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The Geology of Thomas Hardy: A Pair of Blue Eyes

Just outside the Dorset market town of Dorchester is an expanding new housing development called Poundbury, built under the patronage of the Prince’s Foundation. It looks like an old-fashioned country town, constructed around small squares and curving thoroughfares, with municipal buildings sporting clock towers and a good few peering out under thatched roofs. I didn’t see a pub or a shop, but I’m sure it has been thought of in this pioneering bit of urban development. There is a mixture of all the architectural styles the western world has ever known, sometimes all in one building, for which the words ‘pot pourri’ spring to mind. I wonder what Thomas Hardy would think of it, as he was born in the summer of 1840 a few miles away, the son of a stone mason.
Before Hardy wrote his masterpieces of Wessex life and Wessex love, he wrote the intensely autobiographical A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), in which the son of a stone mason (sic) forms one hero, while a geologist gentleman forms another. The completion of the love triangle is the daughter of a vicar who bears a striking resemblance to Hardy’s real life wife. Before we get on to the geology, the story goes like this. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, then she falls in love with another unknown to the first, who turn out to be great friends, things go pear-shaped amidst a shed-load of deception, and both suitors end up empty handed while she dies the wife of a posh and recently widowed gent who doesn’t really form part of the story in the first place. Cracking.
But what is interesting is the number of geological references made in the book, sometimes seemingly made gratuitously and pointlessly, save for the providing of artistic detail. A combination of the geological references with the geographical information causes a slightly puzzling picture to emerge that makes me doubt the full veracity of Hardy’s descriptions, as may be appreciated by continuing to read.
Contrary to Hardy’s other books, which provide the backdrop of the quintessential Wessex, A Pair of Blue Eyes takes us to the barbaric fringes of the West Country, as far as the very fringes of Devon and the beginnings of Cornwall.
Deep into the novel, the new wife of the vicar contemplates her journey home from London and complains and worries about ‘that enervating ride through the myrtle climate of South Devon’. The myrtle climate is an interesting one, but the point is that they must go home enduring a ride through South Devon, so they abandon the train from London, and take a 2-day boat journey, which says a lot about the languid passage of time in the late 1800’s.
Now the boundary between Cornwall and Devon runs up the deep and jagged wound of water that is the flooded river valley of the Tamar and Tavy. So if the vicar’s wife was fretting about her journey through the myrtle climate of South Devon, she must have been referring to the region to the east or north of Plymouth, but not to the west (because she would be in Cornwall) and not to the south (because she would get wet feet). Furthermore, we know from many references to the cliffs and the sea that the vicar’s home is very close to the coast. Indeed, the most dramatic scene of the book takes place at the top of a steep, lofty and exceedingly crumbly sea cliff. We are narrowing down the exact location at the epicenter of A Pair of Blue Eyes. It must either have been on the coast to the east of Plymouth, a region underlain mostly by Devonian slates, or far to the north on the coast of the Bristol Channel, a region underlain by a somewhat different geology made of Carboniferous sandstones and shales.
A map of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, helpfully inserted after the Author’s Preface in the Wordsworth Classic edition, makes the whereabouts of certain localities crystal clear: St Launce’s is Launceston, the main town, a hefty horse ride from the vicarage by the sea, and the point at which a train could be caught for Plymouth and onward to London. Camelton is probably Camelford or thereabouts, a new station in Hardy’s day closer to the location of the main scenes of the book. Barwith Strand is clearly Trebarwith Strand, a windy but exhilarating present-day venue for surfing and hypothermia. A Pair of Blue Eyes therefore appears to be set on some rugged coastline in the region of Boscastle or Tintagel, named Castle Botrel by Hardy. Did Hardy concatenate the two place-names to form Castle Botrel?
Having fixed on the geographical location of the epicenter of the novel, we start to stumble over the geological references. There are several places in the novel where rocks are briefly (never exhaustively) described. The 2-3 hours journey by train to Plymouth passed through ‘vertical cuttings in metamorphic rocks’, which presumably are the Devonian slates that make up a large portion of South Devon, into which the granite of Dartmoor has been punched. On an excursion to Barwith Strand, ‘chocolate-toned rocks forming a wall on both sides’ are described, together with ‘shadowed hollows of purple and brown rocks’, which we are told would be blue but for a tint caused by nearby water, which sounds like the rusty weathering beds of Carboniferous sandstones embedded in blue shales, typical of the north Cornish and west Devon coasts. More problematically, we are told that on the train from Bristol, 1 hour before arrival in St Launce’s, ‘red rocks overhung them’, while the train was by the sea, which is more puzzling. These red rocks might be the Permo-Triassic of the Exeter region, but this doesn’t match with being 1 hour from St Launce’s. There is a baffling reference to pieces of ‘red marble’ said to be found in the stone walls. The closest red marble (actually a recrystallized limestone that has not been appreciably heated) is the Devonian-aged ‘Ashburton Marble’ but it is found in the region between Torquay and Plymouth, principally on the eastern flank of Dartmoor near Newton Abbott. Hardy may have been familiar with this decorative marble, but it is difficult to imagine it in stone walls in the extreme northwest of Devon.
Finally, we have the extraordinary reference to a trilobite embedded in a ‘vast stratification of blue-black slate’, of cliffs made of ‘enormous masses of black strata’ with quartz rock as ‘igneous protrusions’. It is on a bracket of quartz rock that our gentleman geologist hero rests his weight while undergoing a worrying cliff-hanging moment in a key, pivotal scene in the novel. He is faced by a trilobite, ‘a creature with eyes’, in the rock before him. The rocks surely must be deep marine shales of the Carboniferous, and the quartz must be filling jagged fractures into which it crystallized during the tectonic movements that were later to affect the region. Not an igneous protrusion, but a good try. As for trilobites, they reduced in abundance after the Devonian, and became extinct in the Permian, so it is possible, though perhaps rare, to find a trilobite in the black strata of the coastal cliffs. Its introduction is clearly a literary device, yet firmly based in geological plausibility.
There is therefore a mixture of geological rectitude and puzzlement in A Pair of Blue Eyes. I am especially puzzled by a reference to our heroine, on the cliffs of northwest Devon or northern Cornwall, who ‘looks to the left’ to see the arrival of a steamer called the Puffin, with its port of departure of Bristol. The steamer is carrying the figure of her first lover, the son of the stone mason, whose love for our heroine was first requited and then unrequited. How very odd to look left at a boat that should be coming from the right. I have no explanation for this, other than involving the boat chugging about in circles or our heroine having eyes in the back of her head. This being the case, I am in favour of renaming the novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in the Back of the Head.
With a father as a stone mason, and born at a time of exponential growth in the understanding of geology, it is not surprising that Thomas Hardy made good use of geological references in his novels. It profits the reader to underline these references and to ponder on whether they are reasonable. In the majority of cases, they are indeed reasonable, providing an accurate descriptive backdrop as well as the occasional literary device to aid the flow of the novel. I feel drawn to the coast around Tintagel and Boscastle in search of the location where a trilobite from its Carboniferous tomb surveys the cliff-hanging geologist at the top of a crumbling pile of black shale. It sounds a far cry from the mellow and gently landscaped village of Poundbury on the perimeter of Hardy’s Dorchester.

Stratigraphy.net | Impressum

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