tag:theconversation.com,2011:/nz/topics/19th-century-literature-64348/articles19th-century literature – The Conversation2020-01-07T14:53:51Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1291062020-01-07T14:53:51Z2020-01-07T14:53:51ZDavid Copperfield on screen: Charles Dickens’ masterpiece is a celebration of everyday heroes<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308416/original/file-20200103-11924-15r40x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C0%2C6699%2C4446&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of Lionsgate</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Charles Dickens’ great masterpiece David Copperfield begins with uncertainty: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With those few words the author gives us one of the most memorable lines to be found in 19th-century fiction and gets us thinking about who or what a hero might be.</p>
<p>A new film version of the novel is about to open in cinemas in the UK after being premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019 and opening the 63rd BFI London Film Festival the following month <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/02/the-personal-history-of-david-copperfield-review-armano-iannucci">to glowing reviews</a>. Written by Armando Ianucci and Simon Blackwell, the movie stars Dev Patel in the title role, who – as producer Kevin Loader <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/17/why-dev-patel-in-dickens-could-change-film-for-ever">told The Guardian</a>, is one of those “actors who are capable of embodying the character as perfectly as possible, regardless of their ethnicity”.</p>
<p>The young Copperfield certainly shows some heroic promise: he’s an orphan – which is often a good start for a Victorian hero – and he manages to walk from London to Dover alone as a young boy to extricate himself from a life of dull labour. But he also lacks a certain amount of agency: Copperfield is buffeted around by chance and coincidence, relying on the hospitality and generosity of those he meets. So the strange and eccentric characters he encounters also operate as heroes to him.</p>
<p>We could argue, in fact, that the book meditates on the necessity of everyday heroism in a world that is often cruel and unfair. Copperfield witnesses these acts of generosity from early on in his life. When he visits Daniel Peggotty (his beloved nurse’s brother) Copperfield openly admires his heroism in offering a home to his orphaned nephew and niece and to the morbidly depressed widow, Mrs Gummidge. </p>
<p>Copperfield soon has cause to rely on this sort of heroism himself – when he too is orphaned, set to work, and then runs away to throw himself on the mercy of his aunt. His aunt, the eccentric Betsey Trotwood, adopts Copperfield, having already taken on the care of the troubled but amiable Mr Dick, who had been destined for life in an asylum when emotionally traumatised by an undisclosed event in his past. </p>
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<span class="caption">Star-studded: Peter Capaldi as Mr Micawber.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lionsgate</span></span>
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<p>And of course, we must admire the ultimate heroism shown by Ham who drowns attempting to rescue the shipwrecked Steerforth – seducer of Ham’s beloved Little Em’ly. Fostering children, prison visiting, care for the elderly, the homeless, and the mentally unwell, are the acts of heroism that make Copperfield’s life liveable. They are the stitches through which a 19th-century society, without the mechanisms of a modern welfare state, holds itself together.</p>
<h2>Everyday evil</h2>
<p>Of course, the novel also has plenty of antiheroes, most memorably the sadistic Edward Murdstone, who squelches Copperfield’s childhood freedoms, and the insidious Uriah Heep, who defrauds Copperfield’s family. At times the novel’s small individual acts of heroism seem to be overwhelmed by forces of wrongdoing, indifference and ignorance represented by characters such as those two.</p>
<p>But, of course, this is Dickens – and the way in which David Copperfield’s plotlines come together reveals Dickens’ vision of the world as interconnected. The handy coincidences of converging plots are not just a sop to satisfy mawkish readers, but an embodiment of Dickens’ philosophy. </p>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-1.html">preface to his magazine</a>, Household Words, Dickens tells us that he wants literature to: “bring the greater and the lesser in degree, together … and mutually dispose them to a better acquaintance and a kinder understanding”. By inculcating sympathy with others in his fiction, Dickens thought he could encourage minor acts of heroism such as those that run through the plotlines of David Copperfield.</p>
<h2>New vision</h2>
<p>The new film version promises to give us an energetic and modern re-working and has received 11 British Independent Film Awards nominations, including best screenplay and best actor. </p>
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<span class="caption">Dev Patel: one of those actors who can inhabit a character regardless of its ethnicity.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lionsgate</span></span>
