R. Knight's "Yalbury Wood and the Keeper's House, p. 153" in Thomas Hardy's "Under the Greenwood Tree"

Yalbury Wood and the Keeper's House

R. Knight

1878

Wood engraving

14 cm high by 10 cm wide

Ninth illustration for Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, facing page 153.

Passage illustrated: “The game-keeper, Geoffrey Day, lived in the depths of Yalbury Wood; but the wood was intersected by a lane at a place not far from the house, and some trees had of late years been felled, to give the solitary cottager a glimpse of the occasional passer-by. [Part the Second, "Spring," Chapter 6, "Yalbury Wood," p. 154-155]

See commentary below.

Photograph, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Commentary

If we substitute "Yellowham" for the fictional "Yalbury Wood," we have the name of an actual locale near Lower Bockhampton, near Hardy's native village. Not to be confused with a present-day guest-house named "Yalbury Cottage," the gamekeeper's house is an actual building, so that once again Thomas Hardy's Wessex coincides with the county of Dorset chiefly, the woods being between Puddletown and Dorchester. Geoffrey Day's

cottage ('remodelled', according to Hermann Lea) may be found on the northern side of the road, with 'the greenwood tree' behind it. The copses between which the newly married Dick Dewy and Fancy Day passed in the tranter's 'excellent new spring-cart' extend from Grey's Wood to Higher Bockhampton. [Pinion, 515]

The one house in the wood is that of 'Keeper Day'. In real life he was Keeper Browne; his daughter Elizabeth was the young woman of the poem 'To Lizzie Browne'. I found the house less altered than implied by Lea. It stands precisely where Hardy indicates; the front window is still set with thickly leaded diamond glazing, in which one can detect a number of the original thin bottle-glass panes. The 'huge inglenooks' and the little window in the chimney-back, on the other hand, are not to be seen because they never existed. [Kay-Robinson, 49]

To indicate that the young Tranter is visiting the Days, Knight has the spring cart (also prominent in the concluding plate or tailpiece) parked out front.

Bibliography

Hardy, Thomas. Under The Greenwood Tree. A Rural Painting of the Dutch School (1870). Il. R. Knight. London: Chatto and Windus, 1878.

Hardy, Thomas. Under The Greenwood Tree, or, The Mellstock Quire — A Rural Painting of the Dutch School (1872). Ed. Anna Winchcombe. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and London: Macmillan Education, 1978. [All citations from the 1878 Chatto and Windus edition have been checked against this following readily available paperback edition.]

Kay-Robinson, Denys. The Landscape of Thomas Hardy. Exeter: Webb and Bower, 1984.

Pinion, F. B. A Hardy Companion: A Guide to the Works of Thomas Hardy and Their Background. Trowbridge, Wiltshire, and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1968, rpt. 1984.

Wright, Sarah Bird. Thomas Hardy A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2002.

Last modified 24 June 2014