He took away a vivid impression of what he saw, and it remained in his mind for the rest of his life. ‘I am ashamed to say I saw her hanged,’ he wrote to an elderly lady who lived near the village from which Mrs Browne came and asked him about it in his old age, ‘my only excuse being that I was but a youth, and had to be in the town at the time for other reasons.’ He went on: ‘I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’40 The words ‘fine figure’ and ‘tight black silk gown set off her shape’ have been found objectionable, because they suggest he thought of her as an attractive woman in the moment of her death. Only too likely, surely, but hardly culpable. The horrible fact of the helplessness of a dead hanging body is made worse when it is that of a young woman dressed incongruously in her best clothes, which she has chosen for the occasion. It was her last brave piece of vanity, and in its way it was effective.
As it happens, Dickens produced an almost identical reaction to a similar scene. He detested public hangings and campaigned against them but felt obliged to attend at least two and paid large sums of money to hire rooms with a good view. At the first, in 1840, he noticed Thackeray standing in the crowd: also an opponent of public hangings and also feeling obliged to witness one. The second seen by Dickens was in 1849, when a man and a woman, Mrs Mannings, were hanged. Three years later Dickens wrote about it in his family magazine Household Words:
having beheld that execution, and having left those two forms dangling on the top of the gateway – the man’s, a limp, loose suit of clothes as if the man had gone out of them; the woman’s, a fine shape, so elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, that it was quite unchanged in its trim appearance as it slowly swung from side to side – I never could, by my uttermost efforts, for some weeks, present the outside of that prison to myself (which the terrible impression I had received continually obliged me to do) without presenting it with the two figures still hanging in the morning air.41
Dickens, like Hardy, found the shape of the dead woman, with all the other associations it brought, particularly appalling, and as far as I know no one has suggested there is anything unhealthy in his mentioning the fact that Mrs Mannings was elaborately corseted and artfully dressed. I don’t think we should be surprised that Hardy kept the memory of what he saw of the death of Martha Browne. The hanging of a human being cannot be an easily forgotten sight. There is another letter, from 1926, in which he gave a different account of how Martha Browne’s death had struck him: ‘I did as a boy see a woman hanged at Dorchester, and, it rather shocks me now to remember, without much emotion – I suppose because boys are like it.’42 The lack of emotion did not stop him observing precisely what he saw and storing it in his mind. When he was eighteen, he took his father’s telescope out onto the heath on the morning a man was due to be hanged at the prison, three miles away, to test out if it could be seen at such a distance. This time he was horrified to catch the very moment the body dropped, regretted his intention instantly and took himself ‘creeping homeward wishing he had not been so curious’.43 He never watched a hanging again, and when he came to write Tess of the D’Urbervilles gave no description of her time in prison or of her end.
4. Friends and Brothers
Hardy described himself as being still a child at sixteen. The one extant photograph from 1856 shows a slim youngster intent on making himself look as much like a man as he can: longish dark hair, a faint suggestion about the upper lip that he is trying to grow a moustache, a wide, artistic cravat and broad collar to his shirt, and over this a single-breasted cotton coat, simple but neatly cut. There is something of an unfledged dandy about him. He is after all the son of a handsome father, and he is making an effort to present himself well. You can see why Hicks decided it was a good idea to take him into the office, and why he got on with the other young men there. They were agreeable and relaxed, and enjoyed themselves together. One was Henry Bastow, who had studied the classics at his London school and was soon reading Latin and Greek with Hardy for pleasure, arguing points of grammar and vocabulary. Bastow became his first real friend. When they read in the office, Tom made a habit of running into the Revd William Barnes’s school, which happened to be next door, to ask his opinion, and in this way also began a friendship with the poet.1 Another pupil was Herbert Fippard, a man of the world, already in his twenties and a touch condescending, since he had lived in London and knew the famous dance halls, the Argyle Rooms and the Cremorne Gardens, and the girls to be met there. He impressed Hardy by gliding round the office with an imaginary partner in his arms, whistling a quadrille. Dancing in London was seen to be a different thing from the dancing of the Dorset villages, for which he was still providing much music with his father, playing for parties and weddings, as they did on Christmas Day 1856 when Sarah Keats, the Bockhampton carrier’s daughter, a girl he had known all his life, was married.
His life was dividing into three quite separate strands. There was the office, where he was entering the professional world, which no member of his family had attempted to join until now. There was, mostly inside his head, the world of books and scholarship, so intensely experienced that he sometimes talked to himself in Latin on his daily walks; and it held the hope, still vague, of another life altogether, which might be peacefully devoted to books, the reading and even the writing of words. Then there was home and family, and everything that went with them: Bockhampton, Puddletown and the countryside around. Here he was familiar with shepherds, carriers and ploughmen; his uncles were bricklayers, his aunts and cousins dressmakers and carpenters. Just about all of them, including his parents, his grandmother and most of the girls he knew, spoke a different, rustic version of the language he used at the office and was familiar with from his reading.2 He knew what his father meant when he said, ‘She zid a lot of others be gone afore’, but he was not sure that Bastow or Fippard would understand him. His mother, for all her love of reading, was not confident enough to write a letter, and she asked Tom to write for her to her sister Martha Sharpe in Canada. He could not help seeing that his most deeply rooted attachments were to people who were hardly taken seriously in the world he aspired to enter. At best they were seen as quaint and picturesque, at worst as simpletons or clowns. True, his parents were a cut above the shepherds and labourers, and were urging him on and proud of his progress; it did not make it any less awkward for him as he advanced away from them in speech and habits.
Just now his home was dominated by women and children, his mother, in her forties, again preoccupied with the process of giving birth. Another sister, Katharine, known as Kate or Katie, appeared in September. Seven people living in the few small rooms meant there was little privacy or quiet, and as the winter came on it was clear that his grandmother Mary Hardy had not long to live. She was eighty-four, and in January 1857 she died. She had been a central and beloved figure in his home life, a teller of stories of the past and of the cottage over which she had presided for nearly sixty years. His novel Two on a Tower has what seem to be scraps of a portrait of her in her last years. In one scene the hero’s grandmother, who, like old Mrs Hardy, has come from another county and recalls it as she sits by the fire, tells her grandson how she had been dreaming of ‘my old country again, as usual. The place was as natural as when I left it, – e’en just three score years ago! All the folks and my old aunt were there… yet I suppose if I were really to set out and go there, hardly a soul would be left alive to say to me, dog how art!’ That ‘dog how art’ is so odd it sounds like a bit of Granny Hardy’s speech, stored up by a grandson peculiarly attentive to words. He adds a charming story of the old woman scraping off and eating the outside of the pudding she has made for her grandson while she waits for him to come home. He is disgusted by her greed and the scraped-down pudding, refuses it and goes upstairs, then relents, comes down and eats it up in a show of magnanimity. The story is as odd as the speech, and suggests anothe
r memory of Granny Hardy, especially as their only purpose in the novel is to underline the grandson’s divided situation: he has been to the grammar school and aspires to an academic or professional life, yet his home is a village cottage, shared with an old woman with a funny way of talking and behaving. Hardy knew everything there was to know about these things.3
While he mourned his grandmother at home, he liked to think of his other world outside as his student life. He and Bastow took to meeting in Kingston Maurward fields to pursue their classical studies in the open air when the weather allowed, like college chums. Bastow had a strongly religious side too, as a Baptist preparing for adult baptism. Like other converts, he wanted to pass on his beliefs to his friends and get them to join his team, and he set out to win Tom over to the doctrine of adult baptism. Tom first consulted his own team – Mr Shirley, the Church of England vicar of Bockhampton – and found him baffled and unable to advise. Then Bastow introduced him to the local Baptist minister, a Scot as poor as he was learned, with three sons, two of them graduates of Aberdeen University, the youngest already ill with tuberculosis. The sick boy was the one Tom liked best, but all were clever and congenial, and they enjoyed fierce, cheerful bouts arguing over the merits of adult baptism, with much urgent and aggressive citing of biblical texts. In the end Hardy was not convinced, although it took some time, and he absorbed the intricate arguments based on Bible texts so well that he was able to present them years later.4
When not reading or arguing with Bastow, he gave his attention to copying plans and tracing drawings at the office. He was a meticulous draughtsman. Hicks was pleased with him and took him along when he went to examine old churches. This was the period of indiscriminate church restoration which made architecture into a booming profession and was carried out with much misplaced enthusiasm. Hardy, who greatly regretted it later, was soon making surveys. He also took up sketching and painting for pure pleasure, going out alone in the open air in his free time. He made studies of animals and landscapes as well as of houses and churches. One day when he was drawing in the fields the eldest son of the vicar of Fordington looked over his shoulder, offering some advice, and they began to talk. Although Hardy knew the name of Moule and had heard his sermons, this was the first time he had got into conversation with one of his sons. Henry Joseph Moule was in his thirties, a Cambridge graduate, currently earning his living in Scotland as a land agent, although his talents and interests were artistic and antiquarian.5 He must have been holidaying at home when he spoke to Hardy, and through him Hardy soon met his younger brothers, among them Charles and Horace, both at college in Cambridge but enjoying long vacations at home, and Handley, still a schoolboy. Here was a brave new world, and the start of an intense and enchanted friendship.
The Moules were a formidable family. The father was a strenuous, practical, proselytizing, multi-talented man. He had reintroduced Christian worship into near-pagan Fordington after his arrival there in 1828. He was kept busy by the huge expansion in the population of his parish, as the poorest class of people drifted from the land to the town. Moule helped them all as best he could, if not always in ways that best pleased them. For instance, he got the Dorchester races abolished on the grounds that horse racing encouraged vice; it had also been very popular.6 Later he became a hero when cholera broke out in his parish in 1854, and he risked his own life working with the sick, and also pursued those he thought most responsible.7 Convinced that housing conditions bore most of the blame for the spread of the disease, he wrote to the landlord to ask for improvements. Fordington lay in the Duchy of Cornwall, and the committee responsible for its administration was headed by Prince Albert, consort to the Queen. Moule wrote him a personal letter, blaming the officials who managed the estate, urging him to action and saying he intended to make this into a public matter: ‘I shall publish what I write.’
