Proper Names and Improper Meanings in Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd

Abstract

In Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy gave his characters names which strengthen the novel's implicit challenge to Victorian morality. In particular, the names Bathsheba Everdene, Francis Troy, and Fanny Robin make multiple references to people, places, objects, and events in pagan Britain, ancient Greece, and Old Testament Israel, raising the Wessex characters to the level of the figures to whom their names allude and tending to make readers judge them by the standards they would use for characters in folk, classical, or biblical narratives. The names Hardy chose help to make Wessex seem not only a part of the world stage rather than a backwater but to turn it into a pagan country, despite its veneer of Christianity.