Hardy, Time, and the Trilobite

ABSTRACT This paper takes as its starting point an important conversation held between Thomas Hardy and Leslie Stephen in 1875 in which they discussed the “unreality of time” (Maitland 1906, 203). This idea informs Hardy’s (1873) novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which the amateur geologist Henry Knight hangs from a cliff and before him flashes a vision of deep time, which culminates in an eye-to-eye encounter with a trilobite. Several critics have argued for Leslie Stephen’s “A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps” (1872), published just weeks before, as a source of inspiration for Hardy’s scene. I investigate these claims, and argue that Gideon Mantell’s Wonders of Geology (1848) was a greater influence. Drawing on the work of Patricia Ingham and Adelene Buckland, I consider the differences between these texts, and explore the implications of Hardy’s removing the gaze of Mantell’s “higher intelligence” and replacing his teleological view of time with a backwards slide down the evolutionary scale. This prefigured Thomas Henry Huxley’s fear that with the cooling of the sun, humankind would eventually devolve into “low” and “simple” organisms “such as the Diatom of the arctic and antarctic ice” (1894, 191). This paper also draws on Hardy’s copy of The Wonders of Geology, now in the Beinecke, and contested questions around its provenance. Finally, I conclude that this scene raises questions of scale that are never fully resolved and that these questions haunt the rest of Hardy’s oeuvre.