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<p>By all accounts it will entertain us with its fast-paced frolics through a diverse Victorian London and its cast of eccentrics played by Hollywood stars including Tilda Swinton as Betsey Trotwood, Hugh Laurie as Mr Dick and Peter Capaldi as the incorrigible Mr Micawber. But it will also show us the poverty, child labour and homelessness that form the backdrop to Copperfield’s early life.</p>
<p>Ianucci’s film is part of a long succession of adaptations. As soon as the novel was published, adaptors began working on stage versions. It was actually the Little Em’ly fallen woman sub-plot that had most appeal for Victorian theatregoers who were already more than familiar with the poverty of industrial London. </p>
<p>More recent film versions of Dickens’ novels have had to make similar choices about which of Dickens’ multiple plotlines should be emphasised. David McGrath’s 2002 adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby favoured the joyful romp over the brutality of the novel’s early scenes. But McGrath’s Nickleby retains more of the Dickensian sentimentality than seems to be the case in the new David Copperfield. </p>
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<p>The snappy trailer gives a curt but comic announcement of the death of Copperfield’s mother, whereas the novel narrates the deathbed scene in a chapter I defy anyone to read without crying. Even Dora, Copperfield’s young wife, apparently receives a reprieve from her untimely fate in the new film. </p>
<p>Screenwriters and directors have become wary of Dickensian sentimentality but I hope that this new version of Dickens’ own favourite novel retains those links of sympathy and acts of everyday heroism that bind the novel together. If it shows us a hero navigating his way through a difficult world aided by humour, eccentricity and kindness it will be an adaptation that sends us back to the novel to locate those elements once again in Dickens’ work.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129106/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Beth Palmer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The latest version of Dickens’ classic is a refreshingly diverse tale of the triumph of the ordinary heroism over everyday evil.Beth Palmer, Senior Lecturer in English, University of SurreyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1211482019-08-01T13:15:06Z2019-08-01T13:15:06ZThe original Love Island: how George Sand and Fryderyk Chopin put Mallorca on the romance map<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286575/original/file-20190801-169710-njjs0m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C5%2C924%2C720&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">ChopinSandDelacroix</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Eugène Delacroix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>More than <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49157523">four million Britons watched</a> Amber Gill and Greg O'Shea being crowned the victors of Love Island 2019. Gill, a beauty therapist and model from Newcastle in the north of England, and O'Shea, a rugby player from Limerick in Ireland, proved the most popular pairing among the 24 reality TV show contestants on the Balearic island of Mallorca.</p>
<p>Their 12-day romance has ensured fame, fortune and social media influence for the two 20-somethings – and it won’t hurt Mallorca’s tourism numbers either. But perhaps few of the contestants or viewers know that tourism on Mallorca was kick-started almost two centuries ago by an earlier pair of star-crossed celebrity lovers, in a remote lodging just a few miles away from the ITV villa. So while Love Island might feel quintessentially 21st century, it was prefigured by events on the same island in 1838.</p>
<p>In that year, the “most famous woman in France”, the avant-garde, aristocratic, cross-dressing, best-selling novelist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Sand">Aurore Amantine Dupin Dudevant</a> – known by her male pen name of George Sand – travelled to Mallorca with the lauded Polish composer, pianist and political refugee <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/09ff1fe8-d61c-4b98-bb82-18487c74d7b7">Fryderyk Chopin</a>. She was 34, he six years her junior. </p>
<p>Sand claimed they had sailed to the Balearics seeking solitude, where she could write and Chopin compose. They were likely also fleeing from the scandal their love affair had caused in Paris. Sand was a high-society rebel, a divorced mother of two who had successfully won custody of her children. The critic Robert Graves has described her as “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3e1ag2S07fsC&pg=PA335&lpg=PA335&dq=graves+sand+the+uncrowned+queen+of+the+Romantics&source=bl&ots=YOvUdjuLvk&sig=ACfU3U0_9hYgqLdogQXYGytBbF_ddBSfBw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiwjLSVvOHjAhWB-qQKHZa6BU8Q6AEwEHoECB4QAQ#v=onepage&q=graves%20sand%20the%20uncrowned%20queen%20of%20the%20Romantics&f=false">the uncrowned queen of the Romantics</a>”, a conscious pioneer of a “modern”, liberated lifestyle. </p>
<p>At 28, Chopin was the same age as several of the Love Island hopefuls. Like one of this year’s contestants, he came to Mallorca with a recent broken engagement behind him – to fellow Polish émigré Maria Wodzińska. Yet unlike the bronzed, toned bodies of the 2019 ITV islanders, Chopin was in 1838 already ailing, with bronchitis or tuberculosis. Writing to a friend from the island, <a href="https://archive.org/stream/chopinsletters00chop/chopinsletters00chop_djvu.txt">he described his own appearance</a>. He dressed informally, Chopin explained, but his skin was still wan: “Behold me [here] without white gloves, without curled hair, but as pale as usual.” </p>
