Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  Another memory was from the summer of 1833, when she had a sight of the young Princess Victoria touring the west of England with her mother, the Duchess of Kent. Jemima observed with amusement that when the crowd cheered and the Princess stood up in the carriage to acknowledge their cheers and respond to them, the Duchess ‘promptly pulled her down into her seat by her skirts’.14 The royal ladies were visiting Weymouth and the Ilchesters at Melbury House. Victoria was fourteen, Jemima twenty.

  The years she was in service covered the last four years of George IV, the seven years William IV was on the throne and the beginning of Victoria’s reign in 1837. When Charles Fox-Strangways died in 1836, she was moved on to a younger family connection, another clergyman. The Revd Edward Murray was vicar of Stinsford, living with his wife and children not in the vicarage but in Stinsford House, which had been Lady Susan O’Brien’s. He was extremely well connected: his sister Caroline had married Lord Ilchester, and he was a grandson of the Duke of Atholl.15 He was also chaplain to the Bishop of Rochester, who happened to be his own elder brother; his mother had been a lady-in-waiting to the Princesses Augusta and Elizabeth, and his clever younger sister Amelia knew everyone at Court, had sat on George III’s lap as a child and would be appointed a maid of honour to Queen Victoria at her accession in 1837.16 That year the Murrays took Jemima with them to London for the Season.17 She attended the church of St James’s, Piccadilly, with the family and, from below stairs, witnessed urban privilege and luxury on a grand scale. On fine afternoons family parties set off in open carriages for the park, and in the evening there were balls in the mansions of Mayfair and Park Lane: servants could get glimpses of the splendours – extravagant feathers, jewels, satins and velvets – from the back stairs or the area steps. She decided she wanted to stay in London and work as a cook in a gentlemen’s club.18

  There was something else that she got from her time in service: the experience of living in a learned household, even if below stairs. Murray was a scholar, and in the year she went to him he published a commentary on the apocryphal Book of Enoch, with much Greek and Hebrew and many references to Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster and the Sybilline prophecies. He was also the author of a study of Ezekiel, and published a volume of Calvin’s prayers and collects, translated into English and printed in Dorchester. Since Jemima liked to read, it may be that Murray became aware of this unusual trait in a servant and allowed her to look at books in his library.19 Where else would she have been introduced to Dante’s Divine Comedy, later said to be her favourite work?20 According to her son, she also read Johnson’s Rasselas, Scott and Byron. Being a servant in a rich household made you a spectator of another world, and reading allowed you to look even further, to travel in time and space.

  By now Jemima knew her way about Dorset pretty well: from Maiden Newton north over rolling hills, through Cattistock and Evershot to Melbury; south-east to Dorchester along the straight main road, all this part watered by the River Frome; and from Dorchester further south over the downs to Weymouth, Portland and the sea, or else north-east to Puddletown. These were the routes her son would make his people walk in her footsteps: Gabriel and Fanny, Henchard, Giles and Tess. Jemima’s employers opened up the landscape of the county for her in other ways. Physically, they owned much of it; spiritually, they exerted authority through the churches, and they and their fellow landowners also ruled over the judicial and political life of the county. In the early 1830s the labouring people were suffering hardship so intense that it led them to break machines and burn ricks, putting the fear of revolution into their masters’ heads. A few men were hanged, and indeed the soldiers whose Sunday-morning service Jemima attended in Dorchester in 1830 were ready to put down riots among the starving agricultural workers, and the Revd Henry Moule, who preached to them, organized and served on patrols prepared to oppose any violence.21 At the Dorchester Assizes in January 1831 twelve men were sentenced to be transported to Australia and forty-four imprisoned. Some then tried to form unions to protect themselves, but in 1834, the year after Princess Victoria’s progress through the county, six men from Tolpuddle, a village close to Puddletown, were sentenced to transportation to Australia solely for having attempted to form a union; and, although, as a result of nationwide agitation, they were ‘pardoned’ and returned to England in 1838, no agricultural trades union was set up in Dorset, and there was no improvement in the subhuman conditions in which labourers were obliged to live.22 Dorset remained a county in which those who owned the land and those who worked it were hardly thought of as belonging to the same species.

