Tranter
Vicarage study. Office of Mr. Maybold, the village vicar, that is the setting for the most comic scene of the novel. The men march to the vicar’s study to request a dignified farewell for their choir. Grandfather William exemplifies the country people’s discomfort with the unfamiliar as he is startled at discovering springs in the vicar’s chair seat. Tranter Dewey in his enthusiasm backs the vicar into a corner, and the scene is capped by a tableau of the other members of the choir, looking in at the door.
The vicar’s study is also the setting for the saddest scene in the story, in which Maybold watches from his window as a boy leaves to deliver his sad letter to Fancy Day, the new schoolmistress. With the vicar looking on, the boy fights briefly with another boy who coincidentally carries a similar letter to the vicar from Fancy. Such crisscrossing of messengers or letters is developed in later Hardy novels to illustrate the workings of fate.
Mellstock Church. Village church in which three scenes take place. First, the carolers stop at the church at midnight to fortify themselves with hot mead and bread and cheese. They sit in the gallery and wonder at Davy’s absence. They later find him under a tree by Fancy’s window.
The church’s gallery provides Christmas Day seating for the choir. In this early novel, Hardy practices the authorial bird’s-eye view that he frequently uses in his later works. From this vantage point, the members of the choir watch the clerk chewing tobacco, young women reading, lovers touching fingers through a knothole, and a farm wife counting her money. Later, after the choir is disbanded, readers observe their discomfort as they take seats with their wives in the nave of the church, out of their familiar place, feeling “abashed.” Hardy’s own father and grandfather had played stringed instruments in church and for local festivals, and he intended for his novels to capture this earlier time in the lives of country folk.
Schoolhouse. Village school in which Fancy Day is the new mistress. On Christmas Eve, Davy first sees Fancy, framed in an upper window of the schoolhouse. Although the building and the tree outside it provide the setting for his growing love for Fancy, it is in the open air, when they are riding together in his cart and while he is in the woods gathering hazelnuts, that he announces his love and she accepts.
Geoffrey Day’s house. Woodland cottage that is the home of Fancy’s father. The cottage provides rustic comedy in the introduction of an eccentric wife who has doubles of every piece of furniture and who fusses over the table settings. The cottage is also the backdrop for two tense developments: Mr. Day’s initial rejection of Davy, and rival farmer Shiner’s confident wooing of Fancy under Davy’s nose at the bee-smoking. However, in the final chapter, Fancy dresses here for her wedding and then returns here for the outdoor feast under the enormous, ancient tree in her father’s yard. In this venerable tree, hundreds of birds have been born, rabbits have nibbled at its bark, and countless moles and earthworms have crept among its roots. This ageless and vital emblem of fertility now also embraces the wedding guests beneath its branches: oldsters telling stories, the young dancing and singing, the musicians, and Davy and Fancy, the happy newlyweds.