Revision Cards - Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Level, Context

Revise the key points

In the 1870s, when the novel is set, there were five capital crimes: murder, treason, arson in a royal dockyard, espionage and piracy with violence.
At the end of the novel, Tess is convicted of the murder of Alec D’Urberville and hanged at Wintoncester (Winchester) prison.
Public hanging was abolished in Britain in 1868.
When he was eighteen, Thomas Hardy witnessed the public hanging of Elizabeth Martha Brown, a working class woman who had murdered her violent husband, in 1856.

Context

Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Level

For millennia, humans used hand tools to farm, such as the flail or the scythe.
In Britain, the mechanisation of farming started in the 1790s, with the invention of the threshing machine.
By the late 1800s, threshing machines were powered by steam, like the one in Chapter 47 of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Hardy often describes the machines using diabolical imagery, suggesting that the use of machinery is having a negative impact on the nature of agricultural work.

Context

Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Level

Queen Victoria ruled Britain and the Empire from 1837 to 1901, offering a ‘perfect’ role model for women and motherhood.
The ‘sexual norm’ for a Victorian woman was to be a virgin until marriage. Angel is appalled by Tess’s revelation, despite not being chaste himself.
Victorian society was underpinned by Christian values. The established Church was widely followed; as the novel shows, there were also newer evangelical churches.
Hardy’s subtitle for the novel, ‘A Pure Woman’, was a challenge to the conventional (and, as he saw it, hypocritical) conceptions of a Victorian woman.

Context

Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Level

Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. It challenged widely accepted ideas about creation and man’s place in the universe.
Thomas Hardy, a keen amateur scientist, read Darwin’s work, and his novels reflect the fin de siècle trend towards pessimism and religious scepticism.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles could be said to illustrate a ruthless, post-Darwinian society, in which characters who cannot adapt to social change do not survive.
Hardy’s descriptions of hardship at Flintcomb-Ash, where labourers choose to work only when better jobs are unavailable, depict a life of struggle.

Context

Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Level

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Britain underwent a demographic crisis as the population increased rapidly.
Brazil, which had been an independent nation since 1825, abolished slavery in 1850. This created an economic crisis and a demand for agricultural workers.
Immigration gradually intensified: about 71,000 Europeans emigrated to Brazil each year between 1877 and 1903.
Angel Clare goes to Brazil to seek his fortune as part of this migration pattern after his separation from Tess. His venture fails.