Thomas Hardy’s names are notoriously rather on the nose.

Far From the Madding Crowd’s dependable Gabriel Oak and woman-stealing Sergeant Troy are both good proof of this, as is the beautiful Bathsheba, a rather harsh association with a sinful Biblical seductress. That said, if we apply one of the novel’s main themes the names could be simple coincidence. Far From the Madding Crowd is a novel driven by fate and chance incidents, from the loss of Gabriel’s sheep leading him to Bathsheba’s farm to the ill-fated Fanny Robbin turning up to the wrong church. Sergeant Troy is saved from drowning by the timely arrival of a boat; Farmer Boldwood’s entire life is changed when he receives a valentine which could have gone to any man in the parish. The novel’s focus, however, is less about these random acts than how the characters adapt to them, with the reader’s sympathies directed accordingly based on their responses.

Boldwood – initially a character the reader feels sorry for given his status as the victim of Bathsheba’s distasteful valentine prank – becomes mad with love for a woman who does not care for him, becoming manipulative, aggressive and obsessive enough that he neglects his duties to his farm. Sergeant Troy, like Bathsheba’s own father, is an unfaithful lover who ‘could never wish for a handsomer woman than I’ve got, but feeling she’s ticketed as my lawful wife, I can’t help my wicked heart wandering, do what I will’. Not content with breaking one engagement and marrying a woman he only lusts after, Troy almost bankrupts Bathsheba’s farm with his gambling and convinces the men to drink enough her crops are nearly destroyed by their negligence. Gabriel, conversely, is laid far lower than both the other suitors, losing his status as a middle class farmer by the loss of his sheep and being forced to claw back up again. He manages to accomplishes this by educating himself and continual manual labour, actions associated with morality by Hardy and also extended to Bathsheba, who becomes less vain after taking charge of her uncle’s farm.

Fanny Robbin is the true victim of fate in Far From the Madding Crowd, doomed for attending All Souls church rather than All Saints. Sergeant Troy’s volatile emotional state means he takes her simple mistake as a deliberate act and abandons her, a shallow response later repeated by a graveyard scene in the same churchyard littered with disturbingly yonic imagery. Hardy’s sympathy for fallen women is never more vividly expressed than in his descriptions of the flowers on Fanny’s grave, which ‘began to move and writhe in their bed’ as rain disturbs ‘the hole and the tomb, its delicately veined surface splashed and stained’. His purchase of her tombstone is a narcissistic act, with the inscription ‘Erected by Francis Troy in Beloved Memory of Fanny Robin’ putting his name above her own. When faced with the difficulty of mending a slightly inconvenient situation facing a woman he claimed to love truly, ‘he slowly withdrew from the grave. He did not attempt to fill up the hole, replace the flowers, or do anything at all’. The characters of Far From the Madding Crowd, like real people, are subject to chance, nature and time. Their defining characteristic, therefore, is the hard work they put in to change their fate.