Destiny and a Blue Cloak - Thomas Hardy -170 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Destiny and a Blue Cloak is a short story published in 1874 by Thomas Hardy, which also appeared in the New York Times.

It is set in Weymouth and for the most part in a village near Beaminster, both in Dorset.
Destiny and a Blue Cloak is considered Hardy's first proper short story, aside from the 1865 comedic autobiographical narrative How I Built Myself A House.



Image - Weymouth & Portland Borough Council Offices from ArtUK site


A story of identities being mistaken and manipulated into, it shows the greed of humans to get their life being subject to others. Nineteen-year-old Agatha Pollin is approached by young Oswald Winwood. She wears a blue cloak which is very identical to another popular lady of the town, the widely admired 25-year-old Frances Lovill. Agatha lets him be in that delusion for the time being and both fall in love. At the end of the day, she confesses that she is not Frances. Oswald however, is not displeased because he also loves her.

A romantic relationship develops between Agatha and Oswald. He soon leaves for India for a position in the administration office, and their love continues with correspondence and eventually they decide to marry.


Agatha’s family consists of only her uncle who is a miller and widower with four young children. He has a lot of debt with a grain merchant. This rogue merchant has his eyes set on Agatha and promises to waive off all her uncle's debts if allowed to marry his niece. Much argument ensues in the household and she reluctantly agrees that if Oswald doesn't return before year end, she will marry the merchant.

The story ends in tragedy but before that Agatha’s new aunt is Frances Lovill who has a significant bearing in the story and also the blue cloak which started the whole travesty.



Image - 1950s Original Vintage Butterick Sewing Pattern from VintagePattern site

A Tragedy of Two Ambitions - Thomas Hardy - 169 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

A Tragedy of Two Ambitions is a short story by Thomas Hardy set in the later part of the 19th century.

It was published in his collection Life's Little Ironies in 1894.

A tragic family story of might vs innocence. Here might is personified by the two brothers Joshua and Cornelius Halborough who are greedy for more wealth and their ability to hide their guilt. And innocence is symbolised by their sister, Rosa.

Joshua and Cornelius are two young boys studying theology. Their father, Joshua Halborough Senior used to be a millwright but sadly became an alcoholic. The boys are somewhat ashamed of him but do respect him. Senior used all the 900 pounds money left by their dead mother, for his two sons. He used it all for drinking. The boys, now unable to go to Oxford University, as their mother had planned, study in a training college for schoolmasters, where they get scholarships.

This was the starting point for the boys’ slow brewing anger towards their father and his dependence on alcohol.

Soon, Senior marries and gets a new mother for them, which they disapprove of. Gradually the family breaks away. The sons somehow manage to send their father and his wife to Canada. The lives of the children go on. Rosa is set to marry a respectable family.



Illustration of Rosa in a new life and from the hardships of her former life. 

Sketch was titled as On the way to the Hall
Image - Lithograph, George Lambert,The Universal Review December 1888
From Thomas Hardy's "A Tragedy of Two Ambitions" from the Victoriaweb

Both Joshua and Cornelius have been ordained as priests and serve in the churches at Narrowbourne.

They come to know that their father has returned from Canada and is currently in a local jail after being caught for misbehaving while drunk. Fortunately the local newspaper has misspelt his surname. This proves safe as Rosa is not yet formally engaged to the Squire and the brothers fear that their father's sentence will ruin Rosa’s forthcoming chances at a good marriage.

When one day the father tries to desperately meet his daughter, the brothers try to stop him. In a duel which ends up in doom, the father drowns in a weir. The sons could have stopped him, but years of disappointment that their father meted out to them and the unfortunate decisions which affected their childhood as well as frustration of not getting a better livelihood, resulted in the two worthless sons just standing and witnessing with guilty hearts, their father losing his life.

A story of two brothers who are so ambitious to get out of their social environment that they ignore moral values and willingly accept their father's death and hide all that from their sister.

The story is divided into five chapters and follows the structure of classical drama. The location is set in Narrowbourne, which was Hardy's name for West Coker in Somerset.


Themes

Parent child relationship
Joshua Senior is shown as an incompetent father. First, wrongfully spending the children’s inheritance for alcohol. Then, his decision to bring a second wife was also unsuitable. Clearly, all his thoughts were driven with selfishness and not as a caring parent. This seeps into the psyche of the children who have only seen misfortune from their early days. The story shows that children do not really need wealth to be happy. They need a protective hand and a safe home. It's in the absence of these that they grow up wanting wealth and security and social acceptance.


Alcoholism
Alcohol may not be bad in itself but when used excessively, it can ruin lives and families as clearly shown in the story.

Influence and subversive attitude
Joshua, the elder brother, is clearly the dominating force among the two brothers. He is dismissive of his younger brother's occupation and wants Cornelius to become a clergyman. Joshua muses that he might have aspired to become a bishop had he been able to go to Oxford but is unlikely to achieve this now. Cornelius is easily persuaded that he should also become a clergyman.





Two brothers in the garden. Etching by G.H.M. Sumner.
Hospital of St. Cross, Winchester, Hampshire

An Imaginative Woman - Thomas Hardy -168 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

An Imaginative Woman by Thomas Hardy (1894)




Picture caption - The illustration by Arthur J. Goodman shown at the top of this post originally appeared in The Pall Mall Magazine in April 1894 and depicts Robert Trewe and Ella Marchmill – Picture courtesy of Philip V. Allingham



An Imaginative Woman was first published as a serial in Pall Mall Magazine in 1894. It was originally part of Wessex Tales (1896) but Hardy moved it into his collection Life’s Little Ironies (1912) for reasons that he explains rather cryptically in his preface, but which throw some light on how he meant it to be understood:

Turning as it does upon a trick of nature … a physical possibility that may attach to a wife of vivid imaginings, as is well known to medical practitioners and other observers of such manifestations.



Ella Marchmill, the ‘imaginative woman’ of the title is an aspiring poet, writing under the male pseudonym of John Ivy because ‘nobody might believe in her inspiration’ if they knew she was a woman. Her husband, a gunmaker, is her exact opposite in temperament and interests. When the couple and their three children go on holiday to Solentsea in Upper Wessex, Ella becomes obsessed with the previous occupier of their lodgings – a fellow poet by the name of Robert Trewe. During their stay in Solentsea she convinces herself she has fallen in love with a man she has never even met and desperately tries to arrange a meeting with Trewe. After a series of deliberate meetings and futile planning with the landlady, Ella realizes she is deeply in love with this unknown man. Soon it spells doom for her psyche and marriage.



' No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-same thoughts and feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly lacked; perhaps luckily for himself, considering that he had to provide for family expenses. '

“He’s nearer my real self, he’s more intimate with the real me than Will is, after all, even though I’ve never seen him,” she said. "I know his name very well; . . . and his writings"



Arthur J. Goodman. April 1894. Lithograph on Thomas Hardy's "An Imaginative Woman"

The Pall Mall Magazine (April 1894)  [Ella Marcmill, right, and her landlady, Mrs. Hooper, relating to a scene on the facing page]. Courtesy - Victorianweb



Themes

Power of imagination and Unsatisfactory marriages



Painting by Tony Robert-Fleury of French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) releasing lunatics from their chains at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris in 1795.

The Fiddler of the Reels - Thomas Hardy - 167 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Fiddler of the Reels is a short story by British writer Thomas Hardy. It was first published in Scribner's Magazine, April 1893. It was included in Life's Little Ironies, a collection of Thomas Hardy's short stories first published in 1894.

In the story, set in South Wessex and London, the interaction of the lives of three people are related, at the time of the Great Exhibition in London, and of the coming of the industrial changes like the railway to Wessex.





Illustrated Map of Hardy's Wessex



While Thomas Hardy was invited to submit something to a special article of Scribner’s Magazine that was published to celebrate the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the story he submitted, “The Fiddler of the Reels,” focuses on several characters whose lives are impacted by the Great Exhibition of 1851.

A romantic yet dramatic story of a woman seduced by the melodies played by the fiddler, which leads to her downfall, and dooms her subsequent marriage to another.

An old man, reminiscing with the narrator about times past, comments on the Great Exhibition of 1851. He says, "For South Wessex, the year formed in many ways an extraordinary chronological frontier.... a sudden bringing of ancient and modern into absolute contact...." The conversation moves to people they knew at that time, particularly of three local people; their story is described.





Vintage illustration of Village Exhibition 1899



Wat Ollamoor, a veterinary doctor living in the village of Mellstock, is a fiddle-player; he is called "Mop" because of his long hair. His appearance and fiddle-playing attracts him to young ladies, in particular to Carline Aspent of the nearby village of Stickleford. Ned Hipcroft is courting Carline. When his proposal of marriage is rejected, Ned, a mechanic, goes to London (in six days' walking; the railway line was being built but was not open) and works there, living in Lambeth. After four years in London he works on the glass-house of the Great Exhibition. He receives a letter from Carline: she says she had been foolish to refuse him, and would gladly marry him. Ned, after a few days' consideration, replies: he is slightly reproachful and does not volunteer to return to Stickleford; agreeing to marry her, he suggests that she comes to London on the train, the railway line being now open.

She arrives, with a girlchild of three; they are wet after the journey in the rain in an open carriage. Ned, initially disappointed and shocked by the unexpected presence of Carline's daughter, agrees. They get married, visiting the Exhibition after they come back from church; their married life is comfortable. After about three years Ned becomes short of work, and they decide to return home. At Casterbridge, where they leave the train, Ned makes inquiries about work in the town while Carline and her daughter Carry walk to Stickleford. They stop for a rest at an inn; there is entertainment and, being recognized, Carline is welcomed. There is dancing, to the music of Ollamoor's fiddle-playing. "The notes of that old violin... thrilled the London wife, these having still all the witchery that she had so well known of yore, and under which she had used to lose her power of independent will."

She takes part in a five-handed reel; she is eventually the only one left dancing, and finally faints. While she is being revived, Ollamoor disappears with the little girl. Ned, having arrived, is angered by Carry's disappearance, being more concerned about her than he is about his wife. Ollamoor and Carry are never seen again, despite Ned's return to London to look for them. It is supposed that Ollamoor and his daughter escaped to America, "Mop, no doubt, finding the girl a highly desirable companion when he had trained her to keep him by her earnings as a dancer."

Painting of German Fiddler - Dirck Hals, c. 1630

Themes


Modernity impacting general lives
“The Fiddler of the Reels,” focuses on several characters whose lives are impacted by the Great Exhibition of 1851. The focus on the two world’s fairs might lead readers to believe that Hardy was an advocate of the kinds of scientific and technological progress that such spectacles tended to celebrate. But the story focuses on much more themes.


Power of more primitive forces on personality
By ending with a character that clearly represents primal forces that are never suppressed, the story demonstrates that the power of the primitive past is never far from the surface and may emerge at any moment to triumph over the representatives of the present.


Representation of women


'She was like another domestic article, a cheap tea-pot, which often brews better tea than a dear one.'

The story though about love and integrity and fidelity, also shows how the society then viewed as marriage the end-all for women.

The Grave By The Handpost by Thomas Hardy - 166 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Grave By The Handpost by Thomas Hardy is one of the twelve tales in A Changed Man and Other Tales .
Written in 1897, in St James's Budget.



The story  is about a father and his son and their difficult relationship ending in tragedy.  Sargent Holway, was proud to have a son Luke whom he aspired to be in the army and reach great heights. But Luke did not want or share any of his father's dreams.  

'He comes the prisoners to re-lease,
In Satan’s bondage held’

Luke wanted to become a mechanic in spite of his father's wish for him to follow in his footsteps and join the army. He finally persuaded his son, Luke Holway, to go and join the army overseas but as a result of this he had a terrible time.
Soon out of spite, Luke sends letters with deep anger and sarcasm and bitter words to his father from the battlefront. The letters are full of childish complaints and anything but a heroic army man's words as his father would have expected. 

This breaks the proud Sargent's heart slowly and ultimately one fine afternoon, in his cottage, he shoots himself.  Luke on knowing this, feel depressed and guilty. He requests a church choir of his village to bury his father and even prepares the headstone for the grave. Making all arrangements for a proper and respectful funeral, Luke, as his father wishes, goes back and rejoins the army to atone to his father.

The choir people are unable to carry out Luke's request. This was more due to bureaucratic problems than out of respect to the dead and kin of dead. Thus the Sargent's grave remains near the forlorn place by the handpost and not in a proper church cemetery. Even the headstone lies abandoned near the choir member's house, catching moss and dust in the village sleet and rains. 

Many years pass thus. Most of the choir members are also dead in gradual passing of time. After the war in Spain and many years of war and wanderings, Luke Holway returns, wiser and more respected among his superiors and colleagues. But nothing of the glory and accolades mean anything to him, when he finds out that his father's grave is not arranged for as he had requested. Heartbroken

and too humbled or tired to put blame on anyone, and with a burden of guilt for, first, hurting his father and then not being able to give a proper and suitable funeral, Luke kills himself. Shooting in the head just as Sargent did many winters ago on a gloomy night.

He leaves a note say that he want to buried next to his father. But the ill-fated note blows away by a wind of fate, leaving history to repeat itself.

Image - Where His Father Lay Buried — illustration for Thomas Hardy’s “The Grave by the Hand-post” by George M. Patterson. St. James’s Budget Christmas Number (30 November 1897)


The main themes of the story stress on parent child relationship and regret and forgiveness to self.

The Three Strangers - Thomas Hardy - 165 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

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.