Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Context

Prose - Women and Society - Edexcel - A-level English Literature

Thomas Hardy - 1840s

• 1840: Hardy is born in Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester, the eldest of four children.

Thomas Hardy - 1850s

• 1856: At 16, he witnesses the public hanging of Martha Browne at Dorchester Gaol, an event that haunted him for life.

Thomas Hard - 1870s

• 1870: Meets Emma Gifford, restoring church in Cornwall

• 1874: Marries Emma

Thomas Hardy - 1890s

• 1890: Tess published in serial form

• 1891: Tess is published as a novel (US Copyright Act 1890)

Thomas Hardy - 1910s

• 1910: Awarded the Order of Merit by King George V.

• 1912: Emma dies

• 1914: Marries Florence Dugdale

Thomas Hardy - 1920s

• 1928: Hardy dies

Publication

• Novel born into controversy

• Rejected by 3 publishers on moral grounds

• Accepted by The Graphic after bowdlerisation and some censorship

• Tess was first published in serial form in The Graphic (London) in 1890, but only after lots of scenes had been censored/toned down

Road to Serialisation

• Rejected by Tillotson & Son despite existing contract - a devout churchman - shocked by the immorality: rape, illegitimate child, baptism scene - cancelled contract but still paid Hardy the advance.

• Murray brothers also rejected it for immorality

• Macmillan (editor Mowbray Morris) rejected it for its “succulence” — too much physical detail.

• Finally accepted by The Graphic, but only after Hardy bowdlerised the text for serialisation.

Victorian Moral Code

• Hardy used Tess into a vehicle to attack the ‘censorship of prudery’

• 1890 article on ‘Candour in English Fiction’ - condemned popular magazines and lending libraries for excluding subjects (sexuality and childbirth) deemed incompatible with ‘social forms’

Sexuality: A Victorian Double Standard in Society and Law

• Victorian society enforced a strict sexual double standard: women expected to be pure; men’s sexual behaviour widely tolerated.

Contagious Diseases Act

Allowed police to arrest women suspected of prostitution; they faced forced medical exams and detention in lock hospitals.

Bastardy Act (1834)

Made it difficult for unmarried mothers to claim financial support from fathers.

Angel in the House - Victorian Women

Ideology shaped expectations of women’s purity and domesticity; limited employment opportunities.

Josephine Butler

Led the campaign against the Acts, arguing they punished women but excused men; Acts repealed in 1886.

Fallen Women

Were stigmatised; institutions like St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary (Highgate) aimed to “reform” them.

William Acton (1857)

Claimed few men lived chastely before marriage, reinforcing the belief that male sexual desire was natural but female desire was not.

Divorce: The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857

• 1857 Act shifted divorce from church courts to civil courts.

• Introduced new grounds: adultery, cruelty, desertion, incurable insanity.

• Made divorce easier in theory, but still expensive and class‑restricted.

• Women faced stricter requirements: had to prove adultery plus cruelty or desertion.

• Men only needed to prove adultery.

• Divorce remained a privilege of the upper classes despite reforms.

First Wave Feminism

• First wave feminism emerged when women’s demands for equality formed a coherent movement.

• Focused on women’s suffrage (the vote).

• Suffragists (led by Millicent Fawcett): peaceful, constitutional campaigning.

• Suffragettes (led by Emmeline Pankhurst): militant, direct‑action tactics.

• Belief: women could not be free without being self‑governing.

• Argued women must enter the political sphere to create real change.

Hardy’s support of the Sufferage

• Near age 80, Hardy reflected on women’s new freedoms (professions, the vote).

• Shows Hardy’s awareness of marriage as limiting for women compared to emerging opportunities.

• In 1906, Hardy wrote a letter supporting the Suffragette movement.

• Demonstrates his sympathy for women’s rights despite his often‑ambivalent portrayal of gender in fiction

Hardy and Religion: A Conflict

• Hardy was raised Anglican, within an Evangelical tradition.

• Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had a profound impact on him.

• Evolution challenged ideas of divine design and Providence.

• Hardy came to see nature as indifferent or even cruel.

• This made belief in a benevolent Christian God increasingly difficult for him.

• His later work reflects a worldview shaped by chance, struggle, and determinism, not divine order.

Hardy and Agnosticism

• Term “agnosticism” coined in 1869 by Thomas Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”).

• Hardy met Huxley and admired him; Huxley’s essays are cited in Tess.

• Atheist: asserts there is no God.

• Antitheist: asserts a God exists but is uncaring or malevolent, not benevolent.

• Hardy called himself a “harmless agnostic”, but his writing often expressed atheistic or antitheistic ideas.

• His worldview frequently challenged traditional Christian belief and divine benevolence.

Influence of Schopenhauer

• Tess shows Hardy’s deep knowledge of the Bible, classical myth, and major philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer (d. 1860).

• Schopenhauer’s philosophy: the universe is driven by a blind “will” that produces life destined for suffering.

• Schopenhauer described life as an “unprofitable episode” disrupting the peace of non‑existence.

• Tess is permeated by Schopenhauer’s pessimism: suffering as inevitable, fate as indifferent, and life as a burden imposed on the innocent

Hardy’s ‘Sensual Cruelty’ - Philip Larkin

• Term used by Philip Larkin to describe a quality he admired in Hardy’s writing.

• Refers to Hardy’s ability to depict pain, suffering, and emotional intensity with striking vividness.

• Suggests that suffering is shown as integral to life and spiritual development, not incidental.

• Captures Hardy’s blend of sensuous detail with existential harshness — beauty intertwined with cruelty.

• Helps explain the emotional tone of Tess, where tenderness and suffering are inseparable.

Industrialisation and it’s impact

• Hardy disliked industrialism, urban expansion, and mechanisation encroaching on rural life.

• Valued traditional countryside customs, dialects, and rhythms, which he saw disappearing.

• Viewed industrialisation as destructive to Dorset’s agrarian culture.

• Mourned the loss of the rural labourer’s way of life and the erosion of close-knit communities.

• Believed machines, railways, and migration to cities were displacing rural workers.

• In The Dorsetshire Labourer (1883), he wrote that change had occurred “silently, almost stealthily”, leading to the effacement of a class that had existed since early English history.

• Saw Dorset’s peasantry as being pushed aside by modernity.

Hardy’s Thoughts: The Ache of Modernism

• Hardy witnessed rapid change across Wessex during his lifetime.

• He saw old cottages shrink, village inns disappear, and footpaths vanish.

• Noted that the steam‑engine displaced the traditional ploughman and his team.

• Believed industrialisation was erasing rural life he had known intimately.

• Tess’s family’s poverty and instability partly reflect this agricultural mechanisation.

• The novel echoes Hardy’s real‑life fear that rural workers were being pushed aside by modernity.

A Key Event - Martha Brown Execution

• At 16, Hardy witnessed the public hanging of Martha Brown in 1856.

• Brown had been convicted of murdering her husband.

• The execution left a lifelong impression on Hardy.

• Around 70 years later, he wrote about the event, recalling it with striking sensory detail.

• His account suggests a complex, uneasy mixture of fascination and awakening, including an early awareness of the physicality of the scene.

• Scholars often link this moment to Hardy’s later interest in female suffering, public judgement, and the spectacle of punishment in his fiction.

• The execution is frequently cited as an influence on the hanging of Tess at the end of the novel.