Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance

Jacqueline Dillion

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137503190
• eBook ISBN: 9781137503206
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book reassesses Hardy's fiction in the light of his prolonged engagement with the folklore and traditions of rural England. Drawing on wide research, it demonstrates the pivotal role played in the novels by such customs and beliefs as 'overlooking', hag-riding, skimmington-riding, sympathetic magic, mumming, bonfire nights, May Day celebrations, Midsummer divination, and the 'Portland Custom'. This study shows how such traditions were lived out in practice in village life, and how they were represented in written texts – in literature, newspapers, county histories, folklore books, the work of the Folklore Society, archival documents, and letters. It explores tensions between Hardy's repeated insistence on the authenticity of his accounts and his engagement with contemporary anthropologists and folklorists, and reveals how his efforts to resist their 'excellently neat' categories of culture open up wider questions about the nature of belief, progress, and social change.

© The Author(s) 2016

Jacqueline DillionThomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance10.1057/978-1-137-50320-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jacqueline Dillion¹

(1)

Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, USA

End Abstract

The English word ‘Folk-Lore’ was coined in 1846 when Thomas Hardy was six years old. But interest in popular antiquities—the forerunner to folklore studies—had been gaining momentum from the eighteenth century onwards, as the continuance of traditional or folk culture was challenged by the combined pressures of industrialisation and consequent social mobility. Pioneering collections such as John Brand’s Popular Antiquities, first published in 1777, documented the customs of the common people and swiftly attracted the interest of the growing number of curious dilettantes and antiquarians who were, in Richard Dorson’s words, ‘blessed with leisure and private libraries’.¹ But for the most part this early interest was casual rather than systematic, its approach indicated by the full title of the work by Henry Bourne fifty years earlier, on which Brand based his own: Antiquitates Vulgares; or, the Antiquities of the Common People, Giving an Account of several of their Opinions and Ceremonies, with Proper Reflections upon each of them; shewing which may be retain’d, and which ought to be laid aside. Like Bourne, Brand is mistrustful of ‘popular Notions and vulgar Ceremonies’ which have their origin in ‘the Times when Popery was our established Religion’, and will appear ‘foolish to the enlightened Understandings of Men in the eighteenth Century’. At the same time, however, to abandon or prohibit such notions and ceremonies as ‘May-games’ and ‘Midsummer-Eve Rejoicings’ might open the way to new and more dangerous customs, which in their turn might undermine ‘the Character of our boasted national Bravery’. For Brand as for Bourne, Enlightenment confidence is tempered by a pre-Romantic veneration of ‘the folk’: or as Brand puts it, the ‘People’ and their customs provide ‘a respectable Subject to every one who is the Friend of Man’.²

Brand compared his researches to those of an ‘ancient enthusiastic Traveller’ trying to force his way through an ‘intricate and entangled’ wilderness. The turn towards a more deliberate investigation came in 1846, following the success of the second edition of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie. Grimm’s work was an exhaustive attempt to identify a variety of themes in the mythology and belief of the Germanic peoples and to trace their development from ancient to modern times. Prompted by Grimm’s efforts, William Thoms, editor of Notes and Queries, sent to The Athenaeum an article titled ‘FOLK-LORE’, proposing a new name and a new direction for the subject. Thoms intended this ‘good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore—the Lore of the People’ (Thoms’s italics) to denote ‘the manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs &c. of the olden time’, or ‘what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities or Popular Literature’.³ Thoms implored the Athenaeum readers to do more than read: he urged them to go out and collect folklore, and publish it in that magazine’s pages until some British Grimm ‘shall arise who shall do for the Mythology of the British Isles the good service which that profound antiquary and philologist has accomplished for the Mythology of Germany’.⁴ Speaking practically, Thoms suggested that with the ‘wide circulation’ of The Athenaeum, its readers might by acting together accomplish ‘ten times more effectually’ what had already been attempted in Brand’s Popular Antiquities and William Hone’s Every-Day Book (1825–6).

In the same article, Thoms went on to anticipate the discovery of an overarching theory that, like Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, would make sense of the

mass of minute facts, many of which, when separately considered, appear trifling and insignificant,—but when taken in connexion with the system in which his master-mind has woven them, assume a value that he who recorded them never dreamed of attributing to them.⁵

Thus Thoms’s plea was two-fold: that a new breed of amateur folklorists should now go out and collect these masses of ‘minute facts’, and that someone should then work this material into a comprehensive systematic theory that would enable Britons to better understand their folkloric past.

The first part of Thoms’s plan was accomplished through the work of the men and women who would eventually found the Folklore Society together with their network of collectors ‘on the ground’. These were to be discovered among members of the professional classes whose work took them into rural areas: ‘lawyers, doctors, and especially land-agents and gentlemen-farmers—people who, educated themselves, are yet brought by their professions into much contact with the uneducated’. Such people would be ‘much better able to help’ than the clergy, from whom, it was assumed, ‘the uneducated’ would shy away, withholding their true beliefs and practices, as they also would from outsiders coming into the area specifically to collect folklore.⁶ Thoms proposed a new ‘respondent method’ which would rely on direct contact between educated middle-class ‘collectors’ and the ‘folk’, before the information was recorded and reported back to the Folklore Society, and submitted to their classification procedures.⁷ Whether by chance or design, the procedures suggested by Thoms closely resembled those adopted by Victorian naturalists and specimen collectors, reporting their finds back to the Royal Horticultural Society at Kew, or to the London Zoological Society, or the more than 2,000 correspondents scattered around the globe who sent data to Charles Darwin.

