Under the Greenwood Tree, singing in the lane

Under the Greenwood Tree was Hardy’s second published novel, subtitled A Rural Painting of the Dutch School, a term he borrowed from picture galleries. The novel appeared in 1872. The village choir in the book is drawn from the one Hardy’s father and grandfather played in. Project Gutenberg carries the full novel.

Where this text comes fromHardy keeps the way people actually spoke. The passage carries dialect forms and folk names for things rather than the standard words a London editor would have preferred, and the edition linked below leaves them alone. That is a deliberate position and it caused him trouble: reviewers of his early novels complained about exactly this, and he went on doing it for forty years. The scene itself is a man walking a lane at night, which in this book is how nearly everything begins.

What you might not noticeThe passage uses daffodowndilly, a folk name for the daffodil, fourteen letters long and spelled as one word. It survives in the printed text rather than being corrected to the common name. Source

What it trainsTwo words in this passage are unlike anything else on the shelf. Daffodowndilly runs fourteen letters with no break and no pattern your fingers know, and a-sheep-shearing carries two hyphens inside sixteen characters. Both are folk forms rather than dictionary words, so spelling instinct gives you no help at all. Around them the sentences are long, two of them averaging forty-two words, with only three commas to divide 490 characters. Quotation marks appear once as a pair, and the closing one is the last character of the passage. Eight capitals, six inside sentences.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg