Profile of Thomas Hardy on Famous Like Me

Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was a novelist, short story writer, and poet of the naturalist movement, who delineated characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-imaginary county of Wessex, is marked by poetic descriptions, and fatalism.

Biography

Thomas Hardy was born at Upper Bockhampton near Dorchester in Dorset. His father was a stonemason. His mother was ambitious and well-read and supplemented his formal education. Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association.

Although Hardy was estranged from his wife, her death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him. He made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places linked with her, and with their courtship, and wrote a series, Poems 1912-13, exploring his grief. In 1914 he married Florence Dugdale, 40 years his junior, whom he met in 1905. The writer Robert Graves, in his autobiography Goodbye to All That, recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s. Hardy received Graves and his newly married wife and was encouraging about the younger author's work.

Hardy was a confirmed atheist. Some attributed the bleak outlook of many of his novels as reflecting his view of the absence of God. Hardy fell ill in December 1927 and died in January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed. His funeral, on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, was a controversial occasion: his family and friends had wished him to be buried at Stinsford but his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, had insisted he should be placed in Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford and his ashes were interred in the abbey. Hardy's cottage at Bockhampton and Max Gate in Dorchester are owned by the National Trust. Hardy's work was admired by authors D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In 1910 he was appointed as a Member of the Order of Merit.

Novels

Hardy's work takes place in the "partly-real, partly-dream" county of Wessex (named after the Anglo-Saxon kingdom which existed in the area). The landscape was modelled on the real counties of Berkshire, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire, with fictional places based on real locations. He captured the epoch just before the railways and the industrial revolution changed the English countryside. His works are pessimistic and bitterly ironic. His writing is rough but capable of immense power. Hardy had an eye for poignant detail, such as the spreading bloodstain on the ceiling at the end of Tess or little Jude's suicide note; he kept clippings from newspaper reports of real events and used them as details in his novels.

His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished in 1867, failed to find a publisher and Hardy destroyed the manuscript. Only parts of the novel remain. He was encouraged to try again by mentor and friend, Victorian poet and novelist, George Meredith. Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) were published anonymously. In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes was published under his own name. The story draws on Hardy's courtship of Emma Gifford, whom he married in 1874. His next novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), was his first important work. Hardy said that in Far from the Madding Crowd he first introduced Wessex. The novel was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Over the next 25 years Hardy produced 10 more novels. His finest prose work is classified by himself as "Novels of Character and Environment". Hardy was a gloomy pessimist who believed in the impersonal and, generally, negative powers of fate; for his realistic representation of people, mostly the working class.

The Hardys moved from London to Yeovil and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878). In 1885 they returned to Dorchester, moving into Max Gate—a house that Hardy had designed himself. There Hardy wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and The Woodlanders (1887). Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a 'fallen woman' and was initially refused publication. Its subtitle, A Pure Woman, was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle-classes. It was denounced by critics at the time and when Jude the Obscure was published, in 1895, it was met with even stronger negative outcries by the Victorian public for its frank treatment of sex. It was referred to as "Jude the Obscene." It was heavily criticized for its apparent attack on the institution of marriage. The book caused further strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage due to Emma's concern that it would be read as autobiographical. Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags and the Bishop of Wakefield is reputed to have burnt a copy. Disgusted with the public reception of two of his greatest works, Hardy gave up writing novels altogether.

Poetry

In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry was his first love, and published collections until his death in 1928. His poetry was not as well received by his contemporaries as his novels had been, but critical response to Hardy's poetry has warmed considerably in recent years, in part because of the influence of Philip Larkin. However, his poetry is still not considered as well, critically, as his prose. His poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and life, and mankind's long struggle against indifference to human suffering. A vein of regret tinges his often seemingly banal themes. His poems range in style from the epic closet drama Dynasts to smaller, and often hopeful or even cheerful, poems of the moment. Here is The Darkling Thrush dated 31 December 1900.

I leant upon a coppice gate

  When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

  The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

  Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

  Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

  The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

  The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

  Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

  Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

  The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

  Of joy illimited;

An agèd thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

  In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

  Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

  Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

  Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

  His happy good-night air

Some blessèd Hope, whereof he knew

  And I was unaware.

This has elements typical of Hardy's work. The first person voice; an incident in nature triggering deep reflections; the bucolic setting; the desolate landscape; the struggle of small forces against inimical nature; the possibility of redemption. Note the formal rhythm and rhyme, the high poetic tone, and simple phrases such as "happy good-night air".

Bibliography

Prose

Hardy divided his novels into three classes.

Novels of Character and Environment

• Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
• Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
• The Return of the Native (1878)
• The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
• The Woodlanders (1887)
• Wessex Tales (1888)
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
• Life's Little Ironies (1894)
• Jude the Obscure (1895)

Romances and Fantasies

• A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
• The Trumpet-Major (1880)
• Two on a Tower (1882)
• A Group of Noble Dames (1891)
• The Well-Beloved (1897) (first published as a serial from 1892).

Novels of Ingenuity

• Desperate Remedies (1871)
• The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)
• A Laodicean (1881)

There are a number of minor tales and novels including, the unpublished The Poor Man and the Lady written in 1867 and Alicia's Diary (1887).

Poetry

• Wessex Poems (1898)
• Poems of the Past and Present (1901)
• The Dynasts (1904)
• The Dynasts, Part 2 (1906)
• The Dynasts, Part 3 (1908)
• Satires of Circumstance (1914)
• Collected Poems (1919)
• Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)
• Human Shows (1925)

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