Thomas Hardy

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Hardy died at Max Gate on the 11th of January 1928, but not before dictating one final poem to his wife from his deathbed. His death certificate listed cardiac syncope as the cause, with old age as a contributing factor. He was 87. Then came the argument over where to put him.

  Hardy had wanted to lie in the churchyard at Stinsford, in the same grave as his first wife, Emma. His friends and family agreed. But his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, pushed for Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. Neither side would yield entirely, so a compromise was struck: his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes went to the Abbey. It was a division as strange as anything Hardy had put in his novels.

  He had grown up in a hamlet in Dorset, the son of a stonemason, and left school at sixteen to apprentice as an architect. He became famous writing novels he claimed not to care much about, then spent the second half of his life writing poetry he regarded as his true work. Two of those novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, landed in the top fifty of the BBC's survey of best-loved novels. A bishop reportedly burned Jude the Obscure. By the time he died, Hardy had received 25 nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature without ever winning it.

  What drove a man who said he never cared much about fiction to write fourteen novels over 25 years? And what does it mean that the work he valued most, his poetry, was the work the world came to last?

• 2. The Stonemason's Son

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  Higher Bockhampton was a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford, just east of Dorchester in Dorset, and that is where Thomas Hardy was born on the 2nd of June 1840. His father, also named Thomas, worked as a stonemason and local builder. His mother, Jemima, née Hand, was well read and educated her son herself until he started school at Bockhampton at age eight.

  For several years he attended Mr. Last's Academy for Young Gentlemen in Dorchester, where he learned Latin and showed clear academic promise. But the family had no money for a university, and when Hardy turned sixteen his formal schooling ended. He was apprenticed instead to James Hicks, a local architect, and began work on practical projects including the design of a new church at Athelhampton.

  In 1862 he moved to London, enrolling as a student at King's College London and joining Arthur Blomfield's practice as assistant architect. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. He worked on Christ Church in East Sheen, Richmond, and on All Saints' parish church in Windsor. In the mid-1860s he was put in charge of excavating part of the graveyard at St Pancras Old Church before the Midland Railway extended to a new terminus at St Pancras.

  London did not suit him. Hardy was acutely conscious of class divisions and his own sense of social inferiority. He was drawn to the social reform writings of John Stuart Mill, whose essay On Liberty he would later call one of his cures for despair. A friend from Dorset, Horace Moule, introduced him to Charles Fourier and Auguste Comte. After five years in the city, worried about his health, Hardy returned to Dorset and settled in Weymouth, resolved to dedicate himself to writing.

• 3. The Novelist He Became

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  Hardy's first completed novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, failed to find a publisher. He showed it to George Meredith, the Victorian poet and novelist who became his mentor, and Meredith warned him the book was too politically inflammatory and could harm his future prospects. Hardy took the advice, abandoned the manuscript, eventually destroyed it, and later described it in his own recollections as "socialistic, not to say revolutionary; yet not argumentatively so."

  His next two novels, Desperate Remedies in 1871 and Under the Greenwood Tree in 1872, were published anonymously. It was while working on Under the Greenwood Tree that he met Emma Gifford in Cornwall, where he had been sent on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot. They married on the 17th of September 1874 at St Peter's Church in Paddington.

  Far from the Madding Crowd, published that same year, was the novel that changed everything. It introduced the idea of calling the west-of-England region where his stories were set by the old Saxon name of Wessex. It was successful enough that Hardy gave up architecture and pursued writing full-time. Over the next 25 years he produced ten more novels.

  The later major works pushed harder against Victorian convention. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, published in 1891, was initially refused publication for its sympathetic treatment of a woman the period called "fallen." Its subtitle, A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented, was a deliberate provocation aimed at middle-class sensibilities. Jude the Obscure in 1895 went further still, attacking the institutions of marriage and religion so directly that some booksellers reportedly wrapped it in brown paper bags. The Bishop of Wakefield, Walsham How, was said to have burned his copy. Hardy noted the incident in his 1912 postscript: "After these verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop - probably in his despair at not being able to burn me."

  In a posthumously printed interview in the Bookman in March 1928, Hardy gave a simpler explanation for why he stopped writing fiction: "I never cared very much about writing novels" and "I had written quite enough novels."

• 4. Fate and the Wessex World

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  Across his novels Hardy built a semi-fictional geography out of real English counties. His Wessex eventually took in Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire. The name came from the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that had occupied approximately the same territory.

  The landscape carried weight beyond scenery. Crossroads appear repeatedly in Hardy's fiction as moments where fate exerts itself. A junction offers alternative destinations but is also, in Hardy's telling, symbolic of transition and opportunity. His characters do not simply travel through the world; they arrive at points where the story could have gone differently, and usually did not go well.

  In Far from the Madding Crowd, chance governs the plot: had Bathsheba not sent the valentine, had Fanny not missed her wedding, the story would have taken an entirely different path. In Two on a Tower, the astronomer Swithin St Cleeve is caught between his own idealism and the social expectations of Lady Viviette Constantine, who is described in the novel as his binary opposite in nearly every respect: aristocratic where he is lower class, mature where he is young, married where he is single, religious where he is agnostic.

