Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  He had been a reader for years, but his writing skills lagged behind, perhaps because no one had encouraged this at home, and quill pens are refractory instruments.29 Now he worked at his writing, took readily to arithmetic and geography, and proved himself to be a good pupil; but the most powerful effect of the school was not academic. As patron of the school, and with no children of her own, Julia Martin took an intense interest in what went on there and spent many hours acting almost as a supplementary teacher. Tommy became her favourite, and her feelings were reciprocated. That he was small for his age and unlike the other village boys in his ways, being gentle, quick and responsive, made it easy for her to take him on her lap, to pet him and kiss him. She was thirty-eight. She was the first lady – in the social sense – he had ever known. She spoke differently, she smelt differently, she dressed differently. Years later he remembered the four grey silk flounces on her dress and the thrilling ‘frou-frou’ they made when she moved about. He expressed his devotion by making drawings of animals for her and singing songs to please her, but his feeling for her became ‘almost that of a lover’ – these are his own words. The erotic excitements of school were extended to Sundays, when the same ‘frou-frou’ might be produced as her dress brushed against the font when she came into church. There is no doubt that this was an overpowering experience for him, and one he never forgot. Late in life he was still speculating on whether they might have resumed their love and made more of it when she became a widow and he a young man: ‘though their eyes never met again after his call on her in London, nor their lips from the time when she had held him in her arms, who can say that both occurrences might not have been in the order of things, if he had developed their reacquaintance earlier.’30 It is a powerful piece of fantasy. For her part, she may not have been fully aware of the effect her kisses and caresses produced on the boy, and would have seen her own enjoyment as innocently maternal. In truth, she was giving him his first love affair.

  The love affair was interrupted by his mother. Encouraged by Mary’s successful railway journey, she made up her mind to travel to Hertfordshire to visit Martha and to help her over the birth of her fifth baby, due in the winter of 1849. It was also an adventure, a chance to give herself a change from life at Bockhampton, with the bonus that she was escaping any danger of another pregnancy herself for a few months. She announced that she was taking her son with her – ‘for protection’ she explained; ‘being then an attractive and still young woman’, he commented afterwards.31 It meant removing him from school, which may have been a further contributory reason if she had any inkling of his obsession with Mrs Martin.

  They set off in the autumn and did not return until well into the new year of 1850. The journey from Dorchester to Waterloo now took only four hours, but the remainder still had to be made by coach.32 They put up at a coaching inn in London, the Cross Keys, St John Street, Clerkenwell, taking a cheap room on an upper floor. Smithfield was close by – St John Street was the old drovers’ road – and he was horrified by the brutality, filth and noise of the cattle market. He had prepared for the trip by acquiring a map of the City and marking out the streets described by Harrison Ainsworth in Old St Paul’s, a favourite book at the time, and he went out and traced the steps of the hero.33 He remembered also his mother taking him to see the Pantheon in Regent’s Park, and Hyde Park at Cumberland Gate. Then it was time to board the coach, which stopped in the Finchley Road, from which they looked back across the fields at the expanding edge of the city with its new terraces, new roads and building sites.

  The Sharpes were now living in Hatfield, twenty miles from London. They had a house near the church in Fore Street, where there was also a day school to which Tom could go. John’s position as a farm manager for Lord Salisbury seemed to be a very good one, and they gave the Hardys a warm welcome. Uncle John was a different creature from the Puddletown uncles, possessed of some social grace, his sister a governess and his brother going into the Church. Freddy and Louisa were old enough to be companionable, and, although Aunt Martha had too many children already – one of her babies had died, she was occupied with the youngest and now expecting yet another – she was still a lovely, spirited woman. Many years later Hardy said he modelled Bathsheba, the heroine of Far from the Madding Crowd, on his Aunt Martha, so he must have treasured the impression of her physical beauty and charming manners, and perhaps too the spectacle of a more courtly and romantic relationship between husband and wife than he had seen at home.34

  The Hatfield school was ‘somewhat on the Squeers model’, and he was bullied by the bigger boys, who resented his superior skills, but as it was a day school he did not suffer too badly.35 That Christmas he was given The Boys’ Book of Science, inscribing it ‘Thomas Hardy / Dec. 24th 1849’. He also wrote in The Tutor’s Assistant; Being a Compendium of Arithmetic, ‘Thomas Hardys / Book / 1849’. He was kept well supplied with reading matter. His mother had already supplied him with Dryden’s Virgil, Dr Johnson’s novel Rasselas and a translation of Paul et Virginie, the French novel that told the tale of innocent child lovers on a tropical island, popular in the 1790s, and all undoubtedly from his Melbury grandmother’s collection. Ainsworth he knew already, and he was soon reading cheap editions of other recent historical novels by Bulwer-Lytton and Alexander Dumas.