<p>Mallorca in the 1830s was heavily agricultural. In her travel memoir <a href="https://www.literarytraveler.com/articles/george-sand-her-majorcan-winter-of-discontent/">A Winter in Mallorca</a>, Sand estimated that almonds and pigs were the main exports, and she described too the orange groves, figs and olive trees. To the two Parisians the island seemed fertile yet strangely impoverished. “No peasant in the world is so dreary or poor,” Sand concluded. The island’s infrastructure for foreign visitors was extremely limited in the early 19th century. </p>
<p>Sand and Chopin sailed from Barcelona on a cargo ship, its hold full of hogs. Arriving in the capital of Palma, to their shock the couple could not find a functioning hotel. They stayed in expensive rented rooms in a bad neighbourhood – and Chopin’s piano was impounded by customs officers. They ended up renting a cell in an abandoned Carthusian monastery in the mountain village of Valldemossa. </p>
<p>The lovers’ Mallorcan tryst was bittersweet. Chopin’s letters praised the natural beauty, calm and “poetic feeling” of the island. He took pleasure in the “African sun”, the blue sea and the eagles he watched gliding overhead. Sand, however, grew disillusioned. She was angry in particular at the locals who disapproved of the unmarried lovers, and later vented her feelings in her notoriously acerbic memoir. </p>
<p>Yet however unflattering her account, Sand’s book put Mallorca on the literary map. She joked that she had “discovered” the island and predicted that once international travel connections improved “Mallorca would soon prove a formidable rival to the Alps”, a new destination for the North European traveller. That prophecy was realised with the opening of an international airport at Palma in 1960, and the advent of mass tourism.</p>
<p>Then – as with Love Island now – the couple’s Mallorcan love spectacle inspired much hand-wringing, moralising and outright disdain in the newspapers of the day. A journalist writing in the Polish monthly Przegląd Poznański, for example, <a href="http://www.ejournals.eu/sj/index.php/SLit/article/view/1189">lamented Chopin’s extra-marital love affair</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our respect for this person should not blind us, or cause us to pass over in silence things which are so severely condemned by society. It is a source of bitter sorrow that such a beautiful life has not been without deep stain. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Today, contestants hope that a successful stint on Love Island will generate income from advertising, guest appearances and endorsements. For Sand and Chopin, the Mallorcan interlude was also productive for their own careers. Sand wrote <a href="https://booksien.com/2018/01/15/about-spiridion-by-george-sand/">her novel Spiridion</a> in the monastery, and Chopin composed a number of pieces at Valldemossa. But the romantic happy-ever-after which the most gossiped-about couple of 19th-century Europe had sought in the Balearic sun proved, ultimately, far more elusive.</p>
<h2>Unhappy ever after</h2>
<p>Like many Love Island contestants, Chopin and Sand found that an extended stay in a Mallorcan hideaway was no guarantee of successful long-term romance. The trip had an ambiguous effect on their relationship. Chopin was already seriously unwell, and his love affair with Sand would break down in terrible, <a href="https://crosseyedpianist.com/2013/04/10/divine-fire-fryderyk-chopin-and-george-sand/">very public recriminations </a> a few years later.</p>
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<span class="caption">A fine romance? Love Island winners Amber Gill and Greg O'Shea.</span>
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<p>The Polish pianist died in Paris in 1849 and Sand did not attend his funeral. Graves <a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/george-sand">has speculated</a> that the hostile reception which the lovers received from socially conservative, Catholic Mallorcans heightened the existing tensions in their relationship, fuelling Chopin’s own internal misgivings.</p>
<p>We do not yet know if the Love Island villa – rented by ITV from its millionaire German owner – will become a tourist attraction. But at Valldemossa, the Chopin-Sand connection is still <a href="https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2017/08/05/as-mallorca-enjoys-the-frederic-chopin-festival-we-remember-his-island-sojourn-with-george-sand/">a major visitor draw</a>, 180 years on. The town boasts a museum, and offers visits to the monastic cell where the couple lived, as well as regular recitals of Chopin’s music. </p>
<p>Relics associated with the famous visitors are displayed – including Chopin’s piano, finally rescued from customs officials.</p>
<p>So Gill and O'Shea, flying back to the UK, might spare a moment to peer down from their aeroplane window onto the cool northern hills, where those first, pioneering “islanders” put controversial, public-private Mallorcan love affairs on the map.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121148/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Natalia Nowakowska receives funding from the British Academy and the European Research Council. </span></em></p>180 years before Love Island, Chopin and Sands travelled to Mallorca to pursue their romance.Natalia Nowakowska, Associate Professor of Early Modern History, University of Oxford, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1124542019-02-27T10:04:46Z2019-02-27T10:04:46ZOnly Fools and Horses, Charles Dickens and the precariat, then and now<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260991/original/file-20190226-150698-1uxtpgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C14%2C1588%2C1049&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Publicity still for Only Fools and Horses.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.onlyfoolsmusical.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s taken them 30 years, but Del Boy and Rodders have made it from Peckham to the West End. After three decades of ducking and weaving – getting by, making a fortune then losing it – the Trotter brothers from the late John Sullivan’s enduringly popular TV sitcom can now be seen in a musical version of Only Fools and Horses at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Based on Sullivan’s writing, his son has adapted the show along with one of its stars, the comedian Paul Whitehouse.</p>
<p>Journalists have had a great time, rediscovering the Derek Trotter lexicon for evaluating the world – the prospect of the show is, of course, “lovely jubbly”, or even “cushty”. There has been praise for the lovingly recreated stage sets of the flat in Nelson Mandela House, Peckham and the Nag’s Head where the brothers and their crew habitually used to drink. </p>
<p>Where the new show seems to score highly is in the mood of nostalgia that it serves, taking audiences back to the decade that both defined and thwarted Del Boy’s leisured millionaire desires: the 1980s – because (as mere “dipsticks” fail to grasp) only fools and horses work. Since the 1980s – and the first major deregulation of the British economy – we’ve developed a new vocabulary for describing the people who end up living in disadvantage: the “precariat”.</p>
<p>The most negative reaction to the new show involves the music: critics have tended to see some of the show’s songs as poor, bolt-on additions. This raises a question: will a musical adaptation dilute the topical edge explored by the original comedy? </p>
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<p>Is it in danger of doing for the 21st-century precariat what Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1960) did for the orphan pickpocket gangs of the mid-19th century on which Charles Dickens had based Oliver Twist (1837-8) – perhaps trivialising the very real problems they face?</p>
<p>The key figure for exploring this is Charles Dickens. When <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8469698/Only-Fools-and-Horses-creator-John-Sullivan-dies.html">John Sullivan died</a> in 2011, the head of BBC comedy, Mark Freeland, commented that “he was the Dickens of our generation”. Freeland was referring to Sullivan’s undoubted comic genius: it was on display when Del Boy famously fell through the bar, but also in countless instances of superb dialogue. </p>
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<h2>Serious about comedy</h2>
<p>When it comes to Dickens, who is now thought of as a serious writer, we forget the extent to which, when he first came to prominence, he was a master comedy writer. Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller were the leading characters in Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Dickens’s first, breakthrough novel. But they were, in effect, a comic double act – getting into numerous scrapes and escapades as the Pickwick Club travelled around London and southern England (in stage coach rather than a yellow Robin Reliant). </p>
<p>The comparison is valid. In his second novel, Oliver Twist (1837-38), Dickens commented that his art was melodramatic, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/oliver-twist-a-patchwork-of-genres">like layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon</a>, alternating comedy and tragedy. Then think of the way Sullivan’s could manage transitions of tone in Only Fools and Horses: in one episode, Grandad can have us in fits of laughter as a chandelier crashes to the floor (“A Touch of Glass”). In another, Grandad’s funeral (“Strained Relations”) can be an occasion for reflecting movingly on the complex emotional bonds of family life that shape love and loyalty while constraining opportunities.</p>
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<p>Sullivan strongly identified with Dickens – as Graham McCann has shown in <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8877163/Only-Fools-and-Horses-by-Graham-McCann-review.html">his book on the sources of Sullivan’s hit comedy</a>, the author-to-be was introduced to Dickens as a demotivated secondary modern pupil who was being reared as “factory fodder”. </p>
<p>The attachment to Dickens was further emphasised in Sullivan’s creation (in 2000) of a comedy drama around the character of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/mar/20/broadcasting">Wilkins Micawber</a>, an unlikely hero of Dickens’ masterpiece David Copperfield – and a founding member of the precariat, predated only by Dickens’s debtor father and Dickens himself. </p>
