Desperate Remedies Part 8 - The Verdict

Eliza Bright Nicholls,
the inspiration for Cytherea Graye?
Photo from the Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University

As we close the back cover on our examination of Thomas Hardy's first novel, Desperate Remedies, I want to take a quick look at what elements of the book were reflections of people and places in his real life.

Millgate points out in his Hardy biography that Cytherea Graye was based, at least in aspect, upon Eliza Nicholls, the elder of the two Nicholls sisters with whom Hardy had a long-standing "agreement" that did not end in marriage. However, it is very tempting to read some of his own sister, Mary Hardy into the character as well. She was visiting Hardy regularly in Weymouth during the time he was writing The Poor Man and the Lady, which would be cannibalized to some degree or another to create Remedies. The strong bond between Hardy and his sister can also be seen in the relationship between Cytherea and her brother, Owen.

Speaking of Owen, Hardy acknowledged that he had modeled that character upon himself but, when asked about Edward Springrove, he coyly responded that the character was modeled upon someone he met while working in the architectural office in Weymouth. I think it's pretty plain that Edward, an architect of limited means who was tangled up in a long-standing engagement he did not wish to fulfill and had literary aspirations, was also based on Hardy. The two characters (Owen and Edward) become very difficult to tell apart from one another, especially later in the novel when they are working together to prove Manston's guilt. Owen represented Hardy as he saw himself with Edward representing the soulful young architect who aspired to be a writer. To Hardy's credit, he lived out that aspiration more successfully than I imagine even he could have hoped.

Where shall we look to find the inspiration for our two more tortured characters, Miss Aldclyffe and Aeneas Manston? Those characters, I suspect, were mostly invented for the sake of the story. One could point to Julia Martin, the woman of some means who took a shine to Thomas when he was a boy and from whom he was separated by a feud she got into with Jemima Hardy over his education. Hardy infuses Miss Aldclyffe with a surprising degree of sensual energy for the role she plays in the book and she would have been of just the right age when he knew her best to serve as the eventual model for this dark maternal figure. As for Manston, there is no one adequately Byronic enough from Hardy's life prior to the writing of Remedies to have been the direct inspiration. Again, one might be tempted to consider Horace Moule but given Moule's known predilection for young men, it's just a poor fit.

Thomas Hardy's body of novels (and to some extent his poems) are known for their shared geography, the fictional Wessex standing in for the county of Dorset. While Hardy certainly drew upon familiar places to make the locations in Desperate Remedies seem real, he didn't imbue them with the same careful attention to detail that he would in later books. In fact, the Wessex towns that appear in Remedies didn't even bear the names that line up our current editions of the novels with the other Wessex novels in his body of work. He changed them later to import them into his Wessex universe.

Of the places that appear in the novel, only Budmouth (a stand in for the coastal city of Weymouth) comes across as a Wessex city proper. Hardy's inclusion of incidental details that he experienced while living there (and while writing the early draft of The Poor Man and the Lady) like boating and dancing probably have more to do with his trying to draw from lived experiences to give the novel a ring of authenticity. Otherwise, cities don't play the defining role that we'll see in later books.

In closing our examination of Desperate Remedies, I'd like to offer a few broad assessments of it that the reader might take away. Most importantly, it's a pretty good book, especially for a first published work. Several of the characters transcend their function in the twisting plot and inspire a degree of pathos from their suffering, not the least of which being the supposed villain, Aeneas Manston. Hardy's natural gifts for prose leavened by a poetic tone elevates important moments and even sections of the book unmistakably out of the pure genre fiction it is intended to be and up towards something resembling literature.

The book suffers to an extent from being overlong. There are sections, mostly towards the end, where it feels as if we are being asked to tread water in order to satisfy the structural expectations of the audience. The social aspects of the novel feel more successful but the suspenseful elements are leaned upon more heavily to justify the plot. The result is, at worst, mildly diffuse.

For this reader, though, the good in this novel outweighs the bad by a margin of about two-to-one and, on whatever plane we feel the need to record a success or a failure in regards to a work of art, Hardy notched a 'W' on his first published novel.

Desperate Remedies Part 7 - Let's Get Physical

Cytherea Graye, as illustrated by Peter Whiteman for the
Heron Books edition of Desperate Remedies (1977)

Thomas Hardy is known for bringing a thrilling kind of poetry to his physical descriptions and Desperate Remedies is no exception. While the social and suspenseful elements of the plot may group it with or set it apart from other novels he's written, Hardy's attention to detail and his ability to wring emotional value out of the delivery of those details are the elements perhaps most universal to what is great in his writing.

The bedrock of this gift lies in his descriptions of the characters that inhabit his work. The more important that a character is, the more lavish the description he affords. Moreover, Hardy has a particular knack for tying something essential about the character into that description using interesting metaphors or other rhetorical devices.

In the opening of the plot proper, he describes Cytherea Graye, noting that "[her] face was exceedingly attractive, though artistically less perfect than her figure, which approached unusually near the standard of faultlessness." Later, he describes her hair as "resting upon her shoulders in curls" and "of a shining corn yellow in the high lights, deepening to a definite nut-brown as each curl wound round into the shade." Her eyes are "of a sapphire hue" as well as possessing "the affectionate and liquid sparkle of loyalty and good faith as distinguishable from that harder brightness which seems to express faithfulness only to the object confronting them."

We are treated to the first description of her beau, Edward Springrove through Cytherea's eyes. She notes him as being "above her brother's height" and "although the upper part of his face and head were handsomely formed, and bounded by lines of sufficiently masculine regularity, his brows were somewhat too softly arched, and finely pencilled for one of his sex." The sum effect suggested to her that "though they [his features] did not prove that the man who thought inside them would do much in the world, men who had done most of all had had no better ones."

Hardy's description of the misunderstood villain of the piece, Aeneas Manston, is perhaps his most sensual and detailed of the book.

He was an extremely handsome man, well-formed, and well-dressed, of an age which seemed to be two or three years less than thirty. The most striking point in his appearance was the wonderful, almost preternatural, clearness of his complexion. There was not a blemish or speck of any kind to mar the smoothness of its surface or the beauty of its hue. Next, his forehead was square and broad, his brows straight and firm, his eyes penetrating and clear...Eyes and forehead both would have expressed keenness of intellect too severely to be pleasing, had their force not been counteracted by the lines and tone of the lips. These were full and luscious to a surprising degree, possessing a woman-like softness of curve, and a ruby redness so intense, as to testify strongly to much susceptibility of heart where feminine beauty was concerned...

His manner was rather elegant than good; his speech well-finished and unconstrained.

In all three cases, Hardy begins with the physical but then credibly extends his observations into the more intangible elements of character to let the reader know what they can expect from each player moving forward into the story.

Another highlight of Hardy's descriptive passages are those of buildings and structures. By his own admission, Hardy rarely invented these structures of whole cloth but often pulled them from places he'd lived, visited or studied on his own aborted journey toward becoming an architect. He spoke the language of structural design and, at times, could have been reading aloud from a blueprint. He describes Knapwater House (Miss Aldclyffe's home) as "regularly and substantially built of clean grey freestone throughout...the main block approximated to a square on the ground plan, having a projection in the center of each side, surmounted by a pediment. From each angle of the inferior side ran a line of buildings lower than the rest, turning inwards again at their further end, and forming within them a spacious open court, within which resounded an echo of astonishing clearness."

The steward's house is described by Manston himself, again using the voice of an architect to demonstrate Hardy's own fluency in the language of design.

'Here, you see, they have made a door through; here, they have put a partition dividing the old hall in two, one part is now my parlour; there they have put a plaster ceiling, hiding the old chestnut-carved roof because it was too high and would have been chilly for me; you see, being the original hall, it was open right up to the top; and here the lord of the manor and his retainers used to meet and be merry by the light from the monstrous fire which shone out from that monstrous fire-place, now narrowed to a mere nothing for my grate, though you could see the old outline still.'

For all the depth that his description of people and structures brings to Hardy's novels, it is, of course, his descriptions of natural phenomena that often elevate his writing into the poetic register. Like the Impressionists painters, Hardy describes nuance in the interplay of light and shadow that might be lost on a less observant eye, as in this passage: "It was just that stage in the slow decline of the summer days, when the deep, dark, and vacuous hot-weather shadows are beginning to be replaced by blue ones that have a surface and substance to the eye."

Or this painterly description of a "heathery valley":

The wide concave which lay at the back of the hill in this direction was blazing with the western light, adding an orange tint to the vivid purple of the heather, now at the very climax of bloom, and free from the slightest touch of the invidious brown that so soon creeps into shades. The light so intensified the colours that they seemed to stand above the surface of the earth and float in mid-air like an exhalation of red.

His observations are also not limited to the visual dimension but can cross senses with a dizzying facility, as when he is describing Cytherea's long first night at Knapwater House.

Her ears became aware of a strange and gloomy murmur.

She recognized it: it was the gushing of the waterfall, faint and low, brought from its source to the unwonted distance of the House by a faint breeze which made it distinct and recognizable by reason of the utter absence of all disturbing sounds...She began to fancy what the waterfall must be like at that hour, under the trees in the ghostly moonlight. Black at the head, and over the surface of the deep cold hold into which it fell; white and frothy at the fall; black and white, like a pall and its border; sad everywhere.

These kinds of poetic flourishes can be found peppered throughout Desperate Remedies, sometimes to set a scene, often to set a mood or reinforce a theme or, in masterful confluences which manage both aims. Hardy opens this passage with a sly quotation from Tennyson's "A Dream of Fair Women" before completing the image with his own imaginative verbal sketch.

'The tearful glimmer of the languid dawn' was just sufficient to reveal to them the melancholy red leaves, lying thickly in the channels by the roadside, ever and anon loudly tapped on by heavy drops of water, which the boughs above had collected from the foggy air.

(That is my favorite sentence in the book!)

Desperate Remedies Part 6 - Everything Falls Apart

Illustration by Shayna Pond.
Please cite the artist and blog if you reuse this image.

After the wedding that was left unconsummated, Desperate Remedies slips into a torpor. The overarching theme is one of limbo: Cytherea in a half-married, half-unmarried state; Edward unable to advance his cause do to the debt incurred from the inn's burning; Manston searching for a wife recently presumed dead; Miss Aldclyffe receding from the story as a whole.

Manston does his due diligence (though he is near fixated on Cytherea) and places advertisements encouraging his wife to return. After the third advertisement, Manston receives a letter from his estranged wife and she returns, moving into his steward's quarters at Knapwater House as was the original plan. Cytherea and Owen move to a nearby town while she recovers from an illness brought about by the stress of her situation.

It is this point in the book (about two-thirds of the way in) that Desperate Remedies becomes a little tedious. Part of the problem is that the most interesting characters are basically shelved and replaced by two very earnest and almost murderously dull architects (Owen and Edward) painfully unspooling the inconsistencies in the events as they have unfolded. Cytherea will have no part of a marriage with Edward while her virtue is in question, which she perceives that it is due to having married an already married man if in rite only. Edward becomes obsessed with proving that Manston knew his wife was alive before he married Cytherea, which would out him as a knowing bigamist and exonerate her of any implied guilt.

The details of that slow unraveling are too dull to document point by point but they wind us up at the most improbable of outcomes: namely, the discovery that the woman who has been living in Manston's home is not the same woman who arrived at the inn those many months earlier. At the same time, the faux-Mrs. Manston (whom we'll now address by her name, Anne) is having her own doubts about her "husband's" reason for perpetuating the charade. She comes across a letter written by her doppelganger AFTER she'd arrived in Carriford, thus proving she survived the fire. Each of Manston's allies (his fake wife, Miss Aldclyffe and a rector) are peeled away from him by the ever-lengthening trail of evidence until his ultimate motive is revealed in a scene that would be hilarious if it weren't so macabre.

Suspicious of his motives, Anne follows Manston after he presumes that he has slipped her a sleeping concoction. He retrieves a suspicious bundle and trudges off into the forest. Anne sees what no one else does - that Manston is being watched by a man who in turn is being watched by a woman who is being watched by Anne herself and they all follow one another, with Manston as the drum major bearing the bulky load deep into the forest. After he buries the bundle, there is a chain reaction wherein Manston is alerted to his male stalker by the unknown female stalker and, after striking the man down with his shovel, he runs off into the forest. The man is a detective hired to follow Manston and, backed up by the rector and Anne's testimony, they dig up the parcel to discover the lifeless body of the original Mrs. Manston -- her murder his desperate remedy for his obsession with marrying Cytherea.

The woman who alerted Manston was Miss Aldclyffe who, it turns out, is Manston's natural mother. He was the secret lovechild that made her marriage to Ambrose Graye impossible those many years ago. Her machinations to wed him to Cytherea is the final desperate remedy revealed but instead of righting the wrong of her youth, it transforms her son into a murderer in order to escape his joyless marriage. There is a bit of roughhousing at the end when Manston tries to kidnap Cytherea to take her out of the country but his efforts come to naught as eventually the self-inflicted noose, literal and figurative, finally tightens around his neck.

I know that was probably a lot of plot description to take in but it should give you some sense of how twisty this book is. I'll wrap up my discussion of Desperate Remedies in two posts: one looking at Hardy's descriptions of nature and architecture; and the final looking at how Desperate Remedies intersects with our understanding of Hardy himself at the time he wrote the book.

Desperate Remedies Part 5 - Burning Down the House

Hardy uses the revelation of Aeneas Manston's married status as an ironic opportunity to rehabilitate his character in the eyes of the reader. He doesn't struggle against his regrettable fate of being married to someone he does not love but, instead, works diligently to make his home ready for her. His failure to meet her at the right time is chalked up to a genuine misunderstanding.

In fact, Hardy draws a couple of new parallels between Manston and Edward Springrove that invite us to question if Cytherea's heart is unfairly biased towards the latter. Manston's unfortunate marriage calls to mind something Owen Graye says about Springrove earlier in the book, describing him as "an impulsive fellow who has been made to pay the penalty of his rashness in some love affair." Later, as Manston arrives in town, he sees Springrove for the first time, noting that "[b]ut for my wife, Springrove might have been my rival." Both are architects and their shared affection for Cytherea draws a clear line between them.

So it is a wicked trick Hardy plays in burning down the Carriford inn with the wayward Mrs. Manston inside. Upon this hinge, the two men's fortunes reverse.

Aeneas Manston is set free of his social obligation to his wife upon her death. His designs to woo Cytherea Graye had been brought to a grinding halt by the revelation that he was already married. This doesn't improve Cytherea's own social instability, as she remains reliant upon the capricious grace of Miss Aldclyffe as her employer but, at least, retaining that favor is no longer dependent on her reciprocating affection to the obviously smitten Manston. With the spectre of his wife's return banished, he is also free to retrain his sights on wearing down Cytherea's resolve.

The inn's destruction lands heavily on the Springrove family. The tenements, including the inn, were leased to Farmer Springrove along with the responsibility for having them restored. This debt, subtly enforced to Manston's benefit, threatens to send the family into a social chasm and pushes Edward out of the picture while Manston restarts his campaign to win Cytherea as his wife.

When Owen falls ill, Manston befriends and supports him. This proves to be the final point of leverage necessary to erode Cytherea's resistance to marrying a man that she does not love. Finally, the day arrives and the pair are married at Knapwater House. During the ceremony, Cytherea sees a grief-stricken Edward and all of her reservations about marrying Manston are confirmed. Though the ill-fated pair do manage a dramatic reunion far from the sight of others where miscommunications can be clarified, Cytherea is now married and they part with their love acknowledged but forever unconsummated.

This business of consummation becomes a suddenly important one as Cytherea and Manston leave for their honeymoon. It is revealed by a dying man that he saw the original Mrs. Manston after the inn had burned down, suggesting that she was, in fact, alive. Edward and Owen rush to the hotel where Cytherea and Manston are about to consummate their marriage and arrive just in time to stop them from doing so. This sets up the status quo for the remainder of the book, with Cytherea legally married to a man she doesn't love and spared from his touch only by the existence of a second Mrs. Manston.

This is also the section where Desperate Remedies abandons its pretenses of being a social novel and plunges into reversal after reversal to sell its pivot to the suspenseful.

Desperate Remedies Part 4 - The Wedding March

Hardy takes the first third of the book to erect and clarify the social lattice upon which his characters hang. Beginning in the eighth section, he sows the elements of suspense that will germinate in its middle third and blossom in the conclusion.

Miss Aldclyffe, upon confirming Edward Springrove (her neighbor's son) as Cytherea's estranged love, advertises for a steward to manage the land associated with Knapwater House. After rejecting a number of suitable applicants, she casts her nets of inquiry ever wider until, at last, she finds a candidate who suits her enigmatic requirements.

Enter Aeneas Manston.

Hardy introduces Manston with considerable fanfare. He is first "seen" by the reader when Miss Aldclyffe sends Cytherea to Manston's somewhat dilapidated house on the property in order to collect his dues for a social society. She encounters him just after having learned of Edward's betrothal to his cousin and is vulnerable. Hardy paints his physical description with the same vigor as he would one of his heroines:

He was an extremely handsome man, well-formed, and well-dressed...There was not a blemish or a speck of any kind to mar the smoothness of [his complexion] or the beauty of its hue. Next, his forehead was square and broad, his brows straight and firm, his eyes penetrating and clear...Eyes and forehead both would have expressed keenness of intellect too severely to be pleasing, had their force not been counteracted by the lines and tone of the lips. These were full and luscious to a surprising degree, possessing a woman-like softness of curve, and a ruby redness so intense, as to testify strongly to much susceptibility that might require all the ballast of brain with which he had previously been credited to confine within normal channels.

His manner was rather elegant than good: his speech well-finished and unconstrained.

Hardy brings his best descriptive tools to bear on making a memorable first impression, setting the stage at dusk as rain begins to fall heavily. Cytherea is urged by the inclement weather into the house where Manston plays dramatic music on his organ (I can't make this stuff up) as lightning flashes in the raging storm outside an oversized window that dominates the room. She leaves the encounter somewhat intrigued by him but he, of course, falls madly in love with her.

The middle section of the novel is taken up by an inexorable march towards a marriage between Cytherea and Manston and begins to take on more qualities of a suspense novel at the expense of its social elements. Twists in the plot cease to work in service to the social anxieties and more in that of heightening the tension (and delaying the arrival) of that certain-to-be unhappy union. Cytherea, despite Edward Springrove's absence from her life, continues to nurture her love for him even as her dependency shifts from Miss Aldclyffe to that of her unwelcome suitor. His interest in her is succinctly laid out in a passage where he describes her as, "a lady's dependent, a waif, a helpless thing entirely at the mercy of the world; yes, curse it; that is just why it is; that fact of her being so helpless against the blows of circumstances which renders her so deliciously sweet."

Cytherea is granted a surprise reprieve from Manston's persistent affections when Miss Aldclyffe discovers that he is already married, by his own admission, to an actress he'd met in Liverpool ("an American by birth") and from whom he'd tried to estrange himself in taking the position as steward. He is allowed to keep his job if he will move his wife into the old manor home with him. He sends for the wayward Mrs. Manston, whom he admittedly does not love, to meet him. When he doesn't meet her at the train station at the appointed time, she travels to the nearby village of Carriford and takes overnight lodging at the inn, owned by Edward Springrove's father.

The inn burns down and, it is presumed, takes Mrs. Manston with it.

Desperate Remedies Part 3 - Let's Pretend We're Married

As I was writing the last section on social anxiety, it occurred to me that sex and marriage play interesting roles worth exploring in both the suspenseful and social aspects of the book.

Four of the five main characters of Desperate Remedies are entangled, at some point, in a conflict about marriage. In the opening section of the book, it is revealed that the woman who will be known as Miss Aldclyffe can't marry Ambrose Graye, whom she loves, because of a dark secret in her past. Edward Springrove can't marry Cytherea Graye because he is already betrothed to his cousin. Cytherea can't resist marrying Aeneas Manston, whom she does not love, because of her brother's ailing health and her precarious social situation.

