Roger Ebbatson writes:
My talk will endeavour to offer a comparative
juxtaposition of selected writings by Jefferies and Hardy dealing both with
the social and agrarian issues experienced by the workfolk during the Great
Depression and, in a countervailing movement, with the more inward personal
experience of spiritual aspiration and an intuitive sense of ‘the Beyond’. The
focus will be on The Dewy Morn, set in comparison and contradistinction with Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Whilst
Jefferies, in his final essays, moves away from social issues towards a more
inward and transcendental mode of thought, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles in a countervailing movement the
heroine’s innate spirituality is progressively negated and undermined by her
life-experiences, her rape/seduction and subsequent marital abandonment leading
her towards the culminating communal immiseration of the field-workers at
Flintcomb-Ash, followed by her arrest at Stonehenge and subsequent execution.
The social consciousness exhibited, for instance, in Jefferies’ ‘The Wiltshire
Labourer’ or ‘After the County Franchise’ is also powerfully articulated in the
final tragic stages of Hardy’s novel, both writers’ diagnosis chiming with the
Marxian account of change in the Victorian countryside, whilst Jefferies’ more
mystical final phase, which is not echoed in Hardy, may be more productively
framed by reference to the Heideggerian concept of ‘the Open’.
Roger Ebbatson is
Visiting Professor at Lancaster University, a Fellow of the English Association,
and a Vice-President of the Tennyson Society. He has written extensively on
Richard Jefferies, beginning with Lawrence
& the Nature Tradition (1980), and subsequently in An Imaginary England (2005), Heidegger’s
Bicycle (2006), Landscape &
Literature (2013), and most recently, Landscapes
of Eternal Return (2016) that
will be reviewed in the next RJS Journal (Summer 2018).