  Whatever Jemima expected of life, she did not nurse unrealistic hopes and dreams. She had worked out an idea – or possibly got it from her angry, unfortunate father – which she handed on to her son: ‘Mother’s notion, and also mine: That a figure stands in our van with an arm uplifted, to knock us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in as probable.’23 Her ambition was to find work in London, but instead her employer, Murray, himself left Dorset permanently for London to become a prebendary of St Paul’s and vicar of Northolt, Middlesex.24 He did not take her with him.25

  During his time at Stinsford, Murray had taken a particular interest in the church music. He encouraged the group of players he found already working there, invited them to come to practise in his study and approved the results. At other churches there were larger groups – nine players at Maiden Newton and eight in the Puddletown gallery, both mixing wind and string – but at Stinsford there were just four string players, who prided themselves on producing better music, and easier to sing by. They were the builder Thomas Hardy the elder on his cello, with his sons James and Thomas and neighbour James Dart on violins. The older man occupied the middle seat of the gallery of Stinsford Church for thirty-five years, and trained the choir; and he went on making music until he died, playing at his last service a few days before his death.

  It was towards the end of his life that Jemima Hand began to observe him arriving at Stinsford Church on Sunday morning with his sons. The youngest son, Thomas, was a tall, strong, good-looking young man with engaging manners, blue eyes and a shortcut beard. This is her description of the three Hardys, given many years later and written down by her son:

  They were always hurrying, being rather late, their fiddles and violoncello in green-baize bags under their left arms. They wore top hats, stick-up shirt collars, dark blue coats with great collars and gilt buttons, deep cuffs and black silk ‘stocks’ or neckerchiefs. Had curly hair, and carried their heads to one side as they walked… [He] wore drab cloth breeches and buckled shoes, but his sons wore trousers and Wellington boots.26

  These impressions must date from the months in 1836 and 1837 when Jemima was living in Stinsford House and attending the church there, and this is the likely beginning of her wooing by Thomas Hardy the younger.

  The courtship between this Thomas Hardy and Jemima Hand became the subject of a sonnet by their son years later. He dated their first meeting to 1835 and decorously set the scene inside the church, with pew and gallery, window and music:

  She turned in the high pew, until her sight

  Swept the west gallery, and caught its row

  Of music-men with viol, book, and bow

  Against the sinking sad tower-window light.

  She turned again; and in her pride’s despite

  One strenuous viol’s inspirer seemed to throw

  A message from his string to her below,

  Which said: ‘I claim thee as my own forthright!’

  Thus their hearts’ bond began, in due time signed.

  And long years hence, when Age had scared Romance,

  At some old attitude of his or glance

  That gallery-scene would break upon her mind,

  With him as minstrel, ardent, young, and trim,

  Bowing ‘New Sabbath’ or ‘Mount Ephraim’.

  This is one of the poems in which he mythologizes his life, moving through time to have his mother looking back at herself f
rom old age. The last lines, with the names of the tunes, once so popular, now archaic sounding, are the most memorable, specific, odd and strong. How much truth there is in this account of his parents’ wooing is something else again. The most perfunctory lines are at the start of the sestet, when he speaks of ‘their hearts’ bond’ and Age scaring Romance, conventional and lacklustre words. The problem is that he is glossing over what he did not know. True, they were married in December 1839, but there is a gap in the record for Jemima from the end of 1837 until the marriage. Where she went after the Murrays’ departure is not known: his successor, the Revd Arthur Shirley, a bachelor, did not take over Stinsford House but moved into the vicarage.27 One story is that she worked at Kingston Maurward House; another that she returned to cook at the Maiden Newton vicarage.28 She may have gone to help her sister Maria Sparks with her four children in Puddletown, or continued at Stinsford House, now the home of a banker who kept seven servants.29

