Far from the Madding Crowd, the yellow waggon

Far from the Madding Crowd came out in 1874, first as a monthly serial in the Cornhill Magazine, printed without Hardy’s name. Hardy first used Wessex as the name for his part of England in this novel. The success of the book let him give up architecture and write full time. Project Gutenberg carries the full novel.

Where this text comes fromThe passage places things rather than describing them. A road runs through a spur of hill, sunk in a cutting; something is glanced at from above; the geometry of the view is established before anything in it is allowed to be pretty. Hardy is setting a stage he will use repeatedly, and the precision is structural rather than decorative. The place names are his own invention but they map onto real country closely enough that readers have been walking it with the book in hand for a century.

What you might not noticeThe word perpendicularly appears here, fifteen letters, doing work that a plainer writer would give to straight down. Hardy uses the technical word because the passage is measuring an angle rather than admiring a slope. Source

What it trainsSeven commas across three sentences and not a single dash, hyphen or semicolon, which after the other Hardy passage on this shelf feels almost bare. The difficulty is concentrated in two long words: perpendicularly at fifteen letters and Casterbridge at twelve, an invented place name, so no spellchecker instinct will help you. Six capitals, three of them inside sentences: two place names and the surname Oak. The sentences average twenty-five words.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg