Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

  Last Week in April 1862

  Here was indeed as good a thing as could have happened. It was an anchorage, and Hardy never forgot it. Strangely enough, on his arriving on the following Monday to begin, Mr. Norton informed him that a friend whom he had met at the Institute of British Architects had asked him if he knew of a young Gothic draughtsman who could restore and design churches and rectory-houses. He had strongly recommended Hardy, and packed him off at once to call on Mr. Arthur Blomfield, the friend in question.

  Blomfield was a son of the recently deceased Dr. Blomfield, Bishop of London; a Rugbeian, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had been a great boating man; and a well- known church-designer and restorer, whose architectural pupillage had been under Philip C. Hardwicke. Hardy found him in, a lithe, brisk man of thirty-three, with whom Hardy was to keep up a friendship for near on forty years. Arrangements were made, and on the following Monday, May 5, he began work as an assistant-architect in Mr: Blomfield’s drawing-office — at that time at 8 St. Martin’s Place, in rooms also used by the Alpine Club. This was another linking coincidence with aftertimes, for Leslie Stephen, an ardent climber and a member of the Club, was a visitor to these rooms, though ten years were to elapse before Hardy got to know him, and to be mentally influenced by him so deeply. In the following autumn or winter, however, more commodious and lighter drawing-offices were taken at 8 Adelphi Terrace, first floor; which Blomfield continued to occupy during the remaining five years that Hardy worked with him. Shortly after his entry there Hardy had an experience which might have been serious:

  ‘March i o. Went into the streets in the evening to see the illuminations on the occasion of the P. of Wales’s marriage. By the fortunate accident of beginning my walk at the city end of the route I had left the neighbourhood of the Mansion House before the great mass of people got there, but I had enough to do to hold my own at the bottom of Bond Street, where my waistcoat buttons were torn off and my ribs bent in before I could get into a doorway. Molsey and Paris [two pupils of Ferrey’s, friends of Hardy’s] were in the Mansion House crush, having started from the West End, like most of the spectators. Six people were killed close to them, and they did not expect to get out alive.’

  In a letter written many years after to an inquirer who was interested in his association with Adelphi Terrace, Hardy states:

  ‘I sat there drawing, inside the easternmost window of the front room on the first floor above the ground floor, occasionally varying the experience by idling on the balcony. I saw from there the Embankment and Charing-Cross Bridge built, and of course used to think of Garrick and Johnson. The rooms contained at that date fine Adam mantelpieces in white marble, on which we used to sketch caricatures in pencil.’

  It may be added that the ground-floor rooms of this 8 Adelphi Terrace were occupied by the Reform League during Hardy’s stay overhead, and that] Swinburne in one of his letters speaks of a correspondence with the League about this date. ‘The Reform League,’ he says,’ a body of extreme reformers not now extant I believe, but of some note and power for a time, solicited me to sit in Parliament — as representative of more advanced democratic or republican opinions than were represented there.’ Swinburne consulted Mazzini, who dissuaded him from consenting. The heads of the League were familiar personages to Blomfield’s pupils, who, as became Tory and Churchy young men, indulged in satire at the League’s expense, letting down ironical bits of paper on the heads of members, and once coming nearly to loggerheads with the worthy resident secretary, Mr. George Howell — to whom they had to apologize for their exasperating conduct — all this being unknown to Mr. Blomfield himself.

  The following letters were written to his sister, Miss Mary Hardy, during 1862 and 1863, the first year that Hardy was at St. Martin’s Place and Adelphi Terrace.

  ‘Kilburn, 17 August 1862.

  ‘9 p.m.

  ‘My dear Mary ‘“After the fire a still small voice” — I have just come from the evening service at St. Mary’s Kilburn and this verse, which I always notice, was in the ist Lesson.

  ‘This Ch. of St. Mary is rather to my taste and they sing most of the tunes in the Salisbury hymn book there.

  ‘H. M. M. was up the week before last. We went to a Roman Catholic Chapel on the Thurday evening. It was a very impressive service. The Chapel was built by Pugin. Afterwards we took a cab to the old Hummums, an hotel near Covent Garden where we had supper. He may come and settle permanently in London in a few months, but is not certain yet.

  ‘E — was up last week. I had a half day at the Exhibition with him. He is now living at home, looking out for a situation. I do not think he will get into anything yet.

  ‘I have not been to a theatre since you were here. I generally run down to the Exhibition for an hour in the evening two or three times a week; after I come out I go to the reading room of the Kensington Musuem.

  ‘It has been pouring with rain all the day and last night, such a disappointment for thousands of Londoners, whose only holiday is Sunday.

  ‘I should like to have a look at the old Cathedral, etc., in about a month or so. The autumn seems the proper season for seeing Salisbury. Do you ever go to St. Thomas’s? Be careful about getting cold again and do not go out in evenings.

  ‘P. S. is reading extracts from Ruskin’s “Modern Painters” to me which accounts for the wretched composition of this epistle as I am obliged to make comments etc. on what he reads.

  ‘Ever yours,

  ‘T. H.’

  ‘Kilburn, 19th February.

  ‘My dear Mary:

  ‘I don’t fancy that ‘tis so very long since I wrote and the Saturdays [Saturday Reviews] have been sent regularly but I really intended to write this week.

  ‘You see that we have moved, so for the future my address will be as on the other side. We have not recovered from the confusion yet, and our drawings and papers are nohow.

  ‘The new office is a capital place. It is on the first floor and on a terrace that overlooks the river. We can see from our window right across the Thames, and on a clear day every bridge is visible. Everybody says that we have a beautiful place.

  ‘To-day has been wretched. It was almost pitch dark in the middle of the day, and everything visible appeared of the colour of brown paper or pea-soup.

  ‘There is a great deal of preparation for the approaching wedding. The Princess is to arrive on the 7th March and the wedding will be on the 10th. On her landing at Gravesend she will be received by the Prince, the Mayor, Mayoress, etc. They will then go by train to the Bricklayers’ Arms station, and then in procession over London Bridge, along Fleet Street, Strand, Charing Cross, Pall Mall, Piccadilly, through Hyde Park, and up the Edgware Road to Paddington Station — thence to Windsor. The windows along the route are full of notices that seats to view the procession are to be let. There will be an illumination the evening of the 10th.

  ‘I went to Richmond yesterday to see Lee. He’is better but is going to Kent for a short time before coming back to the office.

  ‘I have not heard anything about the Essay yet. The name of the successful competitor will be known in about a fortnight. I am now very busy getting up a design for a country mansion for which a small prize is offered — £3 the best and £2 the second best. It has to be sent in by the 27th March.

  ‘I am glad you have got a drawing prize, but you don’t say what. I think you have done very well altogether. Tell me about the organ and how the Sundays go off — I am uncommonly interested. How is your friend the blind man etc., School, clergyman etc. Say how you are, don’t forget. I am quite well. Horace Moule has been ill. So has H. A. as I daresay you know. Has she written yet? I sent a valentine to Harry and Kate to please them. Harry wrote me a letter, and Kate printed one and sent — rather a curiosity in its way.

  ‘I sent Mrs. Rolls photographs and she sent me a paper and letter.

  She says that Parsons is postmaster in place of Lock who has resigned.

  ‘I tried the
Underground Railway one day — Everything is excellently arranged.

  ‘Do you think to run up Easter? If so, you must not mind being left alone all day — but you know your way about.

  ‘T. S. has commenced the sketch of our house for you. He says it will soon be finished.

  ‘Is Katie coming up to live with you and when is Mother coming?

  ‘Ever your affectionate ‘Tom’

  ‘8 Adelphi Terrace, ‘19 Dec. 1863.

  ‘My dear Mary,

  ‘I was beginning to think you had given up writing altogether, when your letter came. Certainly try to get as long a time as you can Christmas.

  ‘I am glad you have been to Oxford again. It must be a jolly place. I shall try to get down there some time or other. You have no right to say you are not connected with art. Everybody is to a certain extent; the only difference between a professor and an amateur being that the former has the (often disagreeable) necessity of making it his means of earning bread and cheese — and thus often rendering what is a pleasure to other people a “bore” to himself.