  Philip Larkin, reflecting on what made Hardy's sensibility distinctive, argued that suffering was the central note. Larkin wrote that any approach to Hardy's work must first identify "what element is peculiarly his, which imaginative note he strikes most plangently," and that to deny suffering was that element was, in Larkin's view, wrong-headed. Hardy's tragic characters struggle against passions and social circumstances they cannot escape, and the Wessex landscape around them is never merely background.

• 5. The Poet He Always Was

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  Wessex Poems, published in 1898, was Hardy's first poetry collection. It gathered work written over 30 years. Hardy had considered himself primarily a poet all along; the novels had come first in the world's estimation, but not in his own.

  In the twentieth century he published only poetry. Poems of the Past and the Present appeared in 1901, containing "The Darkling Thrush," originally titled "The Century's End," one of his most recognized poems. His three-part epic closet drama The Dynasts, published between 1904 and 1908, made the Napoleonic Wars its canvas. In 2006 Keith Wilson described The Dynasts as a work that "should stand among his greatest achievements."

  War poetry came naturally to a writer who had spent decades meditating on history and suffering. His poems "Drummer Hodge," "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'" and "The Man He Killed" all concern conflict, often told from the point of view of ordinary soldiers in their own colloquial speech. The influence reached other war poets: Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon both absorbed it.

  The work most often now regarded as the peak of his poetic achievement grew from grief. His first wife Emma died in 1912 after roughly 20 years of estrangement. Hardy traveled back to Cornwall to revisit the places from their courtship, and what followed was Poems 1912-13, later collected in Satires of Circumstance in 1914. Claire Tomalin, in her 2007 biography, argued that these elegies are among "the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry" and that Hardy became a truly great English poet only after Emma's death.

  Larkin, who included 27 of Hardy's poems in his edition of The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse in 1973, compared to just nine by T. S. Eliot, put the influence plainly. After Hardy's death, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and Philip Larkin all took up his cause. Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and others traced their own verse back to his.

• 6. Faith, Doubt, and the Immanent Will

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  Hardy was baptized into the Church of England five weeks after his birth, and his father and uncle both contributed to church music. As a young man apprenticing in architecture, he befriended Henry R. Bastow, a Plymouth Brethren man who was preparing for adult baptism in the Baptist Church. Hardy was drawn toward the idea, then backed away. Bastow eventually emigrated to Australia, maintained a correspondence with Hardy for years, and then the letters stopped. That closed Hardy's formal engagement with the Baptists.

  His friend Horace Moule, who had introduced him to scientific findings that complicated literal readings of the Bible, gave Hardy a copy of Gideon Mantell's The Wonders of Geology in 1858. Scholars have since suggested that the dramatic cliffhanger scene in A Pair of Blue Eyes, where the character Henry Knight is left literally hanging off a cliff, drew on Mantell's geological descriptions. Some have also argued that Knight was based on Moule himself.

  What replaced orthodox belief in Hardy's thinking was something he called the Immanent Will: a supernatural force that controls the universe through indifference rather than intent. He held onto a fascination with ghosts and spirits while also retaining a deep emotional attachment to the rhythms of the Christian church as he had known them in rural Dorset. In later years he turned toward Henri Bergson, then Albert Einstein and the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart, seeking some rational basis for believing in an afterlife.

  When a clergyman, Dr. A. B. Grosart, wrote to ask him how to reconcile the horrors of human and animal life with the concept of an all-powerful and all-good God, Hardy replied in the third person: "Mr. Hardy regrets that he is unable to offer any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr. Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness." He then suggested the clergyman read Darwin and Herbert Spencer.

• 7. Hardy Among His Contemporaries

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  In 1914, Hardy was one of 53 leading British authors who signed the "Authors' Declaration" justifying Britain's involvement in the First World War. The list included H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The declaration named the German invasion of Belgium a brutal crime and said Britain could not without dishonor have refused to participate. Hardy signed, then was horrified by what followed. He wrote that he did not think a world capable of such destruction was worth saving, and to John Galsworthy he wrote that "the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world."

  His influence on other writers was direct and acknowledged. D. H. Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy, written in 1914 though not published until 1936, used Hardy as a springboard for Lawrence's own developing philosophy; Lawrence's later novels The Rainbow and Women in Love owed something to Hardy's treatment of character. John Cowper Powys dedicated his first novel, Wood and Stone in 1915, "to the greatest poet and novelist of our age Thomas Hardy." W. Somerset Maugham based the novelist Edward Driffield in Cakes and Ale on Hardy. Robert Graves, in his autobiography Good-Bye to All That published in 1929, recalled visiting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s and finding him warm and encouraging.

  Musically, Gerald Finzi, Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Gustav Holst all set Hardy poems. Holst composed Egdon Heath: A Homage to Thomas Hardy in 1927, evoking the landscape of the novels. John Ireland's orchestral tone poem Mai-Dun appeared in 1921. The house at Max Gate and his birthplace in Bockhampton are now both owned by the National Trust.

  Hardy's estate at his death in January 1928 was valued at £95,418. His executors then burned most of his letters and notebooks; 12 notebooks survived, one of them containing press cuttings and notes from the 1820s that had fed directly into his fiction. The opening chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge, scholars found, was built on newspaper reports of wife-selling.