conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for a book with the title 'The Woodlanders'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Woodlanders
  In the revised text of 1896 'Rubdon Hill' (alias the real Bubb Down) was changed to High-Stoy Hill. The latter was the real name of a place near a wooded area some distance to the west of the original siting and nearer to the Sherborne–Cerne Abbas main road. This suggests a different location for 'Great Hintock' and 'Little Hintock': just to the west of the Sherborne–Cerne Abbas road. This topography is the one with which most readers are familiar, since the 1912 edition has been the basis of most later editions. The present edition has of course the earlier names and locations which seem to be those from which the descriptions, as opposed to the names used in the narrative, derive. In this sense (only) its topography is the more 'authentic'.
  However, the quest for locations (of the 1912 version) has continued. There is evidence from after 1905 that Hardy was prepared to equate 'Great Hintock' with Minterne Magna (Greater Minterne). This suggests an equation of 'Little Hintock' with Minterne Parva (Lesser Minterne). But since the narrative makes clear that 'Little Hintock' is north, not south, of 'Great Hintock', an alternative siting for the former, given by Hermann Lea (1913), is Hermitage (which is to the north). In a sense, however, this is a wild-goose chase since it is clear that originally Hardy at least 'based' his story on the western area of the region under discussion. It seems likely that he was being ironic when he wrote in the 1912 postscript:
  I have been honoured by so many inquiries for the true name and exact locality of the hamlet 'Little Hintock'... that I may as well confess here once for all that I do not know myself where that hamlet is more precisely than as explained above and in the pages of the narrative. To oblige readers I once spent several hours on a bicycle with a friend in a serious attempt to discover the real spot; but the search ended in failure; though tourists assure me positively that they have found it without trouble, and that it answers in every particular to the description given in this volume. At all events... the commanding heights called 'High-Stoy' and 'Bubb-Down Hill' overlook the landscape in which it is supposed to be hid.
  A more straightforward statement of the truth seems to be that made in May 1926 when Hardy answered yet another query as to the whereabouts of 'Little Hintock' in relation to a watercolour of Minterne sent by Arthur M. Hind:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: However, to be more definite, it has features which were to be found fifty years ago in the hamlets of Hermitage, Middlemarsh, Lyons-Gate, Revels Inn, Holnest, Melbury Bubb, etc. – all lying more or less under the eminence called High Stoy, just beyond Minterne and Dogburry Gate, where the country descends into the Vale of Blackmore.
  The passage, though it adheres to the 'second (post-1890) siting' of the narrative, stresses mainly the fact that 'Little Hintock' is not a naturalistic representation of a single place. The chief interest therefore of the changes in 1896 and later lies in their attempt to make the relative positions of the fictional places referred to or journeys between them consistent if plotted on a map. This is all the verisimilitude that is aimed at. It is difficult to understand how by doing this Hardy could be said to be 'changing the location'. His 'Wessex' is not a precise recreation of Alfred the Great's kingdom nor of Dorset.
  After the engagement between Grace Melbury and Edred Fitzpiers they discuss their wedding. Fitzpiers promptly announces his wishes: 'My inclination is not to be married at the horrid little church here, with all the yokels staring round at us, and a droning parson reading.' He prefers a registry office as a 'quieter, snugger and more convenient place in every way'. Grace is shocked and asks, 'How can I be married except at church, and with all my dear friends around me!' But under pressure from Fitzpiers she acquiesces. Later, when he has to explain away evidence strongly suggesting an affair with Suke Damson, she only agrees to resume the engagement provided they can marry in church.
  Grace's objection to a civil marriage is more than a religious one. It was only after the Marriage Act of 1836 that (from 1 July 1837) the option to marry in a specially registered building rather than in an Anglican church became available to those who were not Jews or Quakers or who had a special licence. The insistence on an Anglican church had been thought to discourage some from marrying legally and to contract clandestine marriages instead. However, the registry office connection with the administering of the Poor Law meant that the new civil marriage was disliked by many people. This distaste continued and this type of ceremony remained unpopular with those who saw it as possibly socially inferior. This is evidently part of what Grace Melbury feels when Fitzpiers suggests a less public ceremony in a registry office because he is ashamed of what he sees as her low social origins.
  He is prompted to do this by the advice of Fred Beaucock 'once a promising lawyer's clerk' who has now 'fallen into the mire'. He assures Melbury that 'Mrs Fitzpiers has her remedy', and then explains:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: How much of the exaggerated information on the then new divorce laws which Beaucock imparted to his listener was the result of ignorance, and how much of dupery, was never ascertained. But he related such a plausible story of the case with which Grace could become a free woman that her father was irradiated with the project.
  He repeatedly notices the unchanging nature of inanimate things while human beings suffer and decline.
  He could not forget that Mrs. Charmond had apparently abandoned all interest in his daughter as suddenly as she had conceived it, and was as firmly convinced as ever that the comradeship which Grace had shown with Giles and his crew by attending his party had been the cause.
  Matters lingered on thus. And then, as a hoop by gentle knocks on this side and on that is made to travel in specific directions, the little touches of circumstance in the life of this young girl shaped the curves of her career.
  Keats is stressing the resilience of nature, but Hardy uses the phrase to describe trees mistakenly budding too early. This event is something not understood by Fitzpiers and it is one of many references to his inability to read what he sees in the landscape. See Introduction.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: How much of the exaggerated information on the then new divorce laws which Beaucock imparted to his listener was the result of ignorance, and how much of dupery, was never ascertained. But he related such a plausible story of the case with which Grace could become a free woman that her father was irradiated with the project.
  He repeatedly notices the unchanging nature of inanimate things while human beings suffer and decline.
  He could not forget that Mrs. Charmond had apparently abandoned all interest in his daughter as suddenly as she had conceived it, and was as firmly convinced as ever that the comradeship which Grace had shown with Giles and his crew by attending his party had been the cause.
  Matters lingered on thus. And then, as a hoop by gentle knocks on this side and on that is made to travel in specific directions, the little touches of circumstance in the life of this young girl shaped the curves of her career.
  Keats is stressing the resilience of nature, but Hardy uses the phrase to describe trees mistakenly budding too early. This event is something not understood by Fitzpiers and it is one of many references to his inability to read what he sees in the landscape.