<p>Debt in the early 19th century meant prison and the removal of social opportunity. Dickens’s own experience, being taken out of school and put to work in a blacking factory – recorded for the first time in <a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1206733/1/1206733_redacted.pdf">John Forster’s posthumous biography</a> (1872-74) – connects Dickens to precariats across the generations.</p>
<h2>Only fools and writers</h2>
<p>We are accustomed to seeing him as a powerful figure of status – but the early Victorian Dickens was struggling to make his way in a cut-throat world of the rapidly developing culture industries through a mixture of collaboration and intense individual competitiveness. </p>
<p>We think about Lionel Bart’s Oliver! as the leading musical adaptation of Oliver Twist but overlook the fact that when the novel first adapted for the stage in 1838, it was as a melodrama – <a href="https://athomeonthestage.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/playbill-oliver-twist-or-the-parish-boys-progress-davidges-royal-surrey-theatre/">Oliver Twist: Or, The Parish Boy’s Progress</a> – at the Royal Surrey Theatre.</p>
<p>This melodrama, which mixed music with drama, enabled the controversial subject matter – pickpocket gangs, violent crime, prostitution – to get around the <a href="https://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2016/10/the-lord-chamberlain-regrets-.html">strict codes of theatre regulation</a> that had been in place since the middle of the 18th century. In her brilliant fictional recreation of the event in her neo-Victorian novel, Fingersmith (2002), Sarah Waters portrays little Sue Trinder, a new member of Mrs Sucksby’s pickpocket gang, being taken along to view the lurid performance. And so the spectacle of Oliver Twist is returned to, among others, those precariously positioned communities whose experiences Dickens had written about.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/feb/18/only-fools-and-horses-musical-plonker-lovely-jubbly">recent piece for The Guardian</a>, Stuart Jeffries reflected on the way in which the original TV Only Fools and Horses has become a surprising hit among BAME viewers, for the way in which it resonated closely with their experiences of communal laughter amidst precarious economic living. The challenge for Only Fools and Horses the Musical will be to open its West End doors to these communities to avoid it merely becoming a post-Brexit nostalgia trip – now that would hardly be cushty.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112454/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Amigoni does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>John Sullivan, who created Del Boy and Rodney, has been called a modern Dickens – now both their most famous works have been made into musicals.David Amigoni, Professor of Victorian Literature, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1089462018-12-20T12:40:13Z2018-12-20T12:40:13ZThomas Hardy’s little-known Christmas story for children (with a happy ending)<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/251735/original/file-20181220-45385-16rfoly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">B Calkins via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you are looking forward to curling up with a heartwarming story this Christmas, you might not necessarily choose anything by Thomas Hardy – you’d be more likely to turn to the seasonal staples of <a href="https://www.charlesdickensinfo.com/christmas-carol/">Charles Dickens</a> or <a href="https://www.thesnowman.com/about/raymond-briggs/">Raymond Briggs</a>. While Hardy is renowned for his tragic tales of Wessex life, his brief foray into the world of children’s Christmas fiction is largely unknown. </p>
<p>Published in the Christmas annual Father Christmas: Our little Ones’ Budget, Hardy’s story <a href="http://www.hardysociety.org/stories/5.%20Uncollected%20and%20Collaborative%20Stories/The%20Thieves%20Who%20Couldn't%20Help%20Sneezing.docx">The Thieves Who Couldn’t Help Sneezing</a> is a tale for children which also has much to delight adult enthusiasts of his work.</p>
<p>Hardy’s story made its appearance in the first edition of the annual in December 1877. By this time, he was working on The Return of the Native (1878), having already published five novels – including Far From The Madding Crowd (1874), which first appeared anonymously and established his career as a successful novelist.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, his contribution to the annual could easily be overlooked. In this extract from the Illustrated London News (December 8, 1877) Hardy’s name is sandwiched between lesser-known literary figures:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A new claimant, entitled “Father Christmas: Our Little Ones’ Budget”, is announced to appear shortly. It comes with weighty claims on the favour of the rising generation, being crowded with amusing tales, songs, riddles and acrostics, by its fair editor, Miss N. Danvers, Austin Dobson, Thomas Hardy, W.H.G. Kingston, Reginald Gatty, and other writers of note in this special field of literature.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/251706/original/file-20181220-45391-dx81xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/251706/original/file-20181220-45391-dx81xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/251706/original/file-20181220-45391-dx81xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/251706/original/file-20181220-45391-dx81xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/251706/original/file-20181220-45391-dx81xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/251706/original/file-20181220-45391-dx81xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/251706/original/file-20181220-45391-dx81xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/251706/original/file-20181220-45391-dx81xo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Thomas Hardy (1923) by Reginald Eves.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Portrait Gallery</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The story has received scant critical attention, despite the wealth of Hardy scholarship that exists. Hardy himself does not mention it in his autobiography, although it is included in a list of works compiled by his wife Emma in 1880 (which is available at Dorset County Museum) and categorised as a “Child’s story”.</p>