  They never saw the Sharpes again. Even Lord Salisbury’s estates felt the pinch of the hard times, and his manager was laid off. No other work could be found, and in desperation John Sharpe applied to emigrate to Canada. Lord Salisbury put up some of the money, and in 1851 the family crossed the Atlantic and settled in Ontario. It was not much easier to find the right sort of work there, and there were no sisters to cheer them. More babies kept coming, and with the tenth, in 1859, Martha died, aged only forty-three. It was a bleak conclusion for Bathsheba’s model. John Sharpe became a schoolmaster. Louisa, who preserved a dreamlike memory of the visit of her aunt Hardy and cousin Thomas, wrote to them once, a tiny letter in the neatest hand, in 1870.36 She lived to be ninety-seven, dying in 1941.

  When Jemima and her son got home she did not send him back to Mrs Martin’s school. He suffered and said nothing: ‘he had grown more attached than he cared to own’ is how he put it. To whom could a child of nine complain of losing his love? His mother, determined that he should be given the best education available, had decided to send him to a more serious school in Dorchester, under a Nonconformist headmaster with a high reputation, Isaac Last, who offered Latin lessons. Tom was pronounced fit enough to do the much longer daily walk, three miles each way. There was now no way of being with Mrs Martin, yet he longed to see her so painfully that he worked out a way. He learnt from the village girls that there was to be a harvest supper held at the old manor house on the estate, now tenanted by a farmer, which she would attend; and he persuaded one of the girls to let him go with her, although he had no invitation. They set off together, contriving to leave while his mother was out, and found a lively party in progress, soldiers from the Dorchester barracks having been invited by Mr Martin to be dancing partners for the girls. Presently Mrs Martin arrived. She saw him and came up to speak: ‘Oh Tommy, how is this? I thought you had deserted me!’37 He burst into tears and told her he had not and never would desert her. As a good hostess, she provided him with a dancing partner, her little niece, but after a few dances the party from the great house left, having done its duty. By now the girl who had brought him was taken up with her own partners. He was afraid to go home without her, and too shy to ask for anything to eat or drink, and there he stayed until three in the morning, miserable, hungry and tired.

  The one thing that cheered him was hearing the farm women sing together sitting on a long bench under the barn. They chose the popular ballad ‘The Outlandish Knight’, a villain who came wooing a girl at the great house, getting her to steal away from her parents at night with two horses and stolen gold. When they come to a river the knight tries to drown her as he has drowned many girls before, but she tricks him,
pushes him into the water instead and rides home alone, arriving at dawn, seen only by a parrot in the window:

  The parrot being up in the window so high

  And hearing the lady did say

  ‘I’m afraid some ruffian has led you astray

  That you’ve tarried so long away.’

  Don’t prittle, don’t prattle, my Pretty Polly

  Nor tell any tales on me

  And your cage shall be made of the finest beaten gold

  And the doors of the best ivory.

  The parrot agrees not to tell on the girl, and she gets away with her escapade. Not so Thomas, who was scolded by both his parents when he finally arrived home. For him it was the end of the affair. Whatever Mrs Martin’s affection for him, she was very much put out when she found his mother had chosen a school for her son with a headmaster known to be a Nonconformist. This is the likely reason why his father was no longer given jobs on the estate, removing at a stroke a good part of his regular and easily accessible work. The Martins did not spend the summer of 1851 at Kingston Maurward, and in 1853 Mr Martin sold the estate and moved with his wife to London.38

  3. The Bookish Boy

  His serious schooldays began in 1850. Tom was ten that year, and his enrolment at Mr Last’s school in Dorchester was a sign from his parents that he was being set on a different course from that of his father, his grandfather or any of his uncles.1 It was obvious that he lacked the physical strength to become a builder. His luck was first that his parents saw he had gifts and capacities of another kind, then that they were in a position to do something to encourage and develop them, and that they lived close to a town which could boast several good schools. Few country boys with his sort of background got more than a few years of schooling, and it was common to start work in the fields at the age of nine. 2 For Hardy, his mother’s determination was crucial, the more so because 1850 was not a prosperous year for his father. He and his brother James had divided the business and gone their separate ways professionally, and the 1851 census puts Thomas Hardy down as a mere bricklayer with two assistants. Yet, even if Jemima was the driving force behind the decision to buy Tom a good education, his father supported the plan and paid for it.

  So a new phase of his life started when, instead of being escorted to the little Church of England school in Lower Bockhampton, he set off alone on the three-mile walk to school in Greyhound Yard in the centre of Dorchester. It was his first real, regular freedom from parental control, and the daily routine, there and back in all weathers, gave him time and solitude in which to think, to observe and to dream. His route can still be followed across a landscape that has remained relatively unchanged since the 1850s: down the lane to the road, left and on to a diagonal path across the fields for half a mile, joining the road again close to Stinsford; then west down the long stretch of Stinsford Hill into the valley of the Frome. The river was crossed at Grey’s Bridge with its three stone arches. In the 1850s there were water meadows from Grey’s Bridge to Swan Bridge, which was brick-built and spanned a small branch of the wandering Frome. This was the edge of town, with its pavements and steeply rising high street, its old churches and newly built town hall, its shops and inns and busy street life.

  There were market days twice a week, and four annual fairs for sheep, cattle, wool and leather. The London post and newspapers arrived daily, and there was also a local paper, the Dorset County Chronicle.3 There were circulating libraries and a small theatre in which travelling groups of players made irregular appearances.4 There was the railway station, a modern gaol and, just out of town to the north, the big barracks. With a population under 5,000 the arrival and departure of soldiers and their horses were always important events, because they brought colour and life to the town; some regiments had their own band to entertain everyone, and they kept the inns busy, and the girls. Apart from the barracks and the workhouse, not much had been built outside the Roman walls, planted with avenues of trees and known as the Walks: Chestnut Walk, Bowling Walk, West Walk and North Walk. Here the citizens promenaded for their pleasure when the weather was fair. And the town boasted one suburb, the village of Fordington, with its own church and green, so close that it was effectively part of Dorchester. Below it the vast green area of Fordington Field stretched away to the south, still unenclosed meadow, farmed in strips as it had been since the Middle Ages.

  An army officer posted to Dorchester in 1830 dismissed the place condescendingly as ‘three streets and one or two lanes’.5 Still, it was the County Town, with a mayor and six aldermen. The assizes were held there, and elections, and they sent two MPs to Westminster. In the summer of 1852, at the end of Tom’s second year at Mr Last’s, the successful Liberal candidate was drawn triumphantly round the town in his carriage by his supporters, and Tom was among them, the Hardys being Liberals, even though his father had no vote.6 A boy could learn almost as much as he needed to know about life by keeping his eyes open in Dorchester.

  If school started at eight, it meant being out of the house shortly after seven. Going home could be more leisurely, giving him time to wander in the water meadows, the woods and other roads. These long daily walks became his own special territory; their details engraved themselves on his mind and stayed there. When he was an old man, he could point out the place in a hedge where he had put down an umbrella while he cut a stick for himself and then went on home, forgetting the umbrella until his mother asked for it and retrieving it on his way to school in the morning.7 He learnt to read the noises of the fields and the woods, the bark of the fox, ‘its three hollow notes’ sounding at precise intervals of a minute, and the sound of game birds rising to their roosts at dusk, ‘crack-voiced cock-pheasants’ “cu-uck, cuck”, and the wheezy whistle of the hens’.8 He noticed how the hares came out in the fields at dusk and observed the stars as they appeared. He feared nothing in nature, but once frightened himself by reading the story of Apollyon in Pilgrim’s Progress as he went along and began to imagine that the foul fiend might jump on him out of a tree.9 In winter he often had to walk in the dark, and one incident was so mysterious that even reading about it raises a shiver. As he went up Stinsford Hill, not a single dwelling in sight, and no street lights, ‘he came upon two men sitting on chairs, one on either side of the road. By the moonlight he saw that they were strangers to him; terrified, he took to his heels; he never heard who they were or anything to explain the incident.’10 What makes it sinister is the silence, because on a country road you expect friends and strangers alike to exchange a word as you pass, and their being seated, as though taking part in some arcane ritual.

