Everything about Thomas Hardy totally explained
Thomas Hardy, OM (
June 2,
1840 –
January 11,
1928) was an
English novelist,
short story writer, and
poet of the
naturalist movement, though he saw himself as a poet and wrote novels mainly for financial gain only. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-imaginary county of
Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his fifties, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after
The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Biography
Thomas Hardy was born at
Higher Bockhampton, a hamlet in the parish of
Stinsford to the east of
Dorchester in
Dorset,
England. His father worked as a stonemason and local builder. His mother was ambitious and well read, supplementing his formal education, which ended at the age of 16 when he became apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect. Hardy trained as an
architect in Dorchester before moving to
London in 1862. There he enrolled as a student at
King’s College London. He won prizes from the
Royal Institute of British Architects and the
Architectural Association. He never truly felt at home in London and when he returned five years later to Dorset he decided to dedicate himself to writing.
In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he married in 1874. Although he later became 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 their courtship; his
Poems 1912-13 explore his grief. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary
Florence Dugdale, 40 years his junior, whom he'd met in 1905. However, Hardy remained preoccupied with Emma's sudden death, and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry.
Hardy fell ill with
pleurisy 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, proved a controversial occasion: Hardy, his family and friends had wished him to be buried at
Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma. However, his executor, Sir
Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted he be placed in the abbey's
Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets' Corner.
Shortly after Hardy's death, the executors of his estate burnt his letters and notebooks. Twelve records survived, one of them containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s. Research into these provided insight into how Hardy kept track of them and how he used them in his later work.
Hardy's work was admired by many authors, amongst them
D. H. Lawrence and
Virginia Woolf. 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 warmly, and was encouraging about the younger author's work.
In 1910, Hardy was awarded the
Order of Merit.
Hardy's cottage at Bockhampton and
Max Gate in
Dorchester are owned by the
National Trust.
Religious beliefs
Hardy’s idea of fate in life gave way to his philosophical struggle with God. Although Hardy’s faith remained intact, the irony and struggles of life led him to question God and His traditional meaning in the Christian sense. Hardy's religious life seems to have mixed
agnosticism and
spiritism. Once, when asked in correspondence by a clergyman about the question of reconciling the horrors of pain with the goodness of a loving God, Hardy replied,
Nevertheless, Hardy frequently conceived of and wrote about supernatural forces that control the universe, more through indifference or caprice than any firm will. Also, Hardy showed in his writing some degree of fascination with ghosts and spirits. These new ideas, along with Darwinism, and a series of unsettling events in Hardy’s life may be the reason for his pessimistic attitude that's perceived by many critics and readers alike.
Novels
Hardy's first
novel,
The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher and Hardy destroyed the manuscript so only parts of the novel remain. He was encouraged to try again by his 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, a story drawing on Hardy's courtship of his first wife, was published under his own name.
Hardy said that he first introduced
Wessex in
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his next (and first important) novel. It was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Over the next twenty-five years Hardy produced ten more novels.
The Hardys moved from
London to
Yeovil and then to
Sturminster Newton, where he wrote
The Return of the Native (1878). In 1885, they moved for a last time, to
Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother. There he wrote
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886),
The Woodlanders (1887) and
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), the last of which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was initially refused publication. Its subtitle,
A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented, was intended to raise the eyebrows of the
Victorian middle-classes.
Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, met with even stronger negative outcries from the
Victorian public for its frank treatment of sex, and was often referred to as "Jude the Obscene". Heavily criticized for its apparent attack on the institution of marriage, the book caused further strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy was concerned that
Jude the Obscure would be read as being autobiographical. Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags, and the
Bishop of Wakefield is reputed to have burnt a copy. Once things have been put into motion, that'll play out. Hardy’s characters are in the grips of too much overwhelming fate.
He paints a vivid picture of rural life in the nineteenth century, with all its joys and suffering, a fatalistic world full of superstition and injustice. His heroes and heroines are often alienated from society and rarely become readmitted into it. He tends to emphasize the impersonal and, generally, negative powers of fate over the mainly working class people he represented in his novels. Hardy exhibits in his books elemental passion, deep instinct, the human will struggling against fatal and ill-comprehended laws, a victim also of unforeseeable change.
Tess, for example, ends with some of the most poignant lines in British Literature on this theme:
Jude the Obscure is full of the sense of crisis of the later Victorian period (as witnessed in
Matthew Arnold's '
Dover Beach'). It describes the tragedy of two new social types, Jude Fawley, a working man who attempts to educate himself, and his lover and cousin, Sue Bridehead, who represents the 'new woman' of the 1890s.
His mastery, as both an author and poet, lies in the creation of natural surroundings making discoveries through close observation and acute sensitiveness. He notices the smallest and most delicate details, yet he can also paint vast landscapes of his own Wessex in melancholy or noble moods. (His eye for poignant detail - such as the spreading bloodstain on the ceiling at the end of
Tess of the d'Urbervilles and
little Jude's suicide note - often came from clippings from newspaper reports of real events).
Poetry
» For the full text of several poems, see the External links section
In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry,
Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and published collections until his death in 1928. Although not as well received by his contemporaries as his novels, Hardy's poetry has been applauded considerably in recent years, in part because of the influence on
Philip Larkin. However, critically it's still not regarded as highly as his prose.
Most of his poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and life, and mankind's long struggle against indifference to human suffering. Some, like
The Darkling Thrush and
An August Midnight, appear as poems about writing poetry, because the nature mentioned in them gives Hardy the inspiration to write those. A vein of regret tinges his often seemingly banal themes. His compositions range in style from the three-volume epic
closet drama The Dynasts to smaller, and often hopeful or even cheerful ballads of the moment such as the little-known
The Children and Sir Nameless, a comic poem inspired by the tombs of the Martyns, builders of
Athelhampton.