<p>Unlike Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) where social commentary is cosily bound up within a supernatural fantasy world, Hardy does not spare the reader his trademark realism. The action takes place in the “Vale of Blackmore”, which was described as “a fertile and somewhat lonely district” later to become the famous backdrop for the tragic events of Tess of the D'Urbevilles.</p>
<h2>‘Twas the night before Christmas</h2>
<p>It is Christmas Eve and the 14-year-old protagonist, Hubert, courageous but “a little vain”, is making his way home on “his stout-legged cob Jerry and singing a Christmas carol”. There is barely time for the reader to reach for a mince pie before Hubert is attacked by robbers with “artificially blackened” faces, tied up and thrown into a ditch. </p>
<p>Disorientated and upset that his horse has been stolen, Hubert extricates his legs from their bonds and wanders on until he chances on “a large mansion with flanking wings, gables, and towers, the battlements and chimneys showing their shapes against the stars”. </p>
<p>He enters the house, hoping to find assistance there but – like a scene from a modern-day thriller – suddenly hears the familiar voices of his attackers. Hubert quickly dives under the dining room table and listens as the thieves discuss their plans. It seems they have created a “false alarm” to get the wealthy occupants briefly “out of the house”, giving them time to find a hiding place where they can wait until everyone is in bed before robbing the mansion.</p>
<p>Before long, the “ladies and gentlemen” return to continue their festive celebrations, unaware of the thieves biding their time in a disused closet. Hubert then makes his appearance and starts to tell his story. However, it is met with disbelief – and he is even accused of being a robber himself as there is “a curiously wild wicked look about him…” So the resourceful lad hatches a plan to expose the thieves by pretending to be a magician with the power to “conjure up a tempest in a cupboard”. </p>
<p>While lacking the seasonal sumptuousness of Dickens, Hardy’s tale serves up its own socially subversive Christmas punch. Hubert, a yeoman’s son, manages to singlehandedly outsmart the upper-class family he encounters residing in the mansion. Though the reader is told he feels shame at their mistrust of his story, he accepts their hospitality. Hardy evokes a child’s sense of triumph at being a part of a privileged adult world:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hubert, in spite of his hurt feelings at their doubts of his honesty, could not help being warmed both in mind and in body by the good cheer, the scene, and the example of hilarity set by his neighbours. At last he laughed as heartily at their stories and repartees as the old Baronet, Sir Simon, himself.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Class conflict</h2>
<p>Although the story’s main action concerns a none-too festive attack on a young boy, the tale deals with wider social issues. Born into a working-class family, Hardy did not attend university and felt himself to be an outsider to London’s literary elite. An acute awareness of the divisions between rich and poor colours his work and The Thieves is no exception. </p>
<p>Hubert, outsider to the wealthy party he encounters, not only exposes the thieves through filling their hiding place with sneeze-inducing snuff, he manages to persuade Sir Simon and his guests that he is a magician. Ultimately, it is a child’s successful navigation of an exclusive adult world that is at the heart of Hardy’s narrative.</p>
<p>The Thieves is not Hardy’s only children’s story. <a href="http://darlynthomas.com/exploits.htm">Our Exploits in West Poley: A Story For Boys</a> (1883), serialised in The Household ( November 1892-April 1893) lay in obscurity until its discovery in 1952. While Hardy is certainly not known for his children’s fiction, it can provide valuable insights into his career, as writer and poet, which had a foot in both the 19th and 20th centuries. </p>
<p>Writing for children in 1877, Hardy gives us a message, as relevant now as it was in his own time: however young, poor or seemingly unimportant a person is, they are still capable of doing great things.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/108946/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephanie Meek receives funding from The South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.</span></em></p>If you are tired of A Christmas Carol, why not try one of the few Hardy stories where all’s well that ends well.Stephanie Meek, Full time PhD candidate, University of ExeterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.