The fateful meeting of Durbeyfield with the Antiquarian parson Tringham, who informs him of his heritage as descended from the once powerful, now "extinct" D'Urbervilles.
The D'Urberville legacy consists of things that are dead and buried -- like the "fine skellingtons" and lead coffins of which the drunken Durbeyfield brags.
Similarly, traditions in Wessex have decayed -- the wan May celebration at which Tess dances; the dogeared copy of the "Complete Fortune-Teller" that her mother won't allow in the house overnight -- without modernity having taken grip. In Wessex, "the Elizabethan and Victorian ages stood juxtaposed."
The Durbeyfield brood of six. Hardy punctures the Victorian equivalent of family values rhetoric, in which the family is said to represent "Nature's holy plan": "All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship -- entirely dependent on the judgment of the two Durbeyfield adults . . . If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them."
In the darkness, Tess and her young brother Abraham take the bee hives to market in place of the drunken Durbeyfield ("Sir John"). Abraham "with upturned face made observations on the stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in serene disassociation from those two wisps of human life."
This description of the remoteness of the heavens counters the reading ("A Counterblast at Agnosticism") of the oldest of the wandering brothers at the dance.
Tess, from the national
curriculum and her "Sixth Standard" education is aware there are other planets and worlds and imagines them to be better ones. Pondering alternate suns in the stars above, she tells Abraham that they live on a "blighted" star, not a sound one.
Tess' education also results in her having "quite a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little sisters and brothers."
Tess sent by her parents as emissary to their rich relations -- the Stoke-D'urbervilles -- who in reality are not relations at all. A newly rich tradesman, Simon Stoke, had picked the disused D'urberville name out of old heraldry books at the British Museum.
She meets the young heir Alec D'urberville whom Hardy foreshadows as "potentially the 'tragic mischief' of her drama -- one who stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her young life."
Tess pricked by a thorn from one of the roses Alec D'urberville had placed in her bosom, which she sees as an ill portent. Hardy notes drily that it is the first bad omen she had noted that day.
After the bourgeous Stoke-D'urbervilles erected their new home, they converted the previous house to the poultry shed over which Tess presides: "the rooms in which dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks. Distracted hens in coops occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate agriculturists. The chimney corner and once blazing hearth was now filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while oui-of-doors the plots that each succeeding householder had carefully shaped with his spade were torn by cocks in wildest fashion."
The blind Mrs. D'urberville holds tender feelings for her fowl and the bullfinches that fly free in her bedroom, but less for her son whom she neverthelss loves "scornfully."
Alec rescues Tess from the revels, turned ugly, of her fellow farm maids. But as he rides off with her, the peasant women laugh, knowing she faces a greater danger under his care than from their fists.
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