  What is certain is that her plan to go to London again to work as a cook came to nothing; and in the autumn of 1839 she found herself pregnant. She was twenty-six, repeating her mother’s experience at the same age, and she went back to her mother in Melbury Osmond: she must have walked home, as Hardy made Tess walk home to her mother, up and down hill through the autumn landscape, uncertain of her future. It is possible that Jemima hoped to hand the baby to her mother, or even get rid of it, and to return to work of some kind: the coming child became the figure before her, knocking her back from any pleasant prospect she had imagined for herself. But in Puddletown her sister Maria mobilized her husband, James Sparks, to put pressure on Hardy to do the right thing.30 The marriage was arranged by her family, Sparks marched the reluctant bridegroom across Dorset on the night of 21 December and on the 22nd Jemima was married to Thomas Hardy in Melbury Osmond Church, in the presence of her brother-in-law Sparks and her younger sister Mary.

  She had got herself a fine-looking, musical husband with a kind heart, and once married he accepted the situation with good grace. He was nearly thirty, he had the business from his father, who had died in 1837, and he ran it in an easy-going way. He also had a lifetime lease on his cottage and had been looked after at home by his mother all his life. Jemima was to live there for over half a century, yet she never felt it was hers. When her husband died, fifty-two years later, she said she looked at the furniture and declared she did not relate to it. ‘All those belonging to it, and the place, are gone, and it is left in her hands, a stranger.’31 She never ceased to find her country neighbours ‘a little rustic and quaint’.32 She may have spoken like a countrywoman, but she had after all lived in the houses of gentlemen for seventeen years, the largest part of her life, and in London too. She told her son that she had known a governor of Christ’s Hospital School, and that he could have been sent there had the man not died.33 She is said to have continued to hanker after the idea of working in London herself even after the marriage. She proved a loyal wife, but she was against the condition of marriage itself, and she advised all her own children not to repeat her mistake and admonished them to remain single. Such was the force of her words and character that three out of four obeyed her.

  Her new life was to be lived in an isolated hamlet of the parish of Stinsford, Higher Bockhampton. A map made for the Ilchester Estate in 1838 shows where the cottage stood, at the top of two rows of irregularly placed small buildings, each with a little land, on both sides of a lane. On the other side from the Thomas Hardys are the cottages of William Keats and James Hardy, his elder brother, a bricklayer, like Jemima’s brothers, with three sons. Lower down the lane, land and buildings on both sides belong to Charles Keats. The Keats brothers – they pronounced their name Kaytes – were tranters, or carriers, running horse-drawn carts about the county, and both had large families. Between Charles Keats and James Hardy is the house of Lieutenant Drane, a retired naval officer. There is woodland to the east and heath to the north, belonging to Farmer James Cake, and at the bottom of the lane there are some empty buildings and plots of land. Stinsford lacks shops, a school and a proper road, the nearest one being some way off, but there is a sense of community. Hardy himself reported that there were once dancing parties during the Christmas season, something he must have learnt from his grandmother Hardy: ‘This kind of party was called a Jacob’s Join, in which every guest contributed a certain sum to pay the expenses of the entertainment – it was mostly half a crown in this village.’34 Puddletown, where Jemima’s sister Maria Sparks and brothers Christopher and Henry lived, is three miles away across the heath, but Maria and her children would become her closest family. Dorchester was nearer, but she had nobody to visit there; her husband’s eldest brother, John, was sunk into poverty and squalor in Fordington, and they were not even in touch.

  Three years later the census will show that John Cox, the local Relieving Officer, in charge of poor relief in the parish, has moved into one of the empty houses with his wife and six children: although he was the best-educated man in Higher Bockhampton, Jemima’s memories of parish relief in Melbury may not have endeared him to her. The census also reveals that the lieutenant was Thomas Draine, aged fifty, with no wife but two servants, one male, John Downton, and a female, Jemima Paul, with a three-year-old child, Charles Paul. There were now also two families of agricultural workers, the Kindales with five children and the Downtons with two adult working sons; Mrs Downton does not appear on the census, no doubt because she was away from home delivering a baby – she was the midwife. A picture of the world Jemima’s children were born into begins to emerge. The self-employed Hardys and the Keatses looked down on the labourers but were in turn looked down on by farmers and professional men; the divisions were clear. Away from the village and above them all were the landowners.

  During the months in which she awaited the birth of her first child, she had time to hear the history of the house from her mother-in-law, Mary Head Hardy. It had been built in 1799 as a wedding present by Mary’s father-in-law for her and his son. Being a Dorset builder, he knew how to build a cottage using very little more than materials that lay at hand. The outside was of cob, a mixture of sand, clay, chalk, flint, straw and water made into a pudding which hardened into thick, weatherproof walls. The rafters were tree branches, the thatch of wheat straw and the upstairs floors of chestnut wood; only the ground floor was grandly flagged with stone brought from the quarries at Portland. There were small leaded windows, most of them at the front, facing west, but the main bedroom upstairs had an east window. At first there were only two rooms above and one below; it was enlarged later, more than once. Mary Head explained that when they arrived in 1800 the cottage stood quite alone and there were no human neighbours, their only company the birds nesting in the trees, the wild ponies known as heathcroppers, the bats flying in and out of their bedroom at night and the many snakes and lizards – she called them ‘efts’ – living on the heath behind the cottage. She may also have told Jemima that they had allowed it to be used by smugglers as a depot for their goods, mostly brandy brought over in French boats and carried up from the coast in barrels at night, to be sent on to London later. There was still a pit in the heath near by in which the casks had been hidden.35 Smuggling was a crime, but it was an accepted activity in south Dorset in the early part of the nineteenth century, carried on almost as much for the excitement as for the profits. The Hardys had no guilty feelings about helping out, or accepting brandy for themselves to eke out the cider they made. Hardy’s account of the excitement of defying the law and customs men was given in his story ‘The Distracted Preacher’, in which a charmingly bold heroine is unwilling to give up smuggling.36

  The original Bockhampton was down the hill on the river, and when the Hardys settled up the hill their place was at first named New Bockhampton; some time after 1811 it became ‘Higher’ and the old settlement ‘Lower’. Time brought more families who built alongside them. The plots of land were leased from the local landowner and MP, William Morton Pitt, of near
by Kingston Maurward, a grandiose modern mansion. Pitt was the cousin of the Prime Minister William Pitt, at the zenith of his power as the chief opponent of Napoleon and the revolutionary French. While the wars against France raged on, year after year, Thomas and Mary Hardy reared their family of six children – a seventh died young. Lady Pitt’s benevolence extended to giving books of psalms to deserving boys, and the youngest Hardy son, Thomas, received one. This was Jemima’s future husband, born in 1811. He learnt the building trade from his father and was his mother’s favourite, remaining with her when she was widowed and becoming titular head of the family business. But she was now nearing seventy and must have been glad to have a daughter-in-law to help out at home. She would not have held Jemima’s pregnancy against her, since she had been in the same condition when she married her husband, and six years older than him too, having already borne one illegitimate child in Berkshire, from which she came. She had been orphaned early and suffered much unhappiness. There were several ‘lost’ years of her early life which she never spoke about, and her own mother had also given birth to an illegitimate child in her youth.37 Being pregnant before marriage was usual enough among country people to be no great cause for shame if the man went reasonably willingly to the altar. All the same, the record of this group of women is strikingly consistent. Jemima, her mother, her mother-in-law and her great-grandmother, all strong-minded and intelligent women, had all flouted the rules on sexual behaviour laid down by the Church and gentry.

  As a boy, Hardy naturally knew nothing of this history. In time he became aware of it, but he never alluded to it directly. There was no reason why he should, and many reasons not to. You have to wonder how much he brooded on the discovery that he had been an unwanted child who had prevented his mother from living the life she had hoped to set up for herself, and how much this may have contributed to the moods of black depression that came over him at times, both as a boy and as a man, and even when he was well established. It is noticeable that when he wrote fictional accounts of country girls seduced and pregnant, he made Fanny Robin and Tess into romantic figures and victims, betrayed by men of higher social standing and driven to unhappiness and death.38 He sympathized with them and defended them, but he showed them punished with the severity his society regarded as appropriate. He made their babies die too. In no way did they reflect anything that is known of the lives of the women of his family.