It's valuable to remember that Hardy had spent the roughly ten years previous to writing this book thinking a lot about marriage and the effects (positive and negative) that it could have on his own emotional and social well being. He had searched, in vain, for a future bride with whom he was intellectually compatible but would also satisfy his mother's impossible standards for a wife worthy of joining the Hardy family. It had been ten years playing the "What if?" game, carefully weighing the value of enjoying someone's company against pleasing his mother against the possibility of social mobility, both upward and downward, depending on his choices.

It's tempting to read some of these anxieties into this passage, where Owen Graye describes a conversation to his sister he'd had with Springrove about marriage:

He says that your true lover breathlessly finds himself engaged to a sweetheart, like a man who has caught something in the dark. He doesn't know whether it is a bat or a bird, and he takes it to the light when he is cool to learn what it is. He looks to see if she is the right age, but right age or wrong age, he must consider her a prize. Right kind or wrong kind--he has called her his and must abide by it. After a time, he asks himself, "Has she the temper, hair and eyes I meant to have, and was firmly resolved not to do without?" He finds it is all wrong, and then comes the tussle--"

Due to the social mores of Hardy's time, the presence of sex is almost all implied, either constrained to the past or threatening like an ominous bird a-wing beyond the next plot twist but never arriving. There are two overt intersections of sex with the plot that I want to delay discussing until we get into the suspense elements of the plot but there's one interaction that bears closer consideration relative to the social elements.

On the very first evening that Cytherea spends at Knapwater House with Miss Aldclyffe, the latter comes to her bedroom for a very long and awkward visit that lasts the night.

She got a light in an instant, opened the door and raising her eyes and the candle, saw Miss Aldclyffe standing outside in her dressing-gown.

'Now you see that it is really myself; put out the light,' said the visitor. 'I want to stay here with you, Cythie. I came to ask you to come down into my bed, but it is snugger here. But remember that you are mistress in this room, and that I have no business here, and that you may send me away if you choose. Shall I go?"

'O no; you shan't indeed if you don't want,' said Cythie generously.

The instant they were in bed Miss Aldclyffe freed herself from the last remnant of restraint. She flung her arms round the young girl, and pressed her gently to heart.

'Now kiss me,' she said.

Cytherea, upon the whole, was rather discomposed at this change of treatment; and, discomposed or no, her passion were not so impetuous as Miss Aldclyffe's. She could nor bring her soul to her lips for a moment, try how she would.

'Come, kiss me,' repeated Miss Aldclyffe.

Cytherea gave her a very small one, as soft in touch and in sound as the bursting of a bubble.

'More earnestly than that - come.'

She gave another, a little but not much more expressively.

'I don't deserve a more feeling one, I suppose,' said Miss Aldclyffe, with an emphasis of sad bitterness in her tone. 'I am an ill-tempered woman, you think, half out of my mind; Well, perhaps I am; but I have had grief more than you can think or dream of. But I can't help loving you - your name is the same as mine - isn't it strange?'

Critics and readers alike are torn as to whether Hardy intended this scene to be erotic. Those inclined against that reading can plausibly point to evidence in the plot structure that suggests Hardy is just establishing Miss Aldclyffe as Cytherea's surrogate mother-figure, describing a later kiss in the scene as "warm motherly salute, given as if in the outburst of strong feeling, long checked, and yearning for something to love and be loved in return."

Still, this scene (which goes on for a very long time) stands out as one of the only moments in the book where two characters actually touch one another (in the same bed, unchaperoned except by the reader). It's not hard for me to believe that Hardy may have constructed the scene with the strictest notions of plot structure in mind while being aware that the (mis)interpretation of more prurient readers may have been more racy than that of his own.

Desperate Remedies Part 2 - Chutes and Ladders

Like many of Thomas Hardy's novels, Desperate Remedies relies on social class and status anxieties to fuel at least half of its conflicts. Unlike the suspense elements of the plot, which find their clearest expression in tight, linear storytelling, the social aspects of the novel are most visible over spans of time. Hardy assigns a span of time (and thus a name) to each of the book's 22 sections, ranging from a few hours to thirty years, which allows him to pivot from one set of narrative priorities to the other with relative ease.