A few of Hardy's poems, such as
The Blinded Bird (a melancholy polemic against the sport of
vinkenzetting), display his love of the natural world and his firm stance against
animal cruelty, exhibited in his
antivivisectionist views and his membership in the
RSPCA.
Composers who have set Hardy's text to music include
Gerald Finzi, who produced six song-cycles for poems by Hardy,
Benjamin Britten, who based his song-cycle
Winter Words on Hardy's poetry,
Ralph Vaughan Williams and
Gustav Holst. Holst also based one of his last orchestral works,
Egdon Heath, on Hardy's work. It is said to be Holst's masterpiece. Composer
Lee Hoiby's setting of "The Darkling Thrush" became the basis of the
multimedia opera
Darkling and Timothy Takach, a graduate of St. Olaf, has also put "The Darkling Thrush" into arrangement for a 4-part mixed choir.
Works
Prose
Hardy divided his novels and collected short stories into three classes:
Novels of Character and Environment
Romances and Fantasies
A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
The Trumpet-Major (1880)
Two on a Tower (1882)
A Group of Noble Dames (1891, a collection of short stories)
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)
Hardy also produced a number of minor tales and a collaborative novel, The Spectre of the Real (1894). An additional short-story collection, beyond the ones mentioned above, is A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913). His works have been collected as the 24-volume Wessex Edition (1912-1913) and the 37-volume Mellstock Edition (1919-1920). His largely self-written biography appears under his second wife's name in two volumes from 1928-1930, as The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891 and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928, now published in a critical one-volume edition as The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate (1984).
Poetry (not a comprehensive list)
The Photograph (1890)
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
Poems of the Past and Present (1901)
The Dynasts, Part 1 (1904)
The Dynasts, Part 2 (1906)
The Dynasts, Part 3 (1908)
Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909)
Satires of Circumstance (1914)
Moments of Vision (1917)
Collected Poems (1919, part of the Mellstock Edition of his novels and poems)
Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses (1922)
Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925)
Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928, published posthumously)
Drama
The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923)
Locations in novels
Berkshire is North Wessex,
Devon is Lower Wessex,
Dorset is South Wessex,
Somerset is Outer or Nether Wessex,
Wiltshire is Mid-Wessex,
Bere Regis is King's-Bere of Tess,
Bincombe Down cross roads is the scene of the military execution in A Melancholy Hussar. It is a true story, the deserters from the German Legion were shot in 1801 and are recorded in the parish register.
Bindon Abbey is where Clare carried her.
Bournemouth is Sandbourne of Hand of Ethelberta and Tess of the D'Urbervilles,
Bridport is Port Bredy,
Charborough House and its folly tower at is the model for Welland House in the novel Two on a Tower.
Corfe Castle is the Corvsgate-Castle of Hand of Ethelberta.
Cranborne Chase is The Chase scene of Tess's seduction. (Note - Bowerchalke on Cranborne Chase at was the film location for the great fire in John Schlesinger's 1967 film Far from the Madding Crowd.)
Dorchester, Dorset is Casterbridge, the scene of Mayor of Casterbridge.
Dunster Castle in Somerset is Castle De Stancy of A Laodicean.
Fordington moor is Durnover moor and fields.
Greenhill Fair near Bere Regis is Woodbury Hill Fair,
Lulworth Cove is Lulstead Cove,
Marnhull is Marlott of Tess of the D'Urbervilles,
Melbury House near Evershot is Great Hintock Court in A Group of Noble Dames.
Minterne is Little Hintock,
Owermoigne is Nether Moynton in Wessex Tales.
Piddlehinton and Piddle Trenthide are the Longpuddle of A Few Crusted Characters.
Puddletown Heath, Moreton Heath, Tincleton Heath and Bere Heath are Egdon Heath.
Poole is Havenpool in Life's Little Ironies.
Portland is the scene of The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved.
Puddletown is Weatherbury in Far from the Madding Crowd,
River Frome valley is the scene of Talbothays dairy in Tess.
Salisbury is Melchester in On the Western Circuit, Life's Little Ironies and Jude the Obscure etc.
Shaftesbury is Shaston in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.
Sherborne is Sherton-Abbas,
Sherborne Castle is home of Lady Baxby in A Group of Noble Dames.
Stonehenge is the scene of Tess's apprehension.
Sutton Poyntz is Overcombe.
Swanage is the Knollsea of Hand of Ethelberta.
Taunton is known as Toneborough in both Hardy's novels and poems (see http://www.wessex.me.uk/taunton.html).
Wantage is Alfredston, of Jude the Obscure. Fawley, Berkshire is Marygreen of Jude the Obscure.
Weyhill is Weydon Priors,
Weymouth is Budmouth Regis, the scene of Trumpet Major & portions of other novels;
Winchester is Wintoncester where Tess was executed. Wimborne is Warborne of Two on a Tower.
Wolfeton House, near Dorchester is the scene of The Lady Penelope in a Group of Noble Dames.
Woolbridge old Manor House, close to Wool station, is the scene of Tess's confession and honeymoon.
In other literature
Hardy provides the springboard for D. H. Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy (1936). Though this work became a platform for Lawrence's own developing philosophy rather than a more standard literary study, the influence of Hardy's treatment of character and Lawrence's own response to the central metaphysic behind many of Hardy's novels helped significantly in the development of The Rainbow (1915, suppressed) and Women in Love (1920, private publication).
Further Information
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