The answers he got from gentlemen on the Duchy of Cornwall’s committee denied responsibility. Moule’s anger grew. He asked the Prince himself to look at a map showing the layout of the pitiful housing where the cholera raged. He asserted that ‘no inconsiderable portion [of blame for the cholera epidemic] lies at the door of those who, for the last sixty or seventy years, have managed this estate of HRH Duke of Cornwall.’ Moule’s courage was only partly rewarded. He and his family survived, and he kept the cholera confined to Fordington and out of Dorchester proper, but his letters to the Prince changed nothing. He published the correspondence, his publishers being Bradbury & Evans. Evans was Mrs Moule’s brother, and Bradbury & Evans were Charles Dickens’s publishers, which might seem promising, but the end of the epidemic also brought an end to any interest in the behaviour of the Duchy officials.8
This was only one of Mr Moule’s efforts to change and improve the world. He built a second church, raising the money himself, and set up Sunday schools. He enlarged the vicarage as his family grew. Constantly active and alert, he uncovered an ancient burial ground in the parish while getting a new road cut, finding bodies with Roman coins in their mouths, inscribed with the names of the god Apollo and emperors Constantine and Posthumus, and celebrated these discoveries in verse. He published his poems, his sermons and his views on education. He wrote letters to The Times about the potato. He invented a sanitary system using earth closets and published extensively on its advantages. He chaired regular meetings of Dorset evangelical churchmen in his house. He gave much and expected much of his parishioners. He fathered eight sons – one died in infancy – and required the seven survivors to live unswervingly by the highest standards, intellectual and moral. One of his poems warns an infant waking in his mother’s arms not to turn to ‘impurity’ or ‘the joy will quit thy breast, / And thou through all eternity, / Wilt never, never rest.’ Another predicts ‘The End of the Worldling’ under ‘the dire unmitigated rod’. You sense that these are not idle warnings.
An awe-inspiring father, then, of the same generation as Dr Arnold of Rugby School, and possessed of the same educational and moral confidence. In the words of his youngest son, Handley, he was the ‘object of such reverence as perhaps to check a little, on both sides, the easy demonstration of affection’.9 His wife was remarkable too, the well-educated daughter of a London Unitarian family with literary tastes. She had converted to Anglicanism for her marriage and was as fervent as her husband. Her brother Frederick Evans became a printer and publisher in partnership with William Bradbury, and in 1846 they published Mr Moule’s Scraps of Sacred Verse, the same year in which they began to issue Dombey and Son. Mrs Moule gave her husband wholehearted support in the parish and in the home education of their sons. The results were astounding when you consider that Charles would become President of Corpus Christi in Cambridge, Handley Bishop of Durham, Henry director of the Dorset County Museum; that three more brothers went into the Church, two as China missionaries, one to be elevated to Bishop of Mid China; and all but one wrote and published books in their spare time – about religion, about China, about Dorset antiquities, about Ancient Rome, about their parents and their upbringing.
The Hardys’ cottage would have fitted several times into the Fordington vicarage, and the aspirations of the Moule parents for their sons were far beyond anything imaginable by the Hardy parents. The long, low house full of books and young men was always buzzing with activity, with its great dining room that doubled as a classroom. Dinner was at 2.30 and tea, the last meal of the day, at 6.30. Father presided from his study, mother had her own ‘Little Parlour’. The garden adjoined a big field where games were played, cricket especially, and the views extended over the water meadows of the Frome and the Purbeck Hills in the distance. In summer the boys went fishing and bathing in the gravelly pools of the Frome, or sometimes they all piled into an old stagecoach and set off for the coast at Lulworth, or swam in the green waters off the long beach at Weymouth. Handley set up a telescope and studied the stars.10
Handley was a year younger than Hardy – exactly the same age as his sister Mary – but it was Horace,
eight years older, who became Tom’s special friend. Horace was the charmer, handsome and gifted. He was a tender-hearted son to his mother, writing to her almost every year on the anniversary of the death of the baby brother who had died before he was two.11 At the age of twelve he was already playing the organ in his father’s church. He was a natural scholar, a born teacher and knew how to organize things. When he and Hardy met, in 1856, he was just setting up a literary club at home, the ‘Fordington Times Society’, with himself as President. Among its members were his parents, all their pupils, the resident curates and three of his Evans cousins. They held weekly meetings during the school term time, at which original papers, short plays and poems were read. Sometimes there was a debate – ‘Is coach or railway travel better?’ – or a visitor was invited. One was William Barnes, who sent them a poem, ‘Grief or Gladness’, and who was complimented by Henry for his use of ‘Words of Wessex’ in his work. Horace produced an appreciation of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and wrote his own poetry too.12 A pupil called Bridges offered a comedy in two acts, ‘The Cow and the Choir’, in which a Revd Briggs appeared, determined to abolish the choir in his church, with its squeaking violins, and replace it with his daughter’s up-to-date harmonium. Everyone contributed in his own way, and you ask yourself if Hardy sometimes heard about what went on.13
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