SOURCE: Page, Norman. “Hardy and the ‘world of little things.’” Thomas Hardy Annual 5 (1987): 119-36.

In the following essay, Page discusses several ways in which Hardy uses everyday objects to create meaning in his fiction.

Comfort, in the sense of physical well-being that it now normally carries, as when we speak of the comfort offered by an armchair, is a relatively modern usage. For Jane Austen, for example, who tends to be conservative and backward-looking in matters of semantics, the word often carries emotional and moral rather than physical associations: in Mansfield Park she can speak of ‘comfortable hopes’ and make Lady Bertram say that she will be ‘comfortable’ now that Fanny has returned to give her support and consolation. The shift of emphasis from the mental to the physical reminds us that the material circumstances of daily existence in the western world have improved immeasurably in the last...