Far From the madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

   "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife

    Their sober wishes never learned to stray ;

    Along the cool, sequestered vale of life

    They kept the noiseless tenor of their way."

The title 'Far from the madding crowd' is taken from Thomas Gary's 'Elegy on a country churchyard'.

About the Author :

Thomas Hardy was a famous English novelist and poet. He has the best skill to present a lot of characters in one novel. He gives different personalities to all the characters. He has the best command on the novel as well as on poetry. His famous works are

               " The Mayer of Casterbridge" (1886)

               " Far From the Madding Crowd" (1874)

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) was Thomas Hardy's first major literary success. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine, where it gained a wide readership.

The novel is the first to be set in Hardy's fictional county of Wessex in rural south west England. It deals with the themes of love, honor and betrayal, against a backdrop of the apparently idyllic, but often cruel, realities of a farming community in Victorian England. It describes the farmer Bathsheba Everdene, her life and relationships - especially with her lonely neighbor William Boldwood, the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, and the dashing soldier Sergeant Troy.

If you wants to read the summary of the novel than click here. 

Time and properiety in Far from the madding Crowd :

"It is because narrative structures bend time to human will that we delight in them so. Rhythm is man's triumph over mere chronology his way of making time dance to a human to a human tune"

                                        - Robert Scholes

Osborne demonstrates that Hardy's dual vision of time as preserver and destroyer provides the central imaginative matrix for all of Hardy's novel and Poems.  Hardy talk about issues of time in the nineteenth century. As we believe that, if you want to know the historical era and work of art then it is necessary to study of the time in which this work had been written. Hardy believes that, 

"It is better to be a victim of the modern spirit than to be rooted parochially in one's past." 

Hardy is more willing to admit that new and disturbing time are upon us. In Hardy's Novels, we can find new ideas, new ways of living, new values, new ambitions. For example, In the Far from the medding crowd, there is one character Sergent Troy who deny the precedents of the past and that are more dangerous in Hardy's world. If one looks at the entire fictional corpus as an entity,  it become clear that the rural community is being slowly obliterated. When Gabriel Oak in far from the medding crowd, marries or assumes his position in a stable society, the novel is ended. 

D.H.Lowrence criticise Hardy as "Something of an angel clear" because the heroes of his novels were defeated not by god but by society.  

Hardy's Community is the proper form of human existence. 

Far From the madding Crowd opens with a description of its hero, Gabriel Oak, which include a rather lengthy picture of how that character tells time : 

"Mr.Oak carried about him, by way of watch, what may be called a small silver clock; in other words, it was a watch as to shape and intention, and a small clock as size. This instrument being several years older than Oak's grandfather, had the peculiarity of going either too fast or not at all." 

                                                                                                                                         [P.4]

As it to substantiate the claims of his creator, oak tells time by stars twice in the next few pages. so,oak briefly studies the stars in order to determine how long he has slept, rather simply to calculate the time of night. Telling time by stars is fairy common practice among the farmers and sheepherders of WESSEX. So, Oak always knows what time it is. Oak's interest in time is wholly natural to him. In the novel, there were other such references in which we can Oak's virtual relationship with time. With the time we can see the difference between  Wetherbury and London, between that which is rural and urban and between Oak and Troy. 

The central conflict in Far from the madding crowd issues from the decent in to this world of temporal continuity. Bathseba Everden learns something from with the relation with Troy and Boldwood and with her own farm. but she learns is the worth of oak. She learns to respect and to love, is Oak's sense of time. Bathsebha's character is symbolically ignorant character of time. In the novel, There is one dialogue 

    "I wish I knew what O'clock it is"

In the novel, Troy once offer her watch, but she denied to accept it. Watch is also the symbol of separation of Bathaseba and Troy. so, we can see that how time represent characters in the novel.