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Hardy's Romanticism in The Woodlanders Abstract: The following article is a work in progress, taken from my thesis on the Romantic influence on selected novels of Thomas Hardy. It takes one of the chapters from my thesis and draws out the two main points from this chapter, to provide an abbreviated discussion of Hardy's affinity with Wordsworth and Shelley. In my thesis I argue that Hardy was influenced by Romantic poets to varying degrees throughout his novel-writing career (which spanned from rougly 1870-1897): the influence was not static. So in the earlier novels, the Romantic influence was strong, but it was also largely imitative. By this I mean that Hardy did not challenge Romantic ideals in the way he did in his later novels. In the novel I discuss in this article (The Woodlanders, written at about the mid-point of his career) the Romantic influence is complex: Hardy has, by this stage of his life, become disillusioned with Victorian society, and observed the inability of Romantic ideals to survive in this world; and yet his disillusionment inspires an impulse towards Romanticism, as a solace in the face of an unfamiliar world. In my chapter on The Woodlanders I deal with four Romantic elements: Hardy's vision of nature which combines a Romantic view with a Darwinian view; the rural characters, Marty South and Giles Winterborne, who represent the simple and honest values which Wordsworth applauded in his Lyrical Ballads; the strong influence of Shelley in the character of Dr Edred Fitzpiers; and the character of Grace Melbury, in whose person Hardy explores the issue of whether natural education, or school-based learning is more beneficial, a question of importance to the Romantics. But here, I will consider only two elements: Hardy's view of the landscape, and the character of Fitzpiers, the Shelleyan idealist. Each of the six novels I have chosen for my thesis are Romantic in these two respects, and so I consider these the unifying elements of my argument. Throughout my thesis I consider Hardy's view of nature as combining a Romantic view of the natural world with a Darwinian view, and it is important to explain this distinction now. By a Romantic view of nature, I mean one in which the person viewing the landscape sees "glory" in nature. This glory, seen by the Romantic poets, led them to believe that God was immanent in the landscape, because they had no other explanation for the strong positive feelings they gained from interaction with the natural world. As a young man, this was Hardy's view of nature because not only was he strongly drawn to this view, but the remnants of Romanticism still lingered in the early Victorian era, the society into which he was born. The Darwinian view of nature comes from Charles Darwin's theory (published in The Origin of Species, 1859) that nature evolved over time. This idea, combined with the idea of natural selection (that only the strong in a given species will survive), makes up Hardy's Darwinian view of nature, in which the natural world is characterised by pain, harshness, decay, change, and the brutal struggle for survival. The two ideas seem opposite, but Hardy draws them together as the integral part of his vision: sometimes nature seems Romantic and glorious, but at other times all that can be seen is the ruthless struggle. In the earlier novels, the Romantic view of nature predominated; but in The Woodlanders, the fourth of Hardy's novels which I discuss in my th