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1) Historical Context of Tess of the d'Urbervilles

There are three aspects of the context of this novel that you might pursue.

i) The social context.

ii) The literary context.

iii)The novelist's influences.

i) The social context. There are basically three areas of the text that you should be aware of.

Hardy offers a very detailed picture of his part of rural England, geographically Dorset, historically late 19th century. There are major issues in the novel that are linked to the setting in time and place, e.g. the worlds of the agricultural worker and the other social classes of the time (you should be able to compare and contrast the lives and occupations of the different classes in the novel and how they impact upon the outcome of the novel); traditional life and the movement of historical change (compare Talbothays to Flintcombe-Ash; explore the coming of the machine to farm life; cultural changes, such as the changes in religious perspectives); the patterns of a culture (remember the stories told at Talbothays; the superstitions of Tess's family and others; the religious background embodied in the Clares, in Angel's revisionary views, in 'the writer of texts'; the language patterns and how they reflect class, education, etc).

Task: find material you could use for the above themes; decide what its significance is and to what ends Hardy is using the material.

ii) The literary context. The sensitive reader is expected to see the ways in which the text exploits or contains other texts. Perhaps one of the most obvious, and interesting, uses of other texts is present in the literary influences on Angel Clare. He quotes Walt Whitman, the American 'transcendentalist' and refers to other literary influences of a Romantic nature (it may be worth knowing that transcendalism was America's version of romanticism). When we know this we can understand more fully why Angel cannot accept the outdated views of his father and his 'low church' perspective. Miss this and you miss the contemporary influences on a central character.

Task: find the references to other texts that Angel refers to. What do they tell us about him and what do they explain in him?

iii) The novelist's influences. All writers bring their influences to their texts, so you should be on the look-out for them. Of course, they can be well concealed, especially if you haven't read widely OR if you don't really know much about the historical background. Two examples in 'Tess': a) the Romantics. We would all agree that there is much in Angel Clare that Hardy, as the writer, must have loved, just as Tess did. The structure of the novel, its patterns of characterisation, the denouement, etc all suggest this. And so does Angel's interest in the romantics. Throughout the novel Hardy's love of nature is paralleled in Angel as it is also paralleled in the romantics. b) The influence of Darwin and the theory of the 'survival of the fittest'. We can see this influence at a few points in the novel, often adding a certain bleak sense of the the cruelty involved in being a creature of nature, humanity being no exception.

Task: find examples of these two points in the novel and decide what purpose Hardy is putting them to.

I hope you have enjoyed this mini-tour of the 'context' of a work of literature. Apply it well to your reading and develop your understanding of literature. You can't miss!