As the men prepare to leave the malthouse, Susan Tall’s husband runs in with bad news to deliver to the men. Joseph, in frightened anticipation of what this news could be, lets loose a few folk idioms:
“What a night of horrors!” murmured Joseph Poorgrass waving his hands spasmodically, “I’ve had the new’s bell ringing in my left ear quite bad enough for a murder, and I’ve seed a magpie all alone!”
Hardy enriches the environment of the story with country colloquialisms and superstitions. Joseph recounts hearing a bell ringing “in [his] left ear.” At this time, the sound of a bell ringing was considered an omen of bad luck; the degree to which Joseph has heard it ring (“bad enough for a murder”) anticipates a great deal of bad luck indeed.
Joseph’s hysterical proclamation that he has seen a magpie “all alone” is taken from the old English superstition that seeing a single magpie indicates ill fortune. His phrasing here comes from the first line of the popular nursery rhyme, “One for Sorrow,” which is still popular in parts of England today. In Hardy’s time, the first few lines roughly ran: “One’s sorrow / two’s mirth / three’s a wedding / four’s a birth,” in reference to the number of magpies spotted. It is worth noting that the speech of the farmhands is often full of superstitions, references to luck, and common history. In this way, Hardy’s choice of diction unifies these characters as a community based on shared beliefs and experiences, a step crucial to his exploration of class division in the novel.
Colloquialisms and regional language are not limited to the dialogue between the farmhands. In this scene after Fanny’s disappearance, both Bathsheba and her servant throw around some very specific idioms:
“What a pucker everything is in!” said Bathsheba, discontentedly when the child had gone. “Get away Mary-Ann, or go on with your scrubbing, or do something! You ought to be married by this time, and not here troubling me.”
“Ay, Miss-so I did. But what between the poor men I won’t have, and the rich men who won’t have me, I stand forlorn as a pelican in the wilderness. Ah, poor soul of me!”
Bathsheba describes their circumstances as being “in a pucker,” referencing Fanny's disappearance. A term that comes from needlework, a “pucker” refers to an accidental bunch or wrinkle of fabric . Bathsheba suggests that their circumstances are tangled, bungled, or messy, as their youngest servant’s fate remains unclear.
Bathsheba then gently pokes fun at Mary for not yet being married. Mary replies that most of the men she meets are either too poor to be interesting or too rich to be interested in her. This leaves her as lonely as “a pelican in the wilderness,” a phrase taken from the Book of Psalms to refer to someone entirely out of place.
Both Bathsheba and Mary, like the farm hands, use language that pulls from their day to day labor and references Christianity and the Bible. Despite the class difference between Bathsheba and her workers, her metaphors and expressions are also shaped by labor. However, they are shaped by the more delicate labor she takes on as a farmer and a woman of the house (rather than field labor or husbandry). Interesting to note that biblical and religious references remain a constant in speech between members of different classes—it is a reference point for all of the English countryside in the novel. In this scene, as in the others, language is used as an important tool of characterization and as a way to show the similarities and differences between the experiences of workers and landowners.
