FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

CONTENTS

Preface
I. Description of Farmer Oak--An Incident
II. Night--The Flock--An Interior--Another Interior
III. A Girl on Horseback--Conversation
IV. Gabriel's Resolve--The Visit--The Mistake
V. Departure of Bathsheba--A Pastoral Tragedy
VI. The Fair--The Journey--The Fire
VII. Recognition--A Timid Girl
VIII. The Malthouse--The Chat--News
IX. The Homestead--A Visitor--Half-Confidences
X. Mistress and Men
XI. Outside the Barracks--Snow--A Meeting
XII. Farmers--A Rule--An Exception
XIII. Sortes Sanctorum--The Valentine
XIV. Effect of the Letter--Sunrise
XV. A Morning Meeting--The Letter Again
XVI. All Saints' and All Souls'
XVII. In the Market-Place
XVIII. Boldwood in Meditation--Regret
XIX. The Sheep-Washing--The Offer
XX. Perplexity--Grinding the Shears--A Quarrel
XXI. Troubles in the Fold--A Message
XXII. The Great Barn and the Sheep-Shearers
XXIII. Eventide--A Second Declaration
XXIV. The Same Night--The Fir Plantation
XXV. The New Acquaintance Described
XXVI. Scene on the Verge of the Hay-Mead
XXVII. Hiving the Bees
XXVIII. The Hollow Amid the Ferns
XXIX. Particulars of a Twilight Walk
XXX. Hot Cheeks and Tearful Eyes
XXXI. Blame--Fury
XXXII. Night--Horses Tramping
XXXIII. In the Sun--A Harbinger
XXXIV. Home Again--A Trickster
XXXV. At an Upper Window
XXXVI. Wealth in Jeopardy--The Revel
XXXVII. The Storm--The Two Together
XXXVIII. Rain--One Solitary Meets Another
XXXIX. Coming Home--A Cry
XL. On Casterbridge Highway
XLI. Suspicion--Fanny Is Sent For
XLII. Joseph and His Burden--Buck's Head
XLIII. Fanny's Revenge
XLIV. Under a Tree--Reaction
XLV. Troy's Romanticism
XLVI. The Gurgoyle: Its Doings
XLVII. Adventures by the Shore
XLVIII. Doubts Arise--Doubts Linger
XLIX. Oak's Advancement--A Great Hope
L. The Sheep Fair--Troy Touches His Wife's Hand
LI. Bathsheba Talks with Her Outrider
LII. Converging Courses
LIII. Concurritur--Horae Momento
LIV. After the Shock
LV. The March Following--"Bathsheba Boldwood"
LVI. Beauty in Loneliness--After All
LVII. A Foggy Night and Morning--Conclusion





PREFACE

In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was
in the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd," as they appeared
month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt
the word "Wessex" from the pages of early English history, and give
it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district
once included in that extinct kingdom. The series of novels I
projected being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed to
require a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity to their
scene. Finding that the area of a single county did not afford a
canvas large enough for this purpose, and that there were objections
to an invented name, I disinterred the old one. The press and the
public were kind enough to welcome the fanciful plan, and willingly
joined me in the anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living
under Queen Victoria;--a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post,
mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches,
labourers who could read and write, and National school children.
But I believe I am correct in stating that, until the existence of
this contemporaneous Wessex was announced in the present story, in
1874, it had never been heard of, and that the expression, "a Wessex
peasant," or "a Wessex custom," would theretofore have been taken to
refer to nothing later in date than the Norman Conquest.

I did not anticipate that this application of the word to a modern
use would extend outside the chapters of my own chronicles. But the
name was soon taken up elsewhere as a local designation. The first
to do so was the now defunct _Examiner_, which, in the impression
bearing date July 15, 1876, entitled one of its articles "The Wessex
Labourer," the article turning out to be no dissertation on farming
during the Heptarchy, but on the modern peasant of the south-west
counties, and his presentation in these stories.