  ‘About Thackeray. You must read something of his. He is considered to be the greatest novelist of the day — looking at novel writing of the highest kind as a perfect and truthful representation of actual life — which is no doubt the proper view to take. Hence, because his novels stand so high as works of Art or Truth, they often have anything but an elevating tendency, and on that account are particularly unfitted for young people — from their very truthfulness. People say that it is beyond Mr. Thackeray to paint a perfect man or woman — a great fault if novels are intended to instruct, but just the opposite if they are to be considered merely as Pictures. Vanity Fair is considered one of his best.

  ‘I expect to go home about Tuesday or Wednesday after Xmas and then shall find you there of course — We must have a “bit of a lark.”

  ‘Ever affectionately ‘Tom.

  aet. 21-27

  ‘I am able to write 40 words a minute. The average rate of a speaker is from 100, to 120 and occasionally 140; so I have much more to do yet.’

  During the first few months of Hardy’s life in London he had not forgotten to pay a call on the lady of his earliest passion as a child, who had been so tender towards him in those days, and had used to take him in her arms. She and her husband were now living in Bryton Street. The butler who opened the door was, he recalled, the same one who had been with the family at Kingston Maurward all those years ago, and looked little altered. But the lady of his dreams — alas! To her, too, the meeting must have been no less painful than pleasant: she was plainly embarrassed at having in her presence a young man of over twenty-one, who was very much of a handful in comparison with the rosy-cheeked, innocent little boy she had almost expected ‘Tommy’ to remain. One interview was not quite sufficient to wear off the stiffness resulting from such changed conditions, though, warming up, she asked him to .come again. But getting immersed in London life, he did not respond to her invitation, showing that the fickleness was his alone. But they occasionally corresponded, as will be seen.

  It may be hardly necessary to record, since he somewhere describes it himself, that the metropolis into which he had plunged at this date differed greatly from the London of even a short time after. It was the London of Dickens and Thackeray, and Evans’s supper-rooms were still in existence in an underground hall in Covent Garden, which Hardy once at least visited. The Cider Cellars and the Coal Hole were still flourishing, with ‘Judge and Jury’ mock trials, ‘ Baron Nicholson’ or his successor being judge. And Dr. Donovan the phrenologist gauged heads in the Strand, informing Hardy that his would lead him to no good.

  The ladies talked about by the architects’ pupils and other young men into whose society Hardy was thrown were Cora Pearl, ‘Skittles’, Agnes Willoughby, Adah Isaacs Menken, and others successively, of whom they professed to know many romantic and risqud details but really knew nothing at all; another of their romantic interests that Hardy recalled being, a little later, the legend of the moorhen dive of Lady Florence Paget into Marshall & Snelgrove’s shop away from Mr. Chaplin, her fianci, and her emergence at the other door into the arms of Lord Hastings, and marriage with him — a sensational piece of news with which they came in breathless the week it happened.

  Hungerford Market was still in being where the Charing Cross Station now stands, and Hardy occasionally lunched at a ‘coffee house’ there. He also lunched or dined at Bertolini’s with some pupils of Ferrey’s, the architect who had known his father and been the pupil of Pugin. This restaurant in St. Martin’s Street, Leicester Square, called Newton House, had been the residence and observatory of Sir Isaac Newton, and later the home of the Burneys, who were visited there by Johnson, Reynolds, etc., and the stone floors were still sanded as in former days. A few years after Hardy frequented it Swinburne used to dine there as a member of the ‘ Cannibal Club’. Tennyson is also stated to have often dined at Bertolini’s. To Hardy’s great regret this building of many associations was pulled down in later years.

  On his way to Adelphi Terrace he used to take some short cut near Seven Dials, passing daily the liquor saloons of Alec Keene and Tom King (?) in West Street (now demolished), and Nat Langham at the top of St. Martin’s Lane, when he could sometimes discern the forms of those famous prize-fighters behind their respective bars.

