In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times

About the Author

Thomas Hardy was born in a Dorset village in 1840. Although he had a modest upbringing, Hardy found himself working successfully as an architect in London at the age of 22. He spent five years in London, but was eventually drawn back to Dorset because he did not enjoy the urban environment or the class prejudice he felt, mixing with the well-heeled of England’s capital city. Having returned to the countryside, he began to consider an alternative career as a novelist. By 1867, he had already completed a manuscript, but had no luck placing it with a publisher. Despite this, his ambition knew no bounds and he persevered securing his first publication in 1871. His first five novels were well received, and Hardy’s confidence in pushing the literary envelope grew steadily.

Under the Greenwood Tree

Most of Hardy’s work is set in a semi-fictional region called Wessex. The name comes from the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Wessex, which was eventually fragmented following the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066. In his imaginary Wessex, Hardy gives many real places alternative names as if it were a kind of parallel universe. The first of Thomas Hardy’s 10 Wessex novels is Under the Greenwood Tree (1872).

The novel alludes to a time when English churches had West Gallery musicians to provide the music and song. They comprised singers and players of various string, reed and wind instruments. When the church organ was invented, these ensembles were phased out for various reasons. First and foremost, it was cheaper and easier to instruct a single organist than to maintain a choir. Secondly, West Gallery was deemed to be to colourful and uplifting by those with more pious protestant leanings. They preferred the more solemn sound of the congregation singing hymns with the organ as accompaniment. So it was that West Gallery choirs fell from favour, partly due to the Victorian idea of progress, partly due to the Victorian religious moral and ethical compass.

This process of change had occurred in Hardy’s own local church, so he used it as the axis for his story, creating the opportunity for him to invent a cast of characters. As well as the members of the West Gallery choir, there is the vicar and the organist, an attractive girl and the love interest of the tale. Employing a theme that sits at the heart of Hardy’s work, she is unaware of the potency of her beauty and her lack of certainty about her own desires leads her to become torn between two admirers. Ultimately, she marries the right man, but she has to hide a secret. This provides an element of tension at the end of the story, as well as leaving the girl imperfect in the mind of the reader.

Hardy’s preoccupation with pretty women, whom he sees as untrustworthy temptresses, appears to be a personal issue that would seem to have had something to do with real life experiences. Be that as it may, it lends itself very well to his novels, in which feminine beauty is depicted as a mysterious allure that leads men to behave in obsessive, peculiar and unexpected ways. This sets Hardy up with a reliable tool for creating plots that are as gripping as any literature written before or since.

It can be argued that Hardy was inadvertently responding to Darwinian ideas at that time, as he paints a picture of the human male responding to primal instincts that are ever present, despite any pretentions towards being civilized and removed from nature. Hardy’s men are controlled by their base need to procreate, even though they perceive it as a higher desire to possess. This simple truth exposes their evolved psychology, so that they become instinctual creatures, capable of spontaneous acts of love, lust, foolishness, anger, aggression and violence. They are cavemen in 19^th-century clothing, unable to ignore their hormonal drives.

Hardy’s Later Works

His sixth novel The Return of the Native (1878) is widely regarded as the first modern novel, because it dared to examine themes that Victorian society brushed under the carpet – namely sexual desire and obsession. The central female character, Eustacia, is something of a femme fatale. She is distractingly beautiful, but her seductive manipulation of the male characters leads to her death and that of her lover Wildeve. The book caused a stir in polite society, but it raised the bar in terms of what a novel could achieve as a medium for comment on the human condition. Eustacia essentially saw herself as a special individual and her ambitions led her to behave in ways that the local community could not accept. She was vilified for her lack of ability to fit in and accept her lot in life.

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Томас Харди – Under the Greenwood Tree (страница 1)

UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE Thomas Hardy

History of Collins

Life & Times

UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE

Thomas Hardy