  Walking the roads, meeting others on the road, exchanging news with travellers, being overtaken by riders, carts and carriers, or offered lifts, were all part of his daily experience throughout his boyhood, so that it is not surprising that the road became a theatre for action in his imagination and walking a central activity in his writing, used dramatically and to establish or underline character. Most of his characters are prodigious walkers. Tess and Jude both walk themselves through the crises in their lives, and Jude effectively kills himself by walking in the rain. Gabriel Oak walks to find work, and Fanny Robin walks through the snow to plead with her lover, and then drags herself along the road to the workhouse, leaning on an obliging dog, to die. Elfride in A Pair of Blue Eyes runs ‘through the pelting rain like a hare; or more like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a mind to fly, but does not’.11 The newly-wed lovers in Two on a Tower walk nine miles across country to a railway station to avoid being noticed. The Hand of Ethelberta opens with Ethelberta, a young widow, taking a solitary walk on a heath, where she sees a wild duck being pursued by a hawk, runs after the birds to see what will happen and loses her way. At the beginning of The Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard is shown on the road, his character to be read not in his words but his walk: ‘his measured springless walk was the walk of the skilled country man as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while
in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference, personal to himself.’ And at the end of the book he leaves Casterbridge on foot, a diminishing figure going into the distance, and observed in fine detail: ‘the yellow straw basket at his back moving up and down with each tread, and the creases behind his knees coming and going alternately’. In The Return of the Native, Mrs Yeobright recognizes a distant, anonymous furze-cutter simply by his walk: ‘a gait she had seen somewhere before; and the gait revealed the man to her… “His walk is exactly as my husband’s used to be,” she said; and then the thought burst upon her that the furze-cutter was her son.’12

  The daily walk in the open air made Tom into a sturdy child. He was still small for his age, but his family forgot that he was meant to be delicate. As an old man, he once said he did not like going to school, and remembered being sent when he was ill and could hardly walk to Dorchester, but this can’t have happened often.13 One who claimed to remember him as a fellow schoolboy spoke of his bright eyes and fair hair, rather curly – like his father’s and grandfather’s, although it darkened later – and said he used to wear a brown knickerbocker suit. He had a cap and carried his satchel of books swinging on his arm; and his mother sometimes waited for him at her garden gate in the afternoon. ‘They thought the world of each other, Tom and his mother.’14 Another schoolmate, the son of a small farmer, formed a good opinion of Mrs Hardy after she gave him ‘two slices of bread and butter and one with sugar on’t’ after he had helped to deliver a pig to the Hardy cottage; kindly people, this man thought the Hardys, but ‘in a paltry way’ as to the family business.15 The descendants of the Revd Reginald Smith at West Stafford, whose son Bosworth was the same age as Hardy and later became a close friend, have a tradition that he once stopped for a glass of milk at the vicarage between home and school.16 To the daughter of a rich neighbouring farmer, Tom was an ‘odd looking little boy with a big head’, and her brother Ernest Harding explained that ‘the Hardings regarded the Hardys as socially inferior… Hardy was just a village boy, although it was recognised that he was an unusual type… he never played games, and was a quiet, studious child of a retiring disposition.’17 Not always, according to Hardy’s own account. Passing a cottage one day where a raffle was being organized, the prize a live hen to be awarded on the throw of dice, he put in twopence, threw luckily and won the hen. His parents, instead of being pleased, were angry with him for gambling and forbade him ever to do so again; no doubt they disapproved of the family that set up the raffle.18 Then some of the village girls, illiterate themselves and seeing Tom was a scholar, got together and persuaded him to read their letters from soldier sweethearts stationed in India, and to write down replies for them. He obliged but said he took no interest in the task, perhaps because he considered their affairs too remote from what he felt love to be – an unexpected disclaimer for a future novelist.19