In May of 1897, the greatly prolific, and sometimes great, author and critic Margaret Oliphant wrote ‘A Preface: On the Ebb Tide’ describing ‘the strange discovery which a man makes when he finds himself carried away by the retiring waters, no longer coming in upon the top of the wave, but going out’. 1897 was Queen Victoria's jubilee year, and the coincidence of those celebrations for an aged monarch with the ebbing of the century, made for a cultural moment of reflection and a retrospective gaze over the long Victorian era.

In her own career, Oliphant had always been a canny and reliable author in touch with the cultural moment and the publishing market, so in her writing of an ‘ebb tide’ she was yet again in tune with her readership. But for Oliphant this was as much a personal ‘strange discovery’ of ending as it was cultural: she died just over a month after her preface was published, but even in this preface to a book of short stories she was not writing about death itself, but – to her mind – the more difficult ending of a career. She contemplates the artist's realization that the public is no longer interested in his or her work, even though he or she still feels a vigorous creativity. In fact ‘On the Ebb Tide’ introduces her book of short stories The Ways of Life (1897) that republished ‘Mr Sandford’ (1888) and ‘The Wonderful History of Mr Robert Dalyell’ (1892). In each of these stories, the artist outlives the acclaim and respect of his public.

After she died the critics wrote of Oliphant that she had not outlived her relevance or become simply a voice of the past, and that her reputation would survive. Perhaps they were being kind, because it has to be admitted that Oliphant's work did not, unlike that of Anthony Trollope, to whom she was often compared, survive the modernist rejection of the Victorian three-decker novel, the ‘potboiler,’ and what was deemed to be the stuffy morality and heavy detail of plot and description in the novel and short fiction.

On 9 May 1890, Hardy posted off the six stories originally published as A Group of Noble Dames to the periodical, the Graphic, and immediately set off with Emma for his annual visit to London for ‘the season’. It would appear that he had no presentiment to trouble him that the arrival of the stories at the Graphic would cause offence and consternation – but Hardy never did seem to be troubled by such presentiments. As Michael Millgate writes, he exhibited a ‘curious incapacity to see his work as it might be seen by others, to appreciate its potential impact upon minds and imaginations not precisely attuned to his own.’ One can hear the exasperation in the editor William Locker's letter to Hardy from 25 June: he writes that the stories are

It is more than likely that those Victorian fathers most decidedly would have wished to draw a veil over the sentiments of Squire Dornell, father to Betty, the ‘First Countess of Wessex’ in the first tale.

Thomas Hardy's peculiar, idiosyncratic vision can move from a sweeping view of a vast landscape to fix upon the insects which occupy its smallest spaces; it is this eye that has led many to describe his writing as cinematic. Indeed David Lodge has written that Hardy's ‘verbal description […] can be readily analysed in cinematic terms: long shot, close-up, wide angle, telephoto, zoom, etc’. But rather than the camera lens it was in fact the telescope, ‘the big brass telescope that had been handed on in the family’, that was instrumental in developing his way of seeing from boyhood. Throughout Hardy's childhood, the Sunday walk would take his family together southwards along the heath to a ‘silent green pond’ called Rushy-Pond, and from there they would ascend to a high point topped by a tumulus known as Rainbarrow. Hardy's friend in later life, the Dorset photographer Hermann Lea, recounts how from Rainbarrow, ‘with the aid of a telescope, his father would point out places of interest, houses and other buildings on which he was then working.’ Between 1914 and 1916, before the First World War made petrol scarce, Lea drove Hardy ‘many thousands of miles in my motor car’. Their destinations, mapped out by Hardy upon the ordnance survey maps that he loved, were often high places: ‘he always wanted to reach high points: “and please don't forget to bring your glasses”, he used to say to me when we set out for some high point, my binoculars having superseded the old telescope’.

Hardy's final volume of short stories, A Changed Man, brings together work written at various points during a period of almost twenty years, between 1881 and 1900, and this helps to give it a more miscellaneous character than the other three books discussed in this study. That said, it is also the case that six of the stories represent Hardy's final attempts at literary fiction, being written between 1893 and 1900, and this chronological proximity is clearly a factor in their related choices of subject and setting.

This chapter will focus on the group of late stories, with occasional reference back to the earlier work, beginning with the 1885 text, ‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork’, since this provides a convenient stepping-stone to discussion of the themes of historical retrieval and the ethos of keeping faith with the past. The story is unusual in Hardy's output in its sustained use of the present tense, which is paradoxical given its imaginative fascination with events up to 2,000 years old. The ‘tryst’ referred to in the title is a meeting between the narrator and an antiquarian who proposes to excavate a part of the Iron Age hill-fort where the action is set.

The meeting has to take place at night, since the digging is actually illegal and can only be carried out under cover of darkness. The illegality is compounded by the removal from the site of a Roman statuette, thus provoking questions about the value of historical enquiry, whether carried out by archaeologists or by writers; whether the recovery of historical evidence is carried out with respect and integrity, or whether it becomes the merest pretext for selfish appropriation.

This compact study of Hardy's short stories provides detailed readings of many individual texts as well as giving an account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies of the entire corpus. It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to no fewer than twenty-four separate periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social and cultural politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. There is also a close examination of the extent to which the stories bring out, more pervasively than the novels, the problems of author/reader relations that reached a critical phase for Hardy in the 1890s. No previous study has shown how the powerful challenge to readerly competence mounted in the stories reveals the complexity of Hardy's motivations during a period when he was moving progressively in the direction of exchanging fiction for poetry.

It is partly because our study has an historical bearing that we have chosen to deal with the stories in chronological order of publication. But there is another, more compelling, rationale: a particular feature of Hardy's career as a short-story writer is the close relationship he establishes between many (not all) stories in each individual volume. Apart from the situation with A Changed Man, this reflects his practice of collecting into each volume material written within the same relatively short period of time; that chronological condensation often entails historical coherence of precisely the kind that our study is orientated towards.

The stories that comprise Life's Little Ironies (1894) date from the same five-year period: one from 1888, five from 1891 and two from 1893. Given this relatively concentrated time-span, it is unsurprising that the volume as a whole shows a marked consistency in choice of theme and situation. The earliest story, ‘A Tragedy of Two Ambitions’ (1888), revolves around the inability of two brothers to transcend their humble origins in order to pursue a successful career in the Church – like many of Hardy's characters, they live in the shadow of previous generations, whose influence they resent – while the final story, ‘An Imaginative Woman’ (1893), concerns, among other things, the inability of a mother to discharge her responsibilities towards her children.

The volume as a whole seems obsessed with the failure of nineteenthcentury men and women to negotiate a creative and meaningful relationship with both the past and the future, and this general concern with legacies is given a sharp focus by Hardy's anxiety at this time over the status of his own literary legacy, both in its interpretation of the past and in its susceptibility to misinterpretation in the future.