Thomas Hardy and History

Fred Reid, Thomas Hardy and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. pp. xiv + 238. ISBN: 978-3-319-54174-7. £66.99.

Walter Benjamin stringently maintained that the historical articulation of the past did not entail reporting that past 'as it really was', but was rather an attempt 'to take hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger'. What the historian is thus required to do is to uncover what in the past has been suppressed or marginalised, in Benjamin's terminology 'to brush history against the grain'. In Thomas Hardy and History Fred Reid effectively takes on the role of historian of such repressed voices in relation to the historical and political valences of Hardy's fiction. After a fairly standard review of the range and variety of recent Hardy critiques - Marxist, feminist, postcolonial and so on - Reid propounds his own thesis, arguing that there has been little real acknowledgement or understanding of Hardy's interest in 'philosophical history', and specifically in the discursive ensemble which Reid identifies as Liberal Anglican history, a body of thought which would be primarily relayed to the young Hardy by his mentor, Horace Moule. Supplementary to this meliorist body of religious doctrine, he suggests, and consequent upon Hardy's loss of faith, was a strain of republican and sexually liberatory thought principally framed and explored by George Drysdale and John Stuart Mill. The overall effect of such a body of writings, Reid argues, 'provided [Hardy] with a melioristic idea of history, which conceived progress as an upward cycle of light and dark ages'. The defence of Liberal Anglicanism, as espoused by Thomas Arnold and Henry Hart Milman, would serve to buttress and support a Broad Church position as against the challenges posed not only by the Oxford Movement or Dissent but also by the newly emergent sciences of astronomy, archaeology and geology.

Thomas Hardy and History is especially valuable in its examination of the crucial role of Horace Moule, so often a rather marginal...