Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was the last great Victorian novelist and one of the first great modern poets. Born in a cottage in Dorset, the son of a stonemason, he trained as an architect, then created in fourteen novels the region he called Wessex — the rural south-west of England, its heaths, downs, villages and market towns, its dialects, customs and labourers — and filled it with tragedies of thwarted love, social ambition and cosmic indifference: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). The outrage that greeted Tess and Jude drove him from fiction, and for the last thirty years of his long life he wrote poetry — more than nine hundred poems, including the elegies for his dead wife, Poems of 1912–13 — that made him a master and influence for poets from Philip Larkin to Seamus Heaney.

Life

Bockhampton and Dorchester

Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 at Higher Bockhampton, a hamlet near Dorchester in Dorset, in a thatched cottage at the edge of a heath. His father, Thomas, was a master mason and builder who played the fiddle at dances and in the church band; his mother, Jemima, a former servant, was a great reader who encouraged her son’s education. He was a frail child. He grew up immersed in the rural culture of ballads, church music, folk customs, and village gossip that would fill his fiction, and in the life of a world where labourers still worked by hand, the seasons ruled, and old ways persisted.

He went to school in Dorchester, learned Latin, and at sixteen was apprenticed to a Dorchester architect, John Hicks. He read Greek tragedy in the early mornings. In 1862 he went to London to work for the architect Arthur Blomfield, specialising in church restoration; he read Darwin, Mill, Huxley and the Higher Critics, lost his Christian faith, and wrote poems that no magazine would take.

Novelist

Returning to Dorset, he turned to fiction. His first novel, a satire, was rejected (George Meredith, the publisher’s reader, advised him to write something with more plot). In 1870, sent to restore the church of St Juliot in Cornwall, he met Emma Gifford, the rector’s sister-in-law, a lively, romantic young woman who rode the cliffs on her pony; they married in 1874. Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), a gentle comedy of a village church choir, and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), serialised in the Cornhill, made his name. The latter — the story of the independent young farmer Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, the steadfast shepherd Gabriel Oak, the obsessed farmer Boldwood and the dashing, faithless Sergeant Troy — was the first novel to use the name “Wessex”.

The novels that followed grew darker. The Return of the Native (1878) is set on the brooding Egdon Heath, whose description opens the novel; Clym Yeobright returns from Paris to teach the poor, and marries the passionate, restless Eustacia Vye, who longs to escape; it ends in her drowning. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) begins with a drunken hay-trusser, Michael Henchard, selling his wife and baby daughter to a sailor at a country fair for five guineas; twenty years later, sober and the mayor of Casterbridge (Dorchester), he is ruined by his own pride and rashness and the return of his past — “a man of character”, in the subtitle. The Woodlanders (1887) is set among the woods and orchards. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) caused a sensation with its subtitle, “A Pure Woman”, for a heroine who is seduced, bears an illegitimate child and commits murder.

Jude the Obscure (1895) went further. Jude Fawley, a stonemason who dreams of studying at the university town of Christminster (Oxford), is shut out by class, trapped in a disastrous marriage, and lives unmarried with his cousin, the free-thinking, nervous Sue Bridehead; their children die horribly — Jude’s son from his first marriage, “Little Father Time”, hangs himself and his half-siblings “because we are too menny.” Reviewers called it “Jude the Obscene”; the Bishop of Wakefield burned a copy. Hardy wrote: “the experience completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing.” He never wrote another.

Poet

In 1898 he published Wessex Poems, and devoted the rest of his life to verse: eight collections of lyrics, ballads, narratives and meditations, and The Dynasts (1904–08), a vast “epic-drama” of the Napoleonic Wars in verse and prose, overseen by “Spirits” who watch the blind workings of the “Immanent Will”. His poems are often short, irregular, in a rugged, old-fashioned diction full of odd words, about time, memory, love, loss, chance and nature. “The Darkling Thrush” (dated 31 December 1900) sees the century’s corpse in a desolate winter landscape and an old thrush singing “some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware”. “Channel Firing” (1914) imagines the dead woken by naval gunnery practice; “The Convergence of the Twain” describes the iceberg and the Titanic as made for each other by the Immanent Will; “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” sees a man harrowing clods and lovers whispering, which will go on “though Dynasties pass”.

His marriage to Emma had become bitter and estranged; they lived separately within their house, Max Gate, which Hardy had designed near Dorchester. When she died suddenly in November 1912, he was overwhelmed by grief and remorse, and wrote the Poems of 1912–13, among the finest elegies in English, revisiting the places in Cornwall where they had courted forty years before: “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” (“The Voice”).

In 1914 he married his secretary, Florence Dugdale, nearly forty years younger. He received the Order of Merit and honorary degrees; young writers made pilgrimages to Max Gate. He died on 11 January 1928, aged eighty-seven. His ashes were placed in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey; his heart was buried in Emma’s grave at Stinsford, the church of his childhood.

Vision

Chance and indifference. Hardy’s universe is governed not by Providence or justice but by chance, coincidence and the blind workings of nature. A letter slipped under a door goes beneath the carpet (Tess); a man arrives a moment too late; a wedding happens on the wrong day. He called it “crass casualty” in the poem “Hap” (1866): he could bear suffering if he knew that some vengeful god willed it — “But not so… Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, / And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan.” His characters suffer because the universe is not designed for human happiness, and because society’s rules and their own natures conspire against them.

Wessex and modernity. The novels record the passing of a rural world — its customs, dialects, crafts, festivals and social bonds — as railways, machinery, education and migration transform it. Tess’s mother speaks dialect; Tess speaks two languages; the threshing machine on the farm of Flintcomb-Ash is a “red tyrant”.

Society and morality. Hardy attacked the conventional morality of his age — its double standard for men and women, its marriage laws, its religious hypocrisy, its class barriers to education. He insisted on the dignity of the rural poor and the injustice of their lot.

Tragedy. He modelled his novels on Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, giving rural labourers and dairymaids the stature of tragic heroes; the “President of the Immortals” in Tess echoes Aeschylus.

Pessimism or meliorism? Hardy denied being a pessimist. He called himself an “evolutionary meliorist”, believing that honest acknowledgement of suffering was needed before improvement: “if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”

Legacy

Hardy’s novels have been constantly adapted — John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979), Michael Winterbottom’s Jude (1996). As a poet he was a decisive influence on the English tradition of plain-spoken, formally skilled, melancholy verse — Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, John Betjeman and especially Philip Larkin, who called him “the one poet I would least like to lose”. Dorset’s tourist industry calls itself “Hardy Country”.

In conversation

• “Far from the madding crowd” — away from the frenzied world (Hardy borrowed the phrase from Gray’s Elegy).
• Crass casualty — the blind chance that rules lives.
• A Henchard — a self-destructive man of pride; Little Father Time — the child crushed by adult despair.