 — ,/Aged 20 years’) falls on a Sunday in 1836, just as it does in 1870.]

I mean, this is all so much pedantry, and a barren ‘how many children had Lady Macbeth?’ style posturing, I concede. It doesn’t materially affect the novel, as a novel, if we think of it as happening in the 1830s, as opposed to the 1870s, or vice versa. On the other hand, the other night I had a vivid dream in which I was writing Return To The Madding Crowd, a sequel to Hardy’s novel, and my wife, who is doing some critical work upon Hardy at the moment was (in the dream) very impressed. In the dream and with the vagueness of dream logic, Gabriel and Bathsheba’s three sons were caught up in the First World War, something which wouldn’t be plausible on either of the timelines I’ve discussed here. But if we assume a late-1830s timeline for Far From the Madding Crowd, then a sequel might see the next generation shipped off to the Crimea. That might be an interesting novel to write. For two pins, I’d do so. I dunno: does anybody have two pins?