In Victorian England, as Thomas Heyck has noted, science increasingly served as ‘the model for the acquisition and cultural functions of knowledge’,⁸ and the procedures of the folklorists were intended to be ‘scientific’ in the newly current sense of that term, in emulation of the emerging sciences of human behaviour—sociology, psychology, ethnology, and anthropology—around the mid-century. Though leading figures in the Folklore Society such as George Gomme and Charlotte Burne⁹ accepted that the new discipline could not be ‘an exact science’, they sought to arrange all their data ‘in proper order, so as to bring out their true relation to each other, and to present our new science to the world as a harmonious and homogeneous whole’.¹⁰ Accordingly, Gomme devised a classification system based on a biological model, with divisions of ‘groups’ and ‘classes’ corresponding to genera and species in botany. Burne even suggested that folklore was the foundational science, since ‘every branch of knowledge that we call scientific has been Folk-loric in its origin’.¹¹ As Gillian Bennett has more recently observed, for those working in the field ‘European folklore was to the history of human civilization what the fossil record was to earth history.’¹²

The creation of the Folklore Society in 1878, along with the establishment of their dedicated journal, The Folk-lore Record (later renamed The Folk-Lore Journal, then Folklore),¹³ and their Handbook of Folklore, coincided with an increase in the number of National Schools following the 1870 Education Act. With this development, schoolmasters and teachers soon came to be viewed as among the best sources for obtaining folklore from their previously uneducated students (and by extension, those students’ parents and grandparents). Folklore Society president Charlotte Burne, Charles Booth,¹⁴ and H. Rider Haggard all saw the potential for schoolmasters to record what folklore passed through their schools. Haggard believed, ‘there is nobody who can be so well informed as the local schoolmaster, since all the youth of the village … pass through his hands’.¹⁵ Perhaps not surprisingly, when folklore material was mediated through those charged with ‘improving’ the next generations, following what Thomas Hardy would later call an ‘infinitely Revised Code’,¹⁶ it often became entangled with ideas of progress and cultural development. Hardy was enough in sympathy with the respondent method to gather and report folklore, in his fiction and on occasion in his correspondence, but as a writer with a double allegiance, a man who knew and belonged to both the ‘folk’ and the educated world, he was also quick to resist the overconfident methods of classification that came to dominate folklore studies.

There was the more reason for him be wary in that the period of his own life (1840–1928) saw a shift in the effective definitions of ‘folklore’ and ‘the folk’. While Thoms had repeatedly referred to folklore as belonging to ‘the people’, regretting that ‘popular notions’ had by mid-century become ‘long neglected’, he took it for granted that readers of the Athenaeum sympathetic to folklore studies would know who ‘the people’ were. His successors were more systematic with their terminology. Their delineations increasingly turned on lack of education: the folk were those who had been left behind by social progress, and were unable to contribute to it. The opening pages of the first Folk-Lore Record (1878) drew on Brand’s and Thoms’s diplomatic use of the word ‘popular’ (denoting the populace), spelling out that the aim was the ‘preservation and publication of Popular Traditions, Legendary Ballads, Local Proverbial Sayings, Superstitions and Old Customs (British and foreign), and all subjects related to them’.¹⁷ But very soon definitions began to clarify how ‘the folk’ might be distinguished from the rest of the population. Andrew Lang wrote in 1884 that the study of folklore examines

the relics of old races, the surviving superstitions and stories, the ideas which are in our time but not of it. Properly speaking, folklore is only concerned with the legends, customs, beliefs, of the Folk, of the people, of the classes which have least been altered by education, which have shared least in progress.¹⁸

Lang’s friend George Gomme developed this view in the first edition of the Handbook of Folklore (1890), affirming the privileging of education and progress, and explaining to the reader that those formerly referred to as ‘the people’ were in effect the ‘least cultured inhabitants’ of modern society: indeed, in Gomme’s account, the folk did not merely have a different body of knowledge, but thought and felt in different ways. Like a strange species in an isolated evolutionary niche, they could be expected to continue to ‘generate fresh belief’ according to folk modes, until they too were educated in science and philosophy. He explains that folklore is to be found among

the least cultured of the inhabitants of all the countries of modern Europe [with] a vast body of curious beliefs, customs, and story-narratives which are handed down by tradition from generation to generation and the origin of which is unknown. They are not supported or recognized by the prevailing religion, nor by the established law, nor by the recorded history of the several countries. They are essentially the property of the unlearned and least advanced portion of the community.¹⁹

Gomme’s definition was expanded by his successor Charlotte Burne in the subsequent edition of the Handbook of Folklore (1913). To Burne, the folk could be characterised not only by sharing ‘least in progress’ as before, but also by their mental ‘backwardness’, in spite of their various technical skills. This suggests a submerged class, even an atavistic strain, existing among those ‘more advanced peoples’ who in the estimation of the Folklore Society composed turn-of-the-century Britain. For Burne folklore is the

generic term under which the traditional Beliefs, Customs, Stories, Songs, and Sayings current among backward peoples, or retained by the uncultured classes of more advanced peoples, are comprehended and included … in short, it covers everything which makes part of the mental equipment of the folk as distinguished from their technical skill. It is not the form of the plough which excites the attention of the folklorist, but the rites practised by the ploughman when putting it into the soil … Folklore, in fact, is the expression of the psychology of early man, whether in the fields of philosophy, religion, science, and medicine, in social organization and ceremonial, or in the more strictly intellectual regions of history, poetry, and other literature.²⁰

These definitions determined the way educated readers came to think about folklore over the course of Hardy’s lifetime.²¹ By the time he came to publish his first novels in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Belief: Overlooking, Sympathetic Magic, Hag-Riding, and South’s Tree
• 3. Acts of Disapproval: Skimmington Riding
• 4. Acts of Approval: The Portland Custom
• 5. Winter Customs: Bonfire Night and Mumming
• 6. Summer Customs: May Day and Midsummer Divination
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter