Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  The gulf between gentry and village was a fact of life from the start, and as he grew he observed many further gradations within village life, and understood how safe and sheltered his home was, and how privileged his education. Among the labouring families round about there was real hardship, sometimes leading to grim scenes and tragedy. When he was nine or ten a boy he knew who looked after the sheep near Bockhampton died and was found to have starved to death. He had been trying to sustain himself on raw turnips.20 That was an extreme case, but there was steady, grinding poverty and deprivation for many others. One of the biggest buildings outside Dorchester was the workhouse, and it may be that the shepherd boy preferred starvation at home to what he knew of the workhouse. The system of poor relief that had helped Hardy’s Melbury grandmother, stingy as it was, had been replaced by something crueller when the Poor Law Amendment Act decreed in 1834 that workhouses should be punitive, separating man and wife, parent and child, setting the poor ‘apart like wild beasts in a cage, staked off from their fellow men, and regarded as beings of a different caste’, as even the conservative local newspaper complained.21

  The Hardys were never in danger of the workhouse and never short of food, and, although they had no luxuries, there was usually a bit of money in hand, whether to buy train tickets or to pay for schooling. So the gap between Tom’s experience and the lives of most of the other children living round about stretched wider. Given his opportunity, he seized it, and among the dull sons of better-off farmers and shopkeepers at Mr Last’s school he became a prize pupil. He was quick to learn, with a great fund of curiosity and an exceptional memory. He had no trouble mastering arithmetic, geometry and algebra; he enjoyed drawing and was good at it. He was always reading, whether Dumas or Harrison Ainsworth’s historical novels, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or The Boys’ Book of Science. He paid attention to what he read and arrived at his own judgements, deciding, for example, that Shakespeare would have done better to have made more of the ghost in Hamlet.22

  He knew what he wanted too – for instance, he was eager to study languages. Although he did not seek friends or popularity, and shrank from physical contact, he was always ready to help other boys with their lessons. School did not provide a midday meal, and it was too far to go home, so he sometimes carried his lunch-box with him and ate it wherever he chose to in town; and at other times went to his uncle James Sparks’s sisters, Amelia and Rebecca, who lived in Dorchester, doing piecework as shoe-binders, fixing leather or ribbons to newly made shoes. According to his Sparks cousins, he disconcerted the good maiden ladies by performing ‘conjuring tricks’ in their house, flicking bread and butter to the ceiling to see if it would stick there.23 If this is a true story, it is rather a relief to hear of some ordinary naughtiness away from the eye of both controlling mother and disciplinarian schoolmaster, who had a reputation as a beater of bad boys. As far as we know, Hardy was never beaten.

  In May 1851, just before his eleventh birthday, the Great Exhibition was opened in London by the Queen. It was the first big tourist attraction in England and succeeded beyond its organizers’ dreams, drawing unprecedented numbers of visitors. Special excursion trains were run from the provinces, and the railway companies slashed their fares. Good fathers took their children, and whole parishes went in groups, led by their vicar.24 Parties set off from Dorchester during the summer at special cheap rates, with third-class carriages open to the skies, and excitement ran so high that spectators gathered by the railway track just to see the long trains packed with people passing through the countryside. The travellers sometimes arrived in London chilled and rain-soaked, but they hurried on to be amazed by Paxton’s glass palace and stunned by the range of exhibits gathered from all over the world.25 Six million people managed to pass through its doors between May and October. It was just the thing a clever schoolboy would long to see: why did Hardy fail to get to the Exhibition?

  Money may have been short, but there was another reason: his mother was expecting a baby that summer. Not only that: her elder sister Maria Sparks also gave birth to a daughter in March, at the advanced age of forty-six. Neither woman can have been pleased. Maria had enjoyed eight years without a baby, Jemima ten. When little Tryphena Sparks made her appearance in Puddle-town her eldest sister, Rebecca, was already twenty-two.26 At the same time there was cause for sorrow among the sisters when they heard that Martha Sharpe was leaving for Canada with her husband and five children. Emigrants went with no expectation of returning, believing they were seeing the last of England and of those they loved and left behind; the Sharpes had fallen on such hard times that they were not even in a position to make last farewells. They had been forced to beg money for their passage.27 So Martha, who had seemed to make the best marriage of the four Hand sisters, was now the poorest, and lost to them. They left England in July.

  After this, in August, Jemima’s baby was born. He was a large boy, named Henry after his maternal uncle Henry Hand, and he proved to be a solid son with no ambition to break out of the world he was born into and ready to follow his father into the building trade. If Tom was disconcerted to find his mother at the mercy of nature and the physical processes of childbearing and nurture, and sorry to miss the Great Exhibition, he had a busy life of his own to pursue as he started on his second year at Mr Last’s; and over the years he became attached to his large, practical, unintellectual brother. Although they had nothing in common beyond family, they remained companionable to the end of their lives, even going on holiday together from time to time.28

  When Tom was twelve, he bought himself An Introduction to the Latin Tongue and began to learn the genders of Latin nouns, devising his own system of colour coding to help his memory. Soon his parents were paying for private Latin lessons with Mr Last, and Tom was reading Caesar. It was a clear signal of his ambitions, since the ability to read the classics was the badge of an educated man and the path towards higher education. There were other schools where he could have learnt Latin and Greek in Dorchester, notably the grammar school, which taught ‘by the Eton method’, and another run by the clergyman-poet William Barnes, but neither seems to have been considered for Tom. Nor was what was undoubtedly the most efficient educational establishment in the district, run by the vicar of Fordington, the Revd Henry Moule, whose sermon to the soldiers had so impressed Jemima years before. Moule taught all his seven sons up to university level at home, with a group of paying pupils alongside, sons of gentlemen destined for the professions. This was above Tom’s social level, and he had small prospects of higher education; and, although Moule was known to the Hardys as a prominent local clergyman with whom they had occasional contact, Tom had yet to be befriended by the Moule sons. So when Mr Last expanded his teaching arrangements in 1853 and became head of an ‘Academy’, Tom continued his education with him. Last’s Academy was backed by local Nonconformists, but its religious bias hardly impinged on Tom.29 He read the Bible regularly and took himself to church every Sunday, if not always at Stinsford. None of the Hardys were religious zealots, but they respected the conventions in which they had been reared, and if churchgoing had been more fun when the men made the music, it remained part of the essential order of country life. Mr Shirley kept his eye on Tom and in due course enrolled him in his confirmation class. Hardy’s only account of a confirmation suggests that the service did not impress him, but Shirley saw that he was bright and got him to join his own sons as a teacher in the Sunday School.30

  There Tom found himself instructing girls several years older than himself, something he enjoyed. One was a dairymaid, ‘pink and plump’, with a gift for memorizing whole chapters of the Bible. Years later he based Tess’s kindly friend Marian on her, one of ‘the few portraits from life’ in his work, he wrote.31 She amused him, but he fell ‘madly in love’ (in his own phrase) with another girl, a stranger, seen riding near the South Walk in Dorchester. Horseback riding was a pastime for the rich, which may have added to her appeal; he could not ride himself, but he looked f
or her for several days and enlisted his school friends in the search, with no luck. Then he met a girl from Windsor and was attracted to her because he had been reading Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Windsor Castle, but when he found she took no interest in either the historical or the ghostly parts of Ainsworth’s plot, he lost interest in her. A red-haired gamekeeper’s daughter Elizabeth – Lizbie – was another of his loves, and a more long-lasting attachment was to Louisa Harding, daughter of a local farmer. He once managed to say ‘Good evening’ to her in the Bockhampton lane on his afternoon walk home from Dorchester, and when he heard she had been sent to boarding school in Weymouth he started going there on Sundays to get a glimpse of her in church. A shy smile was all his reward: the Hardings, as we have seen, did not want to know the Hardys. The teens are for falling in love indiscriminately, and there seems to have been none of the painful intensity of his feeling for Mrs Martin. Louisa and Lizbie are given light-hearted poems, and even when Louisa appears as a ghost in one it is only mildly wistful.32

  By 1853 Mr Hardy had plenty of work again, and a horse and trap of his own in which he drove about on his business. Hardy remembered being taken to Weymouth in the trap as a treat that year.33 He got on well with his father and in the holidays would go with him to one of his building sites, an old house or a church that was being restored, and listen to him discussing the job in hand with the architect. Both enjoyed their fiddle playing and kept up the family tradition, still sometimes joined by uncle James, now playing the cello, when they went out to make music for the dancing at weddings and other celebrations. There is a story of young Tom playing without a break for forty-five minutes for the country dancers and being stopped by his hostess for fear he should break a blood vessel; another of a bride so delighted with the music that she kissed him in her white dress as a sign of her pleasure. There were occasions too when songs and behaviour became bawdy, and some of the revellers fell over and ended up in tangled heaps on the floor. These were evening gatherings, and father and son might find themselves walking home at three in the morning; if that meant he was tired the next day, it also gave him a view of the festive life of the farms and cottages round about, and a contrast with the quiet, studious hours in the classroom. His mother told him he must not accept payment, since he was offering a neighbourly service, but one night, seeing that the assembled revellers had collected several shillings in a hat, he made up his mind to accept it. There was a good reason. He had seen and coveted The Boys’ Own Book in the window of a Dorchester shop, and the money was enough to buy it. For such a prize it was worth facing his mother’s disapproval. He was a haunter of bookshops, and was remembered for it by the son of a Dorchester bookseller, who used to watch Tom at the shop’s counter, reading his way through one volume after another. The boy welcomed Hardy, because he brought him some particularly good eating apples, the Bockhampton Sweets from his parents’ garden, and the bookseller was too good-natured to complain, knowing that a reader will one day turn into a buyer.34

  He called himself ‘a born bookworm’.35 At Christmas 1854 he won a school prize for his diligence and good behaviour – a book, naturally, Scenes and Adventures at Home and Abroad – and the next summer a Latin testament. But Last, knowing he was unlikely to go to a university, had him work on specimen commercial letters and accounts, set out in the copperplate hand required of clerks. He did not confine himself to it but developed another free, handsome and beautifully legible hand of his own, easily recognizable in the manuscripts of his letters, novels and poems. When he heard that his sister Mary’s school boasted a French mademoiselle, he went to her for lessons, buying himself A Stepping Stone to the French Language for good measure. Then he started on German, using a course provided in a magazine called The Popular Educator, given to him by his mother. Self-help was the spirit of the age, enshrined in Samuel Smiles’s book, published in 1859.

