Discussion of the text

1. What characters of the novel are described in the passage and what does the reader learn about them?

2. What does the word “philosopher” suggest in this context? Identify the stylistic devices.

3. How do you account for the sudden transmission from literary vocabulary mostly used by the author (“under the auspices”, etc.) to the colloquial words (“a confounded quarrelsome highbred jade”)? What stylistic effect is achieved by this device?

4. Comment on the exclamatory sentence “what a happy woman was Rose to be my Lady Crawley!” and say what is the main stylistic device used to characterize “the items of her happiness”.

5. Comment on the stylistic effect of the rhetorical question: “He had his pretty Rose, and what more need a man require than to please himself?”

6. Analyse the manner the author describes “the endowments with which Nature had gifted Lady Crawley”. What expressive means and stylistic devices stress the emptiness of Lady Crawley’s life?

7. Pick out the stylistic devices used to characterize Lady Crawley’s position in her husband’s house.

8. Comment on the two passages beginning with the rhetorical exclamation “O Vanity Fair! Vanity Fair!...” and speak on the author’s attitude towards the society he describes. Pay attention to the expressive means and stylistic devices employed by the author (note the vocabulary of the passage, metaphors, metonymies, allusions, rhetorical questions and their stylistic function).

9. Summing up the analysis of the chapter pick out all passages where the author’s ironic or sarcastic attitude towards high society and its corrupt morality is acutely felt and analyse the main stylistic devices used to achieve this effect.

A few crusted characters by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy is one of the most prominent English novelists and poets of the second half of the nineteenth century. His life and creative work are inseparable from the South West of English countryside, mainly Dorchester, which forms the background of his novels and stories. Hardy was deeply disappointed in the results of capitalist progress and its fatal influence on the English village. Seeing no way out of its impoverishment and decay, he attributes this process to the force of fate and circumstances, which marks his work with pessimism and fatalism.

The only healing power, to Hardy’s thinking, is nature and people who are nearest to it. That’s why his novels and stories are permeated with deep concern and sympathy for common people – peasants, poor tenants, agricultural labourers, all those small people who suffer from false laws of capitalist civilization.

‘A Few Crusted Characters’ is a collection of short stories written in the same year as Hardy’s masterpiece ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ was published (1891). The collection contains 9 stories with an introduction and an epilogue. The stories are told in turn by the passengers of a van coming back from the local market to their village. The listener is a newcomer and a former inhabitant of those parts. Most of the stories are funny episodes from the lives of people who have been long buried in the nearby cemetery. Humorous as most of the tales may seem at first sight, they are tinged with deep melancholy for the past that is gone for ever. The episode presented here is rendered by the village schoolmaster.