‘Circumstances Sufficiently Appalling to the Country People’: Suicide Burial in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Grave by the Handpost’

Abstract

Thomas Hardy’s 1897 short story, ‘The Grave By the Handpost,’ set in early nineteenth-century Dorset, explores the custom of suicide burial at the crossroads before the practice was outlawed in 1823. The story, which draws from family history, local accounts, and articles in the Dorset County Chronicle, tells of a widowed sergeant who feels forsaken by his son, and in a state of despair, takes his life. The coroner rules a felo de se (or ‘felon of himself’), and the sergeant’s body is buried at the parish boundary between two villages. In contrast with other customs, suicide burial was characterized by a unique capacity to shame both the deceased and the deceased’s family in perpetuity. While suicide itself would not be decriminalized until 1961, I argue that Hardy sought to destigmatize the coupling of suicide and shame that had predominated in British culture for centuries. This approach follows from Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance (2016) in reading Hardy’s view of folk culture in flux, as rural communities evolved to reimagine their inherited customs. Hardy espoused what he called ‘evolutionary meliorism’, a belief that communities might develop more ethical responses to human situations than were codified in the law. I argue that the villagers’ response in ‘The Grave’ demonstrates this idea in practice, and I conclude that their decision to reject this custom on ethical grounds marks ‘The Grave’ as an important late Hardy work.