Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  When Hardy was nearly eighty and women were entering the professions and given the vote, he wrote, on hearing of the birth of a baby to his wife’s married sister, ‘If I were a woman I should think twice before entering into matrimony in these days of emancipation, when everything is open to the sex.’39 He had come to see the point of his mother’s unfavourable view of marriage.

  2. Child

  The first drama of his infancy was his mother’s discovery, one hot afternoon when she came in to the cottage from the garden, of a companionable snake curled up on his chest as he lay sleeping in his cradle. For Hardy, who all his life delighted in contact with wild creatures, this was a good story.1 He remembered himself as a solitary child, although he was only eighteen months old when his sister Mary was born in December 1841. Fond as he was of her, she hardly figures in his childhood recollections. Nor do his cousins, although there were three older Hardy boys living opposite, George, Walter and Augustus. There were also something like twenty other children scattered about the cottages in the lane, yet in Hardy’s memory it was ‘a lonely and silent spot’.2 ‘There was my playground when I was a child,’ he said later – not ‘our playground’ – pointing out a flat patch under the beech trees behind the house.3 All this suggests that he was by nature unsociable, preferring his private world to any companionship. His parents’ protectiveness, and fear that he would not survive childhood – they once said so in his hearing – may have encouraged his taste for solitude.4 Animals pleased him, but he did not like to be touched by people, a trait he kept all his life. An early memory was of getting on to his hands and knees in the pasture to see how the sheep would react. Looking up, ‘he found them gathered around in a close ring, gazing at him with astonished faces.’5 His father showed him how to fold a handkerchief to look like a rabbit, something he remembered how to do seventy-five years later.6 From the start he felt a sense of kinship with animals, and pity for their sufferings. When his father threw a stone at a fieldfare in the garden, killing it, the child picked it up, and to the end of his life remembered the lightness of the half-starved frozen bird in his hand. This capacity to store up particular experiences and draw on them imaginatively in his writing years later was as strong in Hardy as in Wordsworth.

  The close family circle in the cottage was headed by his grandmother, the elder Mrs Hardy, who had been in charge of the family business since the death of her husband, looking after the accounts while her sons went out to the building sites. Much of their work was done nearby on Kingston Maurward, the thousand-acre estate of their landlords, and some for Stinsford Church.7 They had only two men to help them and took their time over their jobs, partly because this was Thomas’s way, also because there was a good deal to be done at home. He was in charge of the garden, growing fruit and vegetables – carrots, onions, parsnips, peas, broad beans and potatoes; in the autumn there would be Gascoyne Scarlets, Golden Pippins and Bockhampton Sweets on their apple trees, and cider to be made.8 They kept a pig, hens and a few hives of bees, and got milk and butter from the dairy of the Kingston Maurward Estate. Water was hard work, as it had to be brought up from the well. The two women baked bread in an oven fuelled with furze cuttings. Jemima’s fine cooking was superfluous here. There must have been days when the change in her circumstances irked her, and she still sometimes dreamt of escaping to a working life in London. But she was bred to stoicism, and when she had enough of Bockhampton she could walk over to Maria’s for a sisterly talk, and see her three nieces, Rebecca, Emma and pretty Martha, and the baby James.

  Whatever their doubts about his future, Hardy’s parents were loving and attentive, and soon aware that his physical frailty went with unusual abilities. By the time he could walk he could also read. One of his earliest distinct memories is of being given a small toy concertina when he was four by his father, eager to infuse his son’s life with what he himself loved best, music.9 He played his fiddle at home in the evening, encouraged the boy to sing and dance, and taught him to play the fiddle alongside him, so that music became a perpetual theme, a perpetual pleasure and an inspiration. Looking back at the end of his life, Hardy wrote his own account of his early response to music, in the third person:

  He was of ecstatic temperament, extraordinarily sensitive to music, and among the endless jigs, hornpipes, reels, waltzes, and country-dances that his father played of an evening in his early married years, and to which the boy danced a pas seul in the middle of the room, there were three or four that always moved the child to tears, though he strenuously tried to hide them… This peculiarity in himself troubled the mind of ‘Tommy’ as he was called, and set him wondering at a phenomenon to which he ventured not to confess.10

  If the combination of an ecstatic temperament and a frail body helped to make him into a poet, his father’s vast repertoire of tunes sharpened his ear and inspired his rhythmical inventiveness.

  His mother made her contribution to the family music by singing traditional songs she had learnt from her mother, Granny Melbury, and by buying an old square ‘table piano’. She could not play it herself, but she wanted her children to learn, and as he got old enough he enjoyed tinkering with it, and got on well enough to be able to play simple tunes. The neighbours also had musical parties, and his Hardy grandmother said that ‘when she was sitting at home at Bockhampton she had heard the tranter “beat out the tune” on the floor with his feet when dancing at a party in his own house, which was a hundred yards or more away from hers.’

  The Hardy brothers gave up playing at church when he was three – the choir was disbanded by the modernizing vicar and churchwardens – but there was still psalm singing in which everyone joined, and his uncle James turned the barrel organ that accompanied their singing. The Hardy children were brought up to be strict churchgoers.11 Church meant psalms but also gazing up out of the windows at clouds and passing rooks, or examining with mixed feelings the gap-toothed skull carved on a monument; and it meant drama.12 The boy understood that the clergyman in charge was dressed up for the occasion and was giving a performance. One Sunday when he was kept at home in bad weather he wrapped himself in a tablecloth, invited his grandmother to be his congregation, stood on a chair and read his version of Morning Prayer. An older cousin who happened to be in the house was coopted to play his clerk and say the Amens – James Sparks, perhaps, or Augustus Hardy. Tommy then gave a sermon made up of a patchwork of the sort of sentences he was accustomed to hearing from the vicar. The family hardly knew what to think: ‘Everybody said that Tommy would have to be a parson, being obviously no good for any practical pursuit; which remark caused his mother many misgivings.’13 Still in frocks, still delicate and small for his age, he imposed himself by his imagination. He also began to think that the life of a parson might suit him better than other alternatives.

  Looking in a cupboard one day, he discovered an old periodical called A History of the Wars, full of pictures of soldiers, ‘melodramatic prints of serried ranks, crossed bayonets, huge knapsacks, and dead bodies’. He was enthralled, the more so on being told his grandfather Hardy had subscribed to it thirty years ago when he was a volunteer, at the time it was feared the French were likely to land on the Dorset coast. Hardy was stirred by tales of soldiers and battles, and this was the start of his interest in the Napoleonic Wars. His grandmother delighted him by remarking, one particularly hot and thundery day, ‘It was like this in the French Revolution, I remember.’ She had been a young woman in the 1790s; and she also described how she had been ironing her best muslin dress when news came of the beheading of the Queen of France. She had put down the iron and stood still on hearing of such a momentous event, she said, and she could still call up the exact pattern of the muslin in her mind’s eye.14

  There were also discussions of modern politics in the house, talk of the Corn Laws, for instance, which taxed imported wheat to protect British farmers and sent up the price of bread cruelly for the poor. The struggle to repeal them and allow free trade was eventually successful
in 1846. When Tom was five or six, on the day the pig was killed – a regular occurrence in the household – he got out the wooden sword made for him by his father, dipped it into the blood of the pig, and proceeded to parade round the garden waving it and shouting ‘Free Trade or blood!’ His next political memory was from a few years later, in 1850, when there was a frenzied outburst of anti-Catholic feeling throughout the country, as the Pope instructed Cardinal Wiseman to restore the Catholic hierarchy in England. On 5 November – Guy Fawkes Day – his father took him to the great ancient Roman amphitheatre outside Dorchester, Maumbury Rings, to see an anti-Catholic demonstration at which a torchlit procession culminated in the burning of effigies of the Pope and Wiseman. He found it grimly exciting without understanding what was going on, and was puzzled by the discovery that one of the evil monks in the procession had the features of a man who worked for his father.15 Much worse was something he did not witness but was told to him by his father, a story that must have gone back to the troubled times of the 1830s: he said he had seen four men hanged only for being with some others who set fire to a rick, one of them a half-starved boy who had run up to see the blaze and who weighed so little that they had to put weights on his feet to break his neck.16

  Both his parents talked freely, if sometimes sombrely, to him and enjoyed taking him out with them. He had a memory of being in a pub in Dorchester – this must have been another outing with his father – where the tall soldiers of the Scots Greys were drinking, filling the bar with the fumes of alcohol so strong that they actually made him drunk.17 His mother took him regularly across the heath to Puddletown to see his Aunt Maria and her children; these were cheerful expeditions, and on one occasion they disguised themselves by putting cabbage nets over their faces to spring a surprise on the cousins.18 Once in Puddletown on a hot day Tom saw a man in the stocks, sitting with his blue-stockinged legs through the holes, the nails in his boots shining; the child thought the man rather a hero and said good-day to him.19 The dark heath with its stretch of Roman road could be threatening but was friendly enough as long as he was with his mother, with whom he always associated it. ‘They were excellent companions, having each a keen sense of humour and a love of adventure,’ he wrote.20 Mrs Yeobright in The Return of the Native has something of her character, and his poem ‘The Roman Road’ raises her ghost tenderly: ‘Guiding my infant steps, as when / We walked that ancient thoroughfare’.21

  From very early he began to make life into art, by seeing the special quality of natural occurrences and by dramatizing and embellishing them. There was a staircase in the front part of the house, which his father had painted vermilion red. On fine evenings the rays of the setting sun lit up the red paint, making a splendid effect. He would watch for this, and developed a ritual response in which he recited an evening hymn by Dr Isaac Watts to accompany it:

  And now another day is gone,

  I’ll sing my Maker’s praise!

  My comforts every hour make known

  His providence and grace.

  But how my childhood runs to waste

  My sins how great their sum!

  Lord, give me pardon for the past,

  And strength for days to come.

  The hymn goes on to invoke angels around the sinful child’s bed with evangelical fervour, but in his recollection the enjoyment was purely aesthetic, the sunset, the red stairs and the recitation combining to produce a richly pleasurable feeling. He was creating a Hardyesque experience.

  His parents followed the forms of religion, and he was brought up to believe in God, and in the Devil and his pitchfork as the destination for sinners, but it was never a gloomy, conscience-searching family. His grandmother was gentle, his father even-tempered, and his mother an able and energetic woman; but he was aware of the divisions between his father and mother. She often pressed him to move the family to a bigger house, either in or near Dorchester, and one more accessible to potential clients of the building business, which would allow him to expand it, make money and become a thriving member of the community. The matter was ‘always arising’, but her persistence was stubbornly resisted by his father, attached to his birthplace and unwilling to lose the freedoms it gave him. His son observed that he had a taste for lying in the sun ‘on a bank of thyme or camomile with the grasshoppers leaping over him’ and for solitary walks on the heath with his telescope; Tom shared his tastes enough to sympathize with him.22 Formidable as Jemima’s willpower and energy were, her husband won the battle, and they remained at Bockhampton.

  This suited Tom as well as his father. One of his best-known poems about his childhood describes him sitting under some ferns and deciding he has no wish to grow up or change his way of life: ‘Why should I have to grow to man’s estate…?’23 The poem was written late, but it can be taken in association with something similar described in the Life: lying on his back, looking through his straw hat at the sun and thinking that he did not want to grow up. ‘Other boys were always talking of when they would be men; he did not want at all to be a man, or to possess things, but to remain as he was, in the same spot, and to know no more people than he already knew… Afterwards he told his mother of his conclusions on existence, thinking that she would enter into his views. But to his great surprise she was very much hurt.’24 Perhaps she was more worried than hurt that her son seemed to be showing the same unwillingness to take on the world as his father.

  Two years or so after the birth of Mary, Jemima became ill. It was a serious episode following a miscarriage and kept her incapacitated for some months. By then her younger sister – confusingly, another Mary – had come from Melbury to help out with the care of the children. There were now three of the Hand sisters living close to one another: Maria Sparks, Jemima Hardy and Mary Hand. The ties between them were always strong. The Sparks family said their mother, Maria, helped to nurse Jemima through her illness, that it lasted for several months, that she suffered from ‘brain fever’, and that she emerged from the sickroom a noticeably sterner woman.25 An anxious time for the children, even with their aunts and Granny Hardy caring for them.

  In 1846 their other granny left Melbury to join her two sons and three daughters in Puddletown and Bockhampton. Most of the Hand family was now reassembled, although they were missing the youngest sister, Martha. Like Maria she was a beauty, and she had been married in 1841 in Puddletown to an ardent and rather dashing suitor, John Sharpe, and gone to live with him in Hertfordshire; a man of some education, he had been in the army, and now worked as a farm bailiff for Lord Salisbury. In December 1846, when their mother was installed among them, Mary Hand determined to go and see Martha, who had just given birth to her third child. It was a bold plan for a country girl, involving a complicated journey alone and a new system of transport, the railway. She had to take the coach to Andover, the nearest point then reached by the railway, stop overnight in London and go on by coach to Hitchin. A letter to her mother, reassuring her that she had arrived safely, describes the bitter cold on the coach, where she sat outside until the driver took pity on her and took her inside near Blandford; and how she found herself at the London station surrounded by ‘a great quantity of men and not one woman – I thought on what Chris [her brother] told me to keep a good look out for the Coachman but no Coachman could I see – so I searched for a Policeman.’ The Sharpes had, in fact, arranged for her to be met by a friend, Mr Trask, and deposited at a hotel. Mary found the price of breakfast ‘rather too Grand for my Pocket’, but at one o’clock Trask reappeared and escorted her to the Hitchin coach. ‘I found John and Freddy [Sharpe and his four-year-old son] waiting for me at the coach office. He led me home where I found Martha waiting for me – poor Maid she could not think it possible for me to be at Hitchin – They were all very kind to me… their kind love to you Mama, Jemima, Chris and Brothers you will let them see this.’26 She must have travelled third class in the train, packed into ill-lit boxcars on wooden benches where body warmth hopefully made up for the lack of heating; her
sister’s surprise at seeing her shows what an extraordinary novelty train travel was.

  Six months later, in June 1847, the railway reached Dorchester. That year Granny Hand from Melbury died, and Mary married a Puddletown cobbler, John Antell, a man with radical views who had also taught himself Latin, Greek and Hebrew but could not put them to any use or organize his life in any satisfactory way.27 The wedding celebrations were held at Bockhampton, and Thomas and James Hardy naturally played for the dancing, supported by seven-year-old Tommy. He was still small for his age, but the family were no longer fearful for his life and had begun to treat him more like an ordinary boy.

  The Hardys had a change of landlord when William Grey Pitt sold Kingston Maurward and its estate in 1844. The new owner, Francis Martin, paid £15,000 and set himself up as a country squire, and his devout and charitable wife, Julia Augusta, proceeded to do good among the tenants. Within a few years, encouraged by the vicar of Stinsford, Mr Shirley, and with his collaboration, she embarked on the building of a Church of England school in Lower Bockhampton, and also paid for two schoolteachers.28 When Tommy reached the age of eight, it was decided that he was strong enough to go to school, and the decision was made easier by the opening of Mrs Martin’s establishment.