George Eliot's Amos Barton and Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree

Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

Note3 to Chapter 5 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

George Eliot's description of Amos Barton may have influenced Thomas Hardy's description of Dick Dewy in the first chapter of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872): "Having come more into the open he could now be seen rising against the sky, his profile appearing on the light background like the portrait of a gentleman in black cardboard. It assumed the form of a low-crowned hat, an ordinary-shaped nose, an ordinary chin, an ordinary neck, and ordinary shoulders."

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Last modified 20 September 2000