It concerns the heroine, Anne Garland, being pursued by three suitors: John Loveday, the eponymous trumpet major in a British regiment, honest and loyal; his brother Bob, a flighty sailor; and Festus Derriman, the cowardly nephew of the local squire.

Near Budmouth (Weymouth) Anne Garland lives with her widowed mother in part of a flour mill, next to their landlord and friend miller William Loveday.

Anne has a secret passion for him (they were childhood sweethearts), but he has brought home Matilda, a prospective bride whom he met just two weeks earlier in Southampton.

Festus's uncle insists on telling Anne where he's hidden his will and other documents, but she drops the (cryptic) details in a field, where they're found by a mysterious woman.

John thinks he has a chance with Anne but discovers she's with Bob, so to cover his embarrassment he pretends to be in love with an unnamed actress at the Budmouth theatre.

Pressed to show Anne and Bob his sweetheart, John buys them tickets for the play, which is also attended by the King and Queen, who are staying in Budmouth.

The press gang (naval recruiters who force men into service) are in town, and Festus and Matilda tip them off that Bob is an experienced sailor.

John tries to be cold towards Anne, but this only makes her warmer towards him, until she virtually proposes to him, just as Bob, newly promoted to Naval Lieutenant, writes to say he's coming home for her.

Anne is worried that he'll do something stupid, but is distracted by Squire Derriman, who arrives asking her to hide his deeds box, as Festus and his new fiancée Matilda are searching the house for it.

Then it turns out that Festus is waiting outside; he comes in, Anne flees, and watching from a hole in the floor of the room above, sees Squire Derriman sneak in and try to retrieve the box.

Festus and Matilda are married, Anne and Bob are to be engaged, and John's regiment is posted away to battle in Spain, where, we are told, he will die.

In this setting, in which he explores the subversive effects and nature of ordinary human beings such when desire and conflicting loyalties on the systemized versions of history.

Like some of Hardy's other famous and popular novels such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge such often implore and deal with deep concepts such as disappointment in love and the "perversity of life", but The Trumpet-Major also deal with these very themes present in many novels and poems which are often laid with a carefully controlled elegiac feeling and much irony in them that make them stand out among the Victorian classical works of literature.

[1] It is also perhaps extraordinary in the extent to which Hardy aimed for historical accuracy; to that end, he conducted research at the British Museum and consulted various periodicals and newspaper accounts of the time.

Other sources include that Hardy, as a young man, would visit and spoke to the Chelsea Pensioners about the Peninsular War and the Hundred Days campaign in which Napoleon was utterly defeated by the British army of the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo.

Thomas Hardy's novel provided the source of Alun Hoddinott's opera The Trumpet Major, with libretto by Myfanwy Piper, first performed in Manchester on 1 April 1981.

There were departures from the novel: while the novel ends of a tragic note, with John Loveday going off to his death on the battlefields of Spain, as Evelyn Evans writes: ‘the curtain of the re-written play fell on laughter, song and dancing.’ Hardy attended some rehearsals at the Corn Exchange, remarking on the fact that many of the performers were direct descendants of Dorset inhabitants who had lived through those turbulent times.

As the Dorset County Chronicle reported: ‘there were to be observed in the front seats a posse of leading dramatic critics who had come down from London especially’, writing ‘critiques, to be wired to Town piping hot from their busily plying pencils.’ The Times devoted nearly a column to its review of the play and a leading article two days later: extraordinary exposure for an amateur company in a small county town, but clear evidence of Hardy's status as an author of international standing.

[7] Unlike most Hardy novels, in which the essence of the story is fictional – though often with reference to contemporary matters (such as changes in divorce law playing a part in The Woodlanders) – the real events of 1804-5 when Dorset was preparing for the palpable threat of French invasion near Weymouth (Budmouth) permeate The Trumpet Major, a danger that only receded with victory at Trafalgar.

Hardy was born in 1840, some 35 years after this period, and it's not hard to imagine him sitting, as a child, listening to first-hand accounts of life in Dorset during that time and the way in which it dominated local people's lives.

The love story at the centre of the novel plays like a complex dance, with the two brothers, John and Bob Loveday and the villainous Festus Derriman all trying to gain the hand of Anne Garland.