The Distracted Preacher by Thomas Hardy

said she. “But I have suffered for it. I am very poor now, and my mother has been dead these twelve months. But won’t you come in, Mr. Stockdale?”
    Stockdale went in; and it is to be presumed that they came to an understanding, for a fortnight later there was a sale of Lizzy’s furniture, and after that a wedding at a chapel in a neighboring town.
    He took her away from her old haunts to the home that he had made for himself in his native county, where she studied her duties as a minister’s wife with praiseworthy assiduity. It is said that in after-years she wrote an excellent tract called “Render unto Caesar; or, The Repentant Villagers,” in which her own experience was anonymously used as the introductory story. Stockdale got it printed, after making some corrections, and putting in a few powerful sentences of his own; and many hundreds of copies were distributed by the couple in the course of their married life.
    April 1879.



Hardy’s Fictional Universe

    The Wessex of Thomas Hardy’s Novels & Poems
Map from The Wessex of Thomas Hardy by B.C.A. Windle & E.H. New.

Introductory
    Introduction from The Wessex of Thomas Hardy by
B.C.A. Windle & E.H. New.
    Whilst Thackeray was engaged upon his story “The Virginians,” he confided to Motley that “he intended to write a novel of the time of Henry V., which would be his capo d’opera, in which the ancestors of all his present characters, Warringtons, Pendennises, and the rest, should be introduced. It would be a most magnificent performance,” he said, “and nobody would read it.” This idea, which was probably never seriously entertained and certainly never was realized, would, had it been carried out, have been quite in harmony with Thackeray’s plan of linking novel to novel by a use, if not always of identical characters in successive books, at least of members of the same family. The genealogist can easily trace the family tree of the Esmond Warringtons from “Henry Poyns, gent., who married Dorothea, daughter and heiress of Edward, Earl and Marquis Esmond, and Lord of Castlewood,” through the Georgian Esmonds and Warringtons, down to “the Stunner,” friend and mentor of Pendennis—of Pendennis, who is himself the hero of one novel, the putative author of another, and a prominent figure in a third. Then, again, amongst minor personages, there is Voelcker or Foker the brewer, whose son was pupil to George Warrington, of “ The Virginians,” and whose better known descendant Harry Foker appears in “Pendennis” to frustrate on two occasions the love-affairs of the young gentleman after whom the book is named. Such a plan of welding into one organic whole what would otherwise be the isolated efforts of a novelist’s imagination, imparts without doubt a considerable air of verisimilitude to the series. It was not, of course, the sole property of the greatest of this century’s novelists, but has been employed by other writers, and notably by Zola in his Rougon Macquart memoirs. Mr. Hardy himself has used it to some extent, for the name of William Dewey, that fine old man, of whom his author seems to be particularly fond, occurs in several of the novels, whilst in “The Mayor of Casterbridge” mention is made of James Everdene, the uncle from whom Bathsheba, of “Far from the Madding Crowd,” inherited her farm, and of Boldwood, then “a silent, reserved young man,” as figuring amongst the creditors of the unfortunate Henchard. But Mr. Hardy has his own plan for binding together the links of his chain of tales—a different plan from that of Thackeray, but not less effectual. The former may perhaps be spoken of as the method of genealogical, the latter of scenic continuity. For Mr. Hardy has annexed unto himself a small—a relatively small—stretch of country, and has steadily, in novel after novel, proceeded to people it