Thomas Hardy, English writer and poet, was born in 1840 in the English village of Higher Bockhampton in the county of Dorset.
Dorset was the inspiration for his fiction and poetry. Rural life in the county had not changed much in hundreds of years, which Hardy saw as a case for joy for him and his writing and he explored it through the rustic characters in many of his novels. Adding to his future as an accomplished writer was his friend and mentor, Dorset dialect poet William Barnes.
Along with Dorset, Stonehenge was also a setting in his later novels and poems like “The Shadow on the Stone.”
Some recurring themes in his writings were -
Druid and Roman
Ancient and medieval ruins
Napoleonic Wars
Boer War and World War I
Hardy wrote many novels, volumes of short stories, and several poems. Hardy’s well known works are Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) and The Dynasts (1908).
The Three Strangers
“The Three Strangers” is a short story by Thomas Hardy, published as a series in 1883. The story is set in 1820s pastoral England and is one of Hardy’s ‘Wessex Tales’. Wessex was a fictional town featuring in many of Hardy's novels, very much inspired from his hometown and rural county Dorchester.
Thomas Hardy's, The Three Strangers, is a mystery story about a group of party guests attempting to discern who among them is a criminal.
During a stormy night in a remote cottage set in the rolling hills, coombs and downs, there's a party to celebrate the birth and christening of a new baby. During the party, three strangers knock on the door in recurring succession. The plot slowly increases in tempo and mood from a joyous gathering to an ominous setting. The guests soon realise they have a criminal in their midst. Who is the sheep-stealing thief and who gets away is the remainder of the story.
The main themes in the story are Conflict and Justice.
There is conflict not just in the minds of the characters as well as the guests but also in the way the story is set against the seemingly quiet agrarian village. Beginning with the description of the beautiful landscape of rolling plains and solitary cottages, the story changes to arrival of gruff looking men.
‘Five miles of irregular upland, during the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists’
‘Some old earthen camp or barrow, some clump of trees, at least some starved fragment of ancient hedge is usually taken advantage of in the erection of these forlorn dwellings. But, in the present case, such a kind of shelter had been disregarded.’
The gathering of dancing and drinking transforms to people standing in corners of the house, wary of these strangers.
‘And so the dance whizzed on with cumulative fury, the performers moving in their planet-like courses, direct and retrograde, from apogee to perigee, till the hand of the well-kicked clock at the bottom of the room had travelled over the circumference of an hour.’
‘The sad wan light revealed the lonely pedestrian to be a man of supple frame; there was something about him which suggested that he naturally belonged to the black-coated tribes of men. His clothes were of fustian, and his boots hobnailed, yet in his progress he showed not the mud-accustomed bearing of hobnailed and fustianed peasantry.’
Justice
The other point in the story is about justice. As the guest and household members learn of the petty crime committed, they have to choose the innocent person among the three strangers.
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