Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is motivated by questions surrounding the legibility of character, and it begins to associate those questions with the increasing economic and cultural influence of London. As an ostensibly provincial novel, Tess is an important test case for the claim that the financialization of the British economy was accompanied by a cultural turn toward London. This chapter argues that Tess is in fact a London novel as it depicts a provincial Wessex infused with the economic and spatial logic of London, a logic that poses problems for the reading of character in the novel, as it depicts Angel Clare mistakenly interpreting Tess’s character through a pastoral rather than urban hermeneutic.

Mark Ford’s chapter on the prose style of Thomas Hardy’s fiction discerns something involuntary and dishevelled about Hardy’s style. Early reviewers lamented its bad taste and haphazard manner. But this chapter shows that therein lies a source of the novels’ power. Moments of scenic description and unexpected encounters are reviewed to reveal that the achieved faltering of Hardy’s style suggests the prose recognizing its own struggling efforts to come to terms with overmastering nature and fate.