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Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) |
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English poet and regional novelist, who depicted the county "Wessex," named after the ancient kingdom of Alfred the Great. Thomas Hardy's career as writer spanned over fifty years. His earliest books appeared when Anthony Trollope (1815-82) wrote his Palliser series, and he published poetry in the decade of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Hardy's work reflected his stoical pessimism and sense of tragedy in human life. Critics can never be made to understand that the failure may be greater than the success. It is their particular duty to point this out; but the public points it out to them. To have strength to roll a stone weighing a hundredweight to the top of the mount is a success, and to have the strength to roll a stone of ten hundredweight only half-way up that mount is a failure. But the latter is two or three times as strong a deed." (Thomas Hardy in his diary, 1907, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928 by Florence Emily Hardy, The Macmillan Company, 1930, p. 123) Thomas Hardy's own life wasn't similar to his stories. He was born in the village of Higher Bockhampton, on the edge of Puddletown Heath. His father was a master mason and building contractor. With a certain pride the author once said, that although his ancestors never rose above the level of a master-mason, they never sunk below it. Hardy's mother, whose tastes included Latin poets and French romances, provided for his education. After schooling in Dorchester, Hardy was apprenticed to an architect. While working in an office, which specialized in restoration of churches, Hardy supervided the removal of the remains of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin when a railway was run through part of the churchyard of of St Pancras Old Church. Some of the displaced gravestones he set around an ash tree that was later named after him. In 1874 Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford, for whom he wrote 40 years later, after her death, a group of poems known as Veteris Vestigiae Flammae (Vestiges of an Old Flame). At the age of 22 Hardy moved to London and started to write poems, which idealized the rural life. He was an assistant in the architectural firm of Arthur Blomfield, visited art galleries, attended evening classes in French at King's College, enjoyed Shakespeare and opera, and read works of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mills, whose positivism influenced him deeply. In 1867 Hardy left London for the family home in Dorset, and resumed work briefly with Hicks in Dorchester. During this period of his life Hardy entered into a temporary engagement with Tryphena Sparks, a pretty and lively sixteen-year-old relative. Hardy continued his architectural career, but encouraged by Emma Lavinia Gifford, he started to consider literature as his "true vocation." Hardy did not first find public for his poetry and the novelist George Meredith advised Hardy to write a novel. The Poor Man and the Lady, written in 1867, was rejected by many publishers and Hardy destroyed the manuscript. His first book that gained notice was Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). After its success Hardy was convinced that he could earn his living by his pen. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) came into conflict with Victorian morality. It explored the dark side of his family connections in Berkshire. In the story the poor villager girl Tess Durbeyfield is seduced by the wealthy Alec D'Uberville. She becomes pregnant but the child dies in infancy. Tess finds work as a dairymaid on a farm and falls in love with Angel Clare, a clergyman's son, who marries her. When Tess tells Angel about her past, he hypocritically deserts her. Tess becomes Alec's mistress. Angel returns from Brazil, repenting his harshness, but finds her living with Alec. Tess kills Alec in desperation, she is arrested and hanged. Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) aroused even more controversy. The story dramatized the conflict between carnal and spiritual life, tracing Jude Fawley's life from his boyhood to his early death. Jude marries Arabella, but deserts her. He falls in love with his cousin, hypersensitive Sue Bridehead, who marries the decaying schoolmaster, Phillotson, in a masochist fit. Jude and Sue obtain divorces, but their life together deteriorates under the pressure of poverty and social disapproval. The eldest son of Jude and Arabella, a grotesque boy nicknamed 'Father Time,' kills their children and himself. Broken by the loss, Sue goes back to Phillotson, and Jude returns to Arabella. Soon thereafter Jude dies, and his last words are: "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?" (Jude the Obscure, edited with an introduction and notes by Patricia Ingham, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 393) In 1896, disturbed by the public uproar over the unconventional subjects of two of his greatest novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Hardy announced that he would never write fiction again. A bishop solemnly burnt Jude, "probably in his despair at not being able to burn me," Hardy noted in April 1912. (Ibid., in 'Postscript' by Thomas Hardy, p. xliv) Hardy's marriage had also suffered from the public outrage - critics on both sides of the Atlantic called the author degenerate and the work disgusting. Hardy wrote: "Then somebody discovered that Jude was a moral work - austere in its treatment of a difficult subject - as if the writer had not all the time said that it was in the Preface. Thereupon many uncursed me, and the matter ended, the only effect of it on human conduct that I could discover being its effect on myself - the experience completely curing me of the further interest in novel-writing." (Ibid., in 'Postscript' by Thomas Hardy, p. xliv) According to Robert Graves, Hardy "regarded professional critics as parasites no less noxious than autograph-hunters, and wished the world rid of them." (Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography by Robert Graves, Jonathan Cape, 1929, p. 376) By 1885 the Hardys had settled near Dorchester at Max Gate, a house designed by the author and built by his brother, Henry. With the exceptions of seasonal stays in London and occasional excursions abroad, this Bockhampton home was Hardy's home for the rest of his life. "The very red-brick solidity of Hardy's house was disturbing to the visitors who came down from London in the expectation of finding him snugly ensconced in some ol manor house or thatched cottage . . . Max Gate, even so, was a modest house, providing neither more nor less than the accommondation they needed—if Hardy was to have a study to himself. and if they were to have a spare