All of which appears to have led us a long way from Mary, though I recall now that she was very fond of apples. But what she was not was an innocent country virgin, for the very simple reason that the two adjectives were incompatible in her century. The causes are not hard to find.

The vast majority of witnesses and reporters, in every age, belong to the educated class; and this has produced, throughout history, a kind of minority distortion of reality. The prudish puritanity we lend to the Victorians, and rather lazily apply to all classes of Victorian society, is in fact a middle-class view of the middle-class ethos. Dickens’s working-class characters are all very funny (or very pathetic) and an incomparable range of grotesques, but for the cold reality we need to go elsewhere—to Mayhew, the great Commission Reports and the rest; and nowhere more than in this sexual aspect of their lives, which Dickens (who lacked a certain authenticity in his own) and his compeers so totally bowdlerized. The hard—I would rather call it soft, but no matter—fact of Victorian rural England was that what a simpler age called “tasting before you buy” (premarital intercourse, in our current jargon) was the rule, not the exception. Listen to this evidence, from a lady still living. She was born in 1883. Her father was Thomas Hardy’s doctor.

The life of the farm laborer was very different in the Nineteenth Century to what it is now. For instance, among the Dorset peasants, conception before marriage was perfectly normal, and the marriage did not take place until the pregnancy was obvious… The reason was the low wages paid to the workers, and the need to ensure extra hands in the family to earn. [10]

I have now come under the shadow, the very relevant shadow, of the great novelist who towers over this part of England of which I write. When we remember that Hardy was the first to try to break the Victorian middle-class seal over the supposed Pandora’s box of sex, not the least interesting (and certainly the most paradoxical) thing about him is his fanatical protection of the seal of his own and his immediate ancestors’ sex life. Of course that was, and would still remain, his inalienable right. But few literary secrets—this one was not unearthed until the 1950s—have remained so well kept. It, and the reality of Victorian rural England I have tried to suggest in this chapter, answer Edmund Gosse’s famous reproof: “What has Providence done to Mr. Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?” He might as reasonably have inquired why the Atreids should have shaken their bronze fists skywards at Mycenae.

This is not the place to penetrate far into the shadows beside Egdon Heath. What is definitely known is that in 1867 Hardy, then twenty-seven years old, returned to Dorset from his architectural studies in London and fell profoundly in love with his sixteen-year-old cousin Tryphena. They became engaged. Five years later, and incomprehensibly, the engagement was broken. Though not absolutely proven, it now seems clear that the engagement was broken by the revelation to Hardy of a very sinister skeleton in the family cupboard: Tryphena was not his cousin, but his illegitimate half-sister’s illegitimate daughter. Countless poems of Hardy’s hint at it: “At the wicket gate,” “She did not turn,” “Her immortality” [11] and many others; and that there were several recent illegitimacies on the maternal side in his family is proven. Hardy himself was born “five months from the altar.” The pious have sometimes maintained that he broke his engagement for class reasons—he was too much the rising young master to put up with a simple Dorset girl. It is true he did marry above himself in 1874—to the disastrously insensitive Lavinia Gifford. But Tryphena was an exceptional young woman; she became the headmistress of a Plymouth school at the age of twenty, having passed out fifth from her teachers’ training college in London. It is difficult not to accept that some terrible family secret was what really forced them to separate. It was a fortunate secret, of course, in one way, since never was an English genius so devoted and indebted to one muse and one muse only. It gives us all his greatest love elegies. It gave us Sue Bridehead and Tess, who are pure Tryphena in spirit; and Jude the Obscure is even tacitly dedicated to her in Hardy’s own preface—“The scheme was laid down in 1890… some of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a woman…” Tryphena, by then married to another man, had died in that year.

This tension, then—between lust and renunciation, undying recollection and undying repression, lyrical surrender and tragic duty, between the sordid facts and their noble use—energizes and explains one of the age’s greatest writers; and beyond him, structures the whole age itself. It is this I have digressed to remind you of.

So let us descend to our own sheep. You will guess now why Sam and Mary were on their way to the barn; and as it was not the first time they had gone there, you will perhaps understand better Mary’s tears… and why she knew a little more about sin than one might have suspected at first sight of her nineteen-year-old face; or would have suspected, had one passed through Dorchester later that same year, from the face of a better educated though three years younger girl in the real world; who stands, inscrutable for eternity now, beside the pale young architect newly returned from his dreary five years in the capital and about to become (“Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth and hair”) the perfect emblem of his age’s greatest mystery.

Exeter, a hundred years ago, was a great deal farther from the capital than it is today; and it therefore still provided for itself some of the wicked amenities all Britain now flocks to London to enjoy. It would be an exaggeration to say that the city had a red light quarter in 1867; for all that it had a distinctly louche area, rather away from the center of the town and the carbolic presence of the Cathedral. It occupied a part of the city that slopes down towards the river, once, in the days (already well past in 1867) when it was a considerable port, the heart of Exeter life. It consisted of a warren of streets still with many Tudor houses, badly lit, malodorous, teeming. There were brothels there, and dance halls and gin places; but rather more frequent were variously undone girls and women—unmarried mothers, mistresses, a whole population in retreat from the claustrophobic villages and small towns of Devon. It was notoriously a place to hide, in short; crammed with cheap lodging houses and inns like that one described by Sarah in Weymouth, safe sanctuaries from the stern moral tide that swept elsewhere through the life of the country. Exeter was, in all this, no exception—all the larger provincial towns of the time had to find room for this unfortunate army of female wounded in the battle for universal masculine purity.

In a street on the fringe of this area there stood a row of Georgian terrace houses. No doubt they had when built enjoyed a pleasant prospect down towards the river. But warehouses had gone up and blocked that view; the houses had most visibly lost self-confidence in their natural elegance. Their woodwork lacked paint, their roofs tiles, the door panels were split. One or two were still private residences; but a central block of five, made shabbily uniform by a blasphemous application of dull brown paint to the original brick, declared themselves in a long wooden sign over the central doorway of the five to be a hotel—Endicott’s Family Hotel, to be precise. It was owned, and administered (as the wooden sign also informed passers-by) by Mrs. Martha Endicott, whose chief characteristic may be said to have been a sublime lack of curiosity about her clientele. She was a thoroughly Devon woman; that is, she did not see intending guests, but only the money their stay would represent. She classified those who stood in her little office off the hall accordingly: ten-shillinger, twelve-shillinger, fifteener, and so on… the prices referring to the charge per week. Those accustomed to being fifteen shillings down every time they touch a bell in a modern hotel must not think that her hotel was cheap; the normal rent for a cottage in those days was a shilling a week, two at most. Very nice little houses in Exeter could have been rented for six or seven shillings; and ten shillings a week for the cheapest room made Endicott’s Family, though without any obvious justification beyond the rapacity of the proprietress, on the choice side.