The Durbeyfields are forced to leave Marlott

The Durbeyfield family’s forced departure from Marlott is both an eviction and a wider social displacement: after the death of John Durbeyfield, the family’s lease can no longer protect its home, and the cottage is needed for a carter’s family. The departure makes visible how changing agricultural employment and shrinking village housing turn bereavement into dispossession, while the community’s language of morality helps present an economic decision as a judgment on the household.

Causes: lease, labor, and village change

The immediate vulnerability follows the death of John Durbeyfield, the last of three household members whose lives had kept the premises under lease. His death therefore has a consequence beyond personal grief: the tenancy ends, and there is no renewal. The narrative notes the irony that the family’s old status as the d’Urbervilles offers no practical protection. The descendants of people once powerful enough to impose hardship on the landless now experience the precariousness of having no secure claim to a home.

The departure takes place amid the annual movement of agricultural workers around Old Lady-Day. Agreements for outdoor service made at Candlemas are now fulfilled, and workers move from one farm to another. Such migration has increased: where field laborers in an earlier generation often remained on the same farm for life, younger families now change places from year to year, each new destination first appearing promising and eventually becoming another place to leave. The Durbeyfields’ removal is part of this mobility, but they are less protected than the hired workers whose employers provide transport to a new farm.

A more lasting transformation is hollowing out village life. Marlott once included carpenters, smiths, shoemakers, hucksters, and other residents whose holdings gave them a measure of independence and stability. As long tenancies ended, their cottages were often demolished or absorbed for farm laborers; families not directly employed on the land were viewed with disfavor. Their departure deprived the village of people who had carried its local traditions and trades. The narrator’s pointed image of rural population seeming to flow uphill toward the towns exposes the force behind the supposedly neutral description of rural migration: people are driven out by material conditions.

The decision to expel the family

With cottage accommodation reduced, the remaining houses are needed for agricultural workers. The Durbeyfields have also been tacitly marked as a household likely to leave when its lease ends, ostensibly in the interests of morality. The community’s case against them invokes the parents’ occasional drunkenness, the younger children’s infrequent churchgoing, and Tess Durbeyfield’s past. The text sets that moral accounting against the practical fact that the roomy house is required for a carter with a large family. The family’s expulsion is thus presented as a convergence of housing demand and social stigma, not simply as a neutral consequence of tenancy law.

The loss of the lease compels Joan Durbeyfield, her daughters Tess Durbeyfield and 'Liza-Lu, Abraham, and the younger children to leave. The impending move also follows an earlier conflict over Tess’s return. After she comes back, influential and scrupulous villagers see her in the churchyard trying with a small trowel to restore her baby’s obliterated grave. They learn she is living at home, scold Joan for harboring her, and take Joan at her independent offer to leave. The household’s departure is therefore bound to the policing of Tess’s presence as well as to the shortage of cottages.

The last night in Marlott

On the last evening, while rain blurs the window, Tess keeps house as Joan, 'Liza-Lu, and Abraham go to say goodbye to friends. Kneeling close to the casement, she watches a spider’s web shiver in a draught and thinks that her return has helped bring about the family’s eviction. She believes her mother and the children might have been allowed to remain as weekly tenants had she not come home. Her thought that she ought never to have returned makes the expulsion feel personal: a household crisis becomes, in her mind, another consequence of the harm and misfortune attached to her life.

Tess also tells the youngest children that this is their last night in the house where they were born. They had been looking forward to a new place; her reminder of the finality of leaving silences them and brings them close to tears. She then asks them to sing. The brief exchange gives the departure an intimate dimension that the wider account of leases and labor cannot contain: the children’s excitement yields to an awareness that their birthplace is being lost.

The removal and its meaning

The move begins in the small hours, when empty wagons and teams rumble along the roads to collect the belongings of families changing farms. A hired agricultural worker is generally carried to the new destination by the farmer who needs his labor. No such team is sent for the Durbeyfields: they are women and children, not regular laborers, and are not particularly required elsewhere. They must hire a wagon at their own expense. The distinction makes their displacement materially sharper than the routine migration around them: they are moved out, but no employer has undertaken to move them in.

After breakfast, the family clears the house with help from friendly neighbors. Furniture is packed, and the beds and bedding are arranged in a circular nest so Joan and the younger children can sit among them during the journey. The loading is delayed while the horses are brought back from being unharnessed. At about two o’clock the wagon finally sets out, with the cooking pot swinging from the axle and Joan holding the clock’s head in her lap to protect its works; the clock strikes at odd intervals when the wagon lurches. Tess and her next-eldest sister walk beside it until they are out of the village.

The date is April 6, and the Durbeyfields meet many other family wagons on the higher ground. Their furniture-laden procession belongs to a collective pattern of rural mobility, but the family’s lack of a destination supplied by an employer marks its particular insecurity. The episode joins large-scale change to domestic objects—the beds, cooking pot, and clock—showing what displacement means in the daily life of a household. Its wider significance lies in the contrast between the village’s proclaimed concern for moral purity and its willingness to remove a family already made vulnerable by the lease, the labor market, and Tess’s stigmatized history.