bedroom for occasional guests." (Thomas Hardy: A Biography by Michael Millgate, Random House, 1982, p. 261) After giving up the novel, Hardy brought out a first group of Wessex poems, some of which had been composed 30 years before. During the remainder of his life, Hardy continued to publish several collections of poems. "Hardy, in fact, was the ideal poet of a generation. He was the most passionate and the most learned of them all. He had the luck, singular in poets, of being able to achieve a competence other than by poetry and then devote the ending years of his life to his beloved verses." (The March of Literature: From Confucius' Day to Our Own by Ford Madox Ford, Dalkey Archibe Press, 1998, p. 777) Hardy's gigantic panorama of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts, composed between 1903 and 1908, was mostly in blank verse. Hardy succeeded on the death of his friend George Meredith to the presidency of the Society of Authors in 1909. King George V conferred on him the Order of Merit and he received in 1912 the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Hardy remained in his childless marriage with Emma Gifford
although it was unhappy and he had - or he
imagined he had -
affairs with other women passing briefly through his life. Emma Hardy
died in 1912. At that time she had already withdrawn from her husband,
and spent much of her time in a small room in the attic. She kept a
diary that she titled "What I Think of My Husband." Filled with
remorse, Hardy had her body placed in a coffin at the foot of his bed,
where it remained until the funeral. In 1914 Hardy
married his secretary, Florence Emily Dugdale, a woman in her 30's,
almost 40 years younger than he. Their relationship had started from a
fan letter she sent him. Nevertheless, Hardy wrote lovingly of Emma in
his
poems, without hiding their estrangement: "Woman much
missed, how you call to me, call to me, / Saying that now you are not
as you were / When you had changed from the one who was all to me, /
But as at first, when our day was fair." (from 'The
Voice,' written in December 1912, Satires
of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries with Miscellaneous Pieces
by Thomas Hardy, The Macmillan and Co., 1914, p. 109) From 1920 through 1927 Hardy concentrated on his autobiography, which was disguised as the work of Florence Hardy. It appeared in two volumes (1928 and 1930). Dispite his country upbringing and reputation as a rural writer, Hardy underlined that he spent a great deal of time in the capital and was familiar with modernism. On the other hand, he gave little information on his methods as a writer. There is no hint of extra-marital affairs and he never criticises his first wife. Hardy's housekeeper during the last years of his life never remembered his taking a bath. (The Wordsworth Book of Literary Anecdotes by Robert Hendrickson, Wordsworth Reference, 1997, p. 123) Human Shows Far Phantasies Songs and Trifles (1925) was Hardy's last book. Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres appeared posthumously in 1928. Hardy died in Dorchester, Dorset, on January 11, 1928. Eva
Dugtale
washed his body and prepared it for burial. Hardy's ashes were cremated
in Dorchester and buried with impressive ceremonies in the Poet's
Corner in Westminster Abbey. According to a literary anecdote his heart
was to be buried in Stinsford, his birthplace, but it never happened.
"All went according to
plan until a cat belonging to the poet's sister snatched the heart off
her kitchen table and disappeared into the
woods with it." (The
Wordsworth Book of Literary Anecdotes, p. 123) Hardy bravely challenged many of the sexual and religious
conventions of the Victorian age. The center of his novels was the
rather desolate and history-freighted countryside around Dorchester. In
the early 1860s, after the appearance Darwin's Origin of Species
(1859), Hardy's faith was still unshaken, but he soon adopted the
mechanical-determinist view of universe's cruelty, reflected in the
inevitably tragic and self-destructive fates of his characters.
Although the stories do not feature ostensible elements of horror,
there are darker undercurrents, too, which has been described as
'Hardyan Folk Horror'. Hardy himself thought that the occureence of
unease is more impressive in the daytime than if it had happened in a
midnight dream. In his poems Hardy depicted rural life without sentimentality -
his mood was often stoically hopeless. "Though he was a modern, even a
revolutionary writer in his time, most of us read him now as a lyrical
pastoralist. It may be a sign of the times that some of us take his
books to bed, as if even his pessimistic vision was one that enabled us
to sleep soundly." (Anatole
Broyard in New York
Times, May 12, 1982) Hardy
had antipathy
towards religious hypocrisy, but he had a deep
understanding of the saceed, and the holy. In the poem 'God's
Funeral' (1908-1910) Hardy imagines himself watching a "strange mystic
form" being
carried across a twilit plain. Affected by sorrow of the mourners he
says: "I could not prop their faith: and yet / Many I had known:
with all I sympathized; / And though struck speechless, I did not
forget / That what was mourned for, I, too, long had prized." (Satires of Circumstance,
Lyrics and Reveries with Miscellaneous Pieces by Thomas Hardy,
The Macmillan and Co., 1914, p. 50) For further reading: Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition by Alan G. Smith, Robert Edgar and John Marland (2023); Thomas Hardy: A Companion to the Novels by Ronald D. Morrison (2021); Thomas Hardy's Women: in Life and Literature by Peter Tait (2021); Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives, edited by Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson (2017); Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin (2007); The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography by Paul Turner (2001); Thomas Hardy in Our Time by Robert Langbaum (1995); Hardy and the Erotic by Terence R. Wright (1989); Thomas Hardy by Michadel Millgate (1982); The Older Hardy by Robert Gittings (1980); An Essay on Thomas Hardy by J. Bayley (1978); The Final Years of Thomas Hardy, 1912-1928 by Harold Orel (1976); Young Thomas Hardy by Robert Gittings (1975); Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography by J.I.M. Stewart (1971); The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary by J.O. Bailey (1970); Thomas Hardy by I.Howe (1967); Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography by Evelyn Hardy (1954); Thomas Hardy by Albert J. Guerard (1949); Hardy of Wessex: His Life and Career by C.J. Weber (1940); The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928 by Florence Emily Hardy (1930; The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891 by Florence Emily Hardy (1928) Selected works:
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