The suspense elements don't really enter the plot until the arrival of Aeneas Manston in the seventh section of the book so we can narrow our focus down to almost purely the social for the sections preceding.

Hardy opens Remedies with a story that gives the book its multigenerational depth. A young Cambridge educated architect, Ambrose Graye, falls in love with a young woman named Cytherea who mysteriously rejects his marriage proposal despite her obvious affection for him . Eventually, her family moves away after her mother inherits a considerable sum of money and Ambrose is forced to move on with his life.

He, in turn, marries a woman of some means and, though he never recovers emotionally from his first love, they have two children together, Owen and his younger sister Cytherea. His wife dies in the eighteenth year of their marriage and Ambrose, saddened, presumably, by her loss, throws himself into his work like never before. Then, one day, as Cytherea (his daughter) is watching him work atop church tower, Ambrose Graye falls to his death.

This is one of those rare moments where Hardy sells his central metaphor about social anxiety in some moment-to-moment storytelling and it happens very early in the book.

"Round the conical stonework rose a cage of scaffolding against the blue sky, and upon this stood five men--four in clothes as white as the new erection close beneath their hands, the fifth in the ordinary dark suit of a gentlemen.

The four working-men in white were three masons and a mason's labourer. The fifth man was the architect , Mr. Graye...[Cytherea] moved herself uneasily, 'I wish he would come down,' she whispered, still gazing at the sky-backed picture. 'It is so dangerous to be absent-minded up there.'

When she had done murmuring the words her father indecisively laid hold of one of the scaffold-poles, as if to test its strength, then let it go and stepped back. In stepping, his foot slipped. An instant of doubling forward and sideways, and he reeled off into the air, immediately disappearing downwards."

Ambrose Graye's literal fall to the earth becomes a potent a symbol for his children's fate. After his death, it is discovered that he was in a great deal of debt and his children are not only deprived of their expected inheritance but saddled with that obligation and accompanying shame.

In order to escape the stigma of their now fallen social and economic condition, the pair leave the only home they've ever known and set up in Budmouth, where Owen finds tenuous work as an architect's clerk and Cytherea hopes to find a position as a governess. Quickly, a romance blossoms between Cytherea and a young architect named Edward Springrove but, in a tragic turn that mirrors that of her father, her suitor disappears with only a cryptic goodbye indicating that it could never have worked out between them. Thus deprived of her opportunity to improve upon her own social insecurity, Cytherea falls into the orbit of a land-holding local aristocrat named Miss Adclyffe who hires her as a personal maid. Hardy reveals, in fairly short order, that Miss Adclyffe is none other than the woman with whom Cytherea's father had originally fallen in love and for whom she was named.

In this opening setting of the board, Hardy places his characters masterfully in dynamic social orbits that rise and fall over time, echoed in Owen's observation that, "[a]s we come down the hill, we shall be continually meeting people going up."

Ambrose Graye had the social status (and promise of future wealth) sufficient to wed Cytherea (the elder) who, we are told, hailed from a family with a lofty name but little wealth to use it to their social benefit. Her secret that made it impossible for them to marry (which remains unexposed until late in the book) weighs heavy on her heart thirty years later. More pragmatically, though, it bought her time enough to add wealth to her name so that she married well up the social ladder from her first love, Ambrose.

Ambrose, due to his unwillingness to release his grief, eventually slides down the chute, depositing his children upon his death at the last stop before destitution. The first moral lesson is clear: Do not dwell over the loss of first love or risk ruin.

Cytherea's situation begins more dire than her father's and her gender only magnifies the risk of descending into a life unrecognizable for a woman of her education and background. Her brother Owen is saddled with an education and training unequipped to handle the burdens he inherits as well as the stigma of his father's sad, final fate. He cannot protect Cytherea from the necessity of marriage as a remedy to forestall her otherwise inevitable slide into desperate poverty.