  When he thought of the future, he remembered the family joke that had destined him for the Church as a small boy parroting the vicar’s words, and thought it might suit him.36 His mother’s years in service had let her see a particularly agreeable aspect of clerical life, well-born clergymen in charge of small parishes and living in large houses, with leisure to read, take holidays and spend months in London as they chose. Not all had such an easy time. Mr Moule of Fordington gave his considerable energy and talents to improving the physical and spiritual condition of his wretchedly poor parishioners as well as educating the large band of boys in his care. William Barnes, orphaned young, had left school at thirteen, educated himself, become a schoolmaster and struggled to get the degree which would allow him to enter the Church; by then he was fifty, and over sixty before he settled down to the quiet life of a country parsonage. He was an example of someone who had worked hard to break out of the constraints of his life to achieve his ambition and succeeded, but the usual route to a career in the Church depended on family money. No one in Tom’s family had ever attended a university, and neither his father’s imagination nor his income would stretch to having a son prepared for a university education that would make him financially dependent well into his twenties. He had his mother and his wife to keep, a fluctuating income and other children to consider; when Tom was fifteen Jemima became pregnant again. She was known to believe that large families were a mistake, but the mistake was made, and there would now be a fourth child to bring up at Bockhampton.37

  In spite of this, Tom was not sent out to earn his living at sixteen. Father, mother and grandmother must have agreed that he could not be put to work in the family firm. They came up with an ingenious side-step, and a step up too: if he was not to be a builder, he might become an architect. Architects took pupils, who paid something towards their training; they helped out with whatever needed to be done in the office or on site at the same time. John Hicks was an architect for whom his father had done a good deal of work, mostly restoring churches; Tom had met him when accompanying his father, and Hicks had formed a good opinion of the boy and was happy to take him as a working pupil. Mrs Hardy bargained briskly for a reduction in the usual premium of £100, payable halfway through the three years, and got it reduced to £40 in cash, paid at the start. In this way Tom was articled for three years, with the prospect of a further three years which might culminate in his becoming an architect himself in 1862. It was not his own choice, but he accepted it without repining.

  Hicks’s office was in the centre of Dorchester, at 39 South Street, and Hardy began there just after his sixteenth birthday, in June 1856. In many ways his life continued as before. He had the same daily walks in and out of Dorchester. He was still entirely dependent on his parents for pocket money. He was able to go on with his private studies by giving himself three hours’ reading from five to eight in the morning; and Hicks allowed all his pupils time of their own during the day. His good sense and humanity contrasted with the reaction of the vicar of Stinsford to Hardy’s venture. One Sunday morning that summer Mr Shirley delivered a sermon attacking the presumption of members of the lower classes who aspired to join the professions. The boy took it as a direct reproach and held it against the vicar ever afterwards. He also found it so humiliating that he did not talk about it until the last years of his life, and Shirley’s name is never mentioned in any letters or recollections, although the clergyman remained at Stinsford until his death in 1891.38 This looks like the first awakening of hostility towards the Church, the beginning of his dislike of the narrow-mindedness, snobbery and cant of many of the clergy. He continued to practise as a Christian, although often preferring to attend other churches, and he did not lose his belief yet, but he was surely set on the path of questioning the authority of the Church and thinking for himself.

  While he was still at school, in March 1854, Britain declared war on Russia after forty years of peace, and the Dorchester barracks emptied as the troops set off to fight in the Crimea. The excitement was great, but, since they were armed with exactly the same weapons as had been used at Waterloo, incompet
ently led and ill provided with clothes, food or medicine, the results were not impressive. The war lasted for two years, and in June 1856, as Tom finished his schooldays, Dorchester put on joint celebrations for the peace and the anniversary of the Queen’s accession, with sports, flags and Chinese lanterns in the town Walks. In July the circus came to town, and there were horseback representations of the Battle of Alma. This was followed by another diversion, the hanging in Dorchester of a woman found guilty of murder.

  Hangings were carried out in public to give a salutary warning to other potential offenders – that was the idea, anyway – but also generally accepted as a form of popular entertainment, and Dorchester Gaol, rebuilt in white stone in the centre of town early in the nineteenth century, had a specially constructed area of flat roof for the gallows, intended to allow them to be observed from below by as many people as possible.39 So there was nothing surprising about the sixteen-year-old Hardy, who had read of a great many grisly murders and hangings in Ainsworth’s novels, joining the crowd of thousands that gathered in August 1856 to watch the unfortunate Martha Browne suffer her punishment.