  There was no Thames Embankment. Temple Bar still stood in its place, and the huge block of buildings known as the Law Courts was not erected. Holborn Hill was still a steep and noisy thoroughfare which almost broke the legs of the slipping horses, and Skinner Street ran close by, with presumably Godwin’s house yet standing in it, at which Shelley first set eyes on Mary. No bridge across Ludgate Hill disfigured St. Paul’s and the whole neighbourhood. The South Kensington Museum was housed in iron sheds nicknamed the ‘Brompton Boilers’, which Hardy used to frequent this year to obtain materials for an Essay he sent in to the Royal Institute of British Architects; it was awarded the prize in the following spring. The Underground Railway was just in its infancy, and omnibus conductors leaving ‘Kilburn Gate’, near which Hardy lived awhile, cried, ‘Any more passengers for London?’ The list of such changes might be infinitely extended.

  Charles Kean and his wife were still performing Shakespeare at the Princess’s Theatre, and Buckstone was at the Haymarket in the new play of The American Cousin, in which he played the name-part. At most of the theatres about nine o’clock there was a noise of trampling feet, and the audience whispered, ‘Half-price coming in’. The play paused for a few moments, and when all was quiet went on again.

  Balls were constant at Willis’s Rooms, earlier Almack’s, and in 1862 Hardy danced at these rooms, or at Almack’s as he preferred to call the place, realising its historic character. He used to recount that inotp se old days, the pretty Lancers and Caledonians were still footed there to the original charming tunes, which brought out the beauty of the figures as no later tunes did, and every movement was a correct quadrille step and gesture. For those dances had not at that date degenerated to a waltzing step, to be followed by galloping romps to uproarious pieces.

  Cremorne and the Argyle he also sought, remembering the jaunty senior-pupil at Hicks’s who had used to haunt those gallant resorts. But he did not dance there much himself, if at all, and the fascinating quadrille-tune has vanished like a ghost, though he went one day to second-hand music shops, and also to the British Museum, and hunted over a lot of such music in a search for it. Allusions to these experiences occur in more than one of his poems, ‘Reminiscences of a Dancing Man’ in particular; and they were largely drawn upon, so he once remarked, in the destroyed novel The Poor Man and the Lady — of which later on.

  In a corresponding fit of musical enthusiasm he also bought an old fiddle at this time, with which he practised at his lodgings, with another man there who performed on the piano, pieces from the romantic Italian operas of Covent Garden and Her Majesty’s, the latter being then also an opera house, which places t
hey used to frequent two or three times a week; not, except on rare occasions, in the best parts of the houses, as will be well imagined, but in the half-crown amphitheatre.

  The foreign operas in vogue were those of Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Meyerbeer, Bellini: and thus Hardy became familiar with such singers as Mario (Grisi had just departed), Tietjens, Nilsson, Patti (just come), Giuglini, Parepa, and others of the date. An English Opera Company was also in existence, and Hardy patriotically supported it by going often to operas by Balfe, Wallace, and others. Here he had the painful experience of hearing the gradual breakdown of the once fine voice of William Harrison, who, with Miss Louisa Pyne, had established the company and endeavoured to keep such opera going. Hardy was heard to assert that, as it were in defiance of fate, Harrison would sing night after night his favourite songs, such as ‘Let me like a soldier fall’ in Maritana, and, particularly, ‘When other lips’ in The Bohemian Girl, wherein his complete failure towards the last attempts would move a sensitive listener to tears: he thought Harrison’s courage in struggling on, hoping against hope,

  might probably cause him to be remembered longer than his greatest success.

  At Blomfield’s Mr. Blomfield (afterwards Sir Arthur) being the son of a late Bishop of London, was considered a right and proper man for supervising the removal of human bodies in cases where railways had obtained a faculty for making cuttings through the city churchyards, so that it should be done decently and in order. A case occurred in which this function on the Bishop’s behalf was considered to be duly carried out. But afterwards Mr. Blomfield came to Hardy and informed him with a look of concern that he had just returned from visiting the site on which all the removed bodies were said by the company to be reinterred; but there appeared to be nothing deposited, the surface of the ground lying quite level as before. Also that there were rumours of mysterious full bags of something that rattled, and cartage to bone-mills. He much feared that he had not exercised a sufficiently sharp supervision, and that the railway company had got over him somehow. ‘I believe these people are all ground up!’ said Blomfield grimly.