Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Clay Daniel

Critical Essay by Clay Daniel

SOURCE: Daniel, Clay. “Hardy, Milton, and ‘The Storm—the Two Together’.” English Language Notes 37, no. 2 (December 1999): 32-41.

In the following essay, Daniel discusses allusions to Milton's Paradise Lost in one chapter of Far from the Madding Crowd.

One of Hardy's most memorable chapters is “The Storm—The Two Together” in Far From the Madding Crowd. An overlooked source for this scene is Milton's epic simile of the weighing scales in Paradise Lost. Hardy often alludes to authors such as Milton “to raise his novels from the level of pastoral romance to the realm of the masterpieces he so admired.”¹ In “The Storm—The Two Together,” Hardy alludes to Milton also surreptitiously to undercut the generic expectations of a reading public with whom even Leslie Stephen was “careful.”² This public was “given, according to the mood of the nation at this time, to nostalgic dreams of a rural England that was...
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