HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H01089 10/29/01 "BOLDWOOD'S CHARACTER MODEL IN FFMC" ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 16:31:51 -0500 Subject: Re: Horace Moule as the model for Boldwood in *FFMC*? From: "Philip & Andrea Allingham" Both Paul Turner and Martin Seymour-Smith in their Hardy biographies propose that Horace Moule is the basis for the character of Boldwood in *FFMC*, and speculate that Hardy created this character in response to learning of Moule's suicide, which occurred on 21 Sept., 1873, just as TH was completing the ten chapters he intended to send to Leslie Stephen. Does anyone who has inspected the manuscript feel that it indicates in Chapters 9 and 10 that Boldwood was added at the last moment, or was Boldwood added after the first two serial episodes had appeared in *The Cornhill*? Since Hardy only learned of Moule's suicide on Sept. 24, and since the publication timeline indicates he mailed the first ms. package (chapters 1-10) to Stephen by the end of September, I find it difficult to believe that Boldwood was created entirely as a response to Moule's suicide, which may, however, have determined the development of that character in Hardy's writing after the end of Sept., 1873. Rosemarie Morgan points out that, erratic behaviour and severe depression aside, Moule and Boldwood do not much resemble one another. Philip Allingham ========== Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 19:47:17 -0500 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: Horace Moule as the model for Boldwood in *FFMC*? A couple of other points, Philip. These arise from oddities in the ms and may provide insights into the character construct of Boldwood but none at all into the model[s] for this construct. And the oddities are these: Hardy's FFMC plot outline to Stephen in 1872 (when he was busy working on *A Pair of Blue Eyes*) was, as you know, sketched as a "pastoral tale...in which the chief characters would be a woman-farmer, a shepherd, and a sergeant in the Dragoon Guards." In September, 1873, he rushed through to Stephen's office the first instalments for publication in the *Cornhill* (Jan 1874). However, these early chapters are surprisingly haphazard in their organisation. Chapters 1-5, for example, are ill-defined with some indications that in the early stages of composition the "crisis" at this stage of Oak's life (which we now take to be the sheepdog's overdriving of his sheep) might well have been his proposal of marriage to Bathsheba and her rejection of him. This section of the serial was subsequently tailored to emphasise the former event-- and my own impression is, given that there are also other points of indetermination later on in the MS composition,* that Hardy is certainly not working from a carefully-planned draft, or any specific character models but, on the contrary, with a good deal of inspired extemporisation. Accordingly, by the second number, the "pastoral" tale has unexpectedly lost its archetypes, notably its Arcadian shepherd and milkmaid (the one, less than nobly, feeds a dead lamb to his sheepdog thus arousing its latent bloodlust, and the other comes into a legacy and instantly turns farmer-estate manager). The February instalment (Ch 6) now veers off in a slightly different direction as, in a reversal of roles (which, being a favourite ploy of TH's, probably had been planned), and the ex-milkmaid becomes the boss & takes the "shepherd" under her wing as her employee. By the March instalment she is now her own acting bailiff -- a position Oak will eventually succeed in gaining. A "bailiff," being the legal representative for the property and an agent or steward of the landlord, is more of an executive than a "shepherd." I mention these role shifts, slight as they seem to be, because it is at that stage in the plot that Hardy introduces a member of the privileged classes, a gentleman-farmer, Boldwood, and the divergence from traditional forms of the pastoral-idyll is almost complete. Yet Hardy is still struggling with rural characters and rural scenes much as if maintaining the correct balance between the tragic drama to be played out among the principals and the "pastoral tale" itself (Stephen had wanted something along the lines of UGT) must, perforce, be weighted with some precision and he must not, at any cost, lose sight of this. I say "struggle" because he is now rapidly overwriting the rustic sections and his editor is insisting on some extensive cuts to these lengthy segments. My longwinded point (sorry! ) is then to stress the experimental and extempore approaches Hardy makes to FFMC. Now that his woman-farmer has emerged to be less than a "rustic" and more of a career-pioneer, problems arise in keeping to the the original plot (if it was ever a serious one). Suffice it to say there are many more examples in the MS of textual or compositional divergences and, if the cancelled words are indicative, many tendencies to diverge from the narrative flow as and when it had been tuned to Stephen's strictures. One major example (to follow the '*' above) is where Troy may well have been meant (momentarily) to join the troops (for the Franco-Prussian war?). In the MS, Hardy completely abandons this short paragraph and works instead towards the "drowning" episode (I have, however. retained the aborted segment in my MS version of FFMC (Penguin World Classic) where it makes for a distinctly odd disjunction in the narrative, but a distinctly interesting one). All in all, whatever Hardy had in mind for Boldwood I doubt it was a portrait or representation of the man he loved more dearly than, perhaps, any other in his life -- the much-admired scholar and dearest friend who, unhappily given to heavy-drinking bouts, slit his own throat in his Cambridge rooms in September 1873, Horace Moule. I would be most interested -- as would Philip, I'm sure -- to hear from anyone who knows more about the Moule/Hardy friendship. Thank you for bearing with me (if you have), Cheers, Rosemarie ========== Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 06:53:03 -0500 Subject: Re: Tinkering with chapters in the 2nd and 3rd parts of *FFMC* From: "Philip & Andrea Allingham" Further to the notion that Horace Moule may have served as the basis for Boldwood (or, at least, that Moule's suicide occurred about the time that Hardy created Boldwood), February's initial-letter vignette in *The Cornhill* is not based on a passage in the February instalment; rather, it illustrates the following passage in Ch. 9 (the first chapter in the March instalment), although Paterson shows Bathsheba standing, and Liddy alone on the floor: ³In the room from which the conversation proceeded, Bathsheba and her servant-companion, Liddy Smallbury, were to be discovered sitting upon the floor, and sorting a complication of papers, books, bottles, and rubbish spread out thereon‹remnants from the household stores of the late occupier² (p. 258 in *The Cornhill*). Is it possible that Stephen¹s moving the ninth chapter to the March instalment was done at Hardy¹s own request so that he could write in the character of Boldwood at that point (he calls in search of news of Fanny Robin), or did Hardy revise Ch. 9 in manuscript in late September, 1873, prior to sending Stephen the first ten chapters of the novel? Philip Allingham ==========