ABSTRACT
During this early period Hardy’s reviewers acknowledged that despite his dubious morality, implausibly philosophical ‘peasants’, clumsy use of coincidence and forced diction, he was a decidedly uncommon novelist. One of the very first reviewers of Desperate Remedies begins with its faults – that it contains no original characters, ‘no display except of the brute kind, no pictures of Christian virtue’ and no ‘transcendent talent’. Then the tone shifts: this anonymous author shows a talent for ‘catching and fixing phases of peasant life’ and a ‘sensitiveness to scenic and atmospheric effects’; his powers ‘ought to be extended, instead of being prostituted to the purpose of idle prying into the ways of wickedness’.1
