Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  Horace taught Handley Roman history by making a plan of Rome with pebbles on the lawn. He read him Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome and translated Hesiod with him as they walked through the cornfields. He wrote a crammers’ guide, The Roman Republic: Designed for the Use of Examination Candidates, published by Bradbury & Evans in 1860. But, whereas all his brothers made their way steadily, something went awry for Horace. He was an outstanding student both at Oxford, to which he won an open scholarship, and at Cambridge, where he carried off the Hulsean Prize for an essay on Christian oratory; and yet he contrived to come away without a degree from either university. Officially he was still at Cambridge during the period of the Fordington Times Society and his early friendship with Hardy, yet he seems to have been at home even when he should have been away at college.

  The family protected him, lovingly no doubt, but you could not be a member of the Moule family without feeling you must do your best at all times and believing in the power of God to help you. Horace asked himself too many questions to be secure in that belief. And he had other problems: he lived on an emotional switchback. There were times when he shone and dazzled, others when he descended into an inexplicable blackness. To deal with the bad times he began to take opium, and to drink. Hardy was not aware of Horace’s problems in the early years of their friendship and saw him simply as an admired and overwhelmingly attractive friend – the best he could ever hope to have. They quickly became close, going for long rambles in the fields, talking and talking as new friends do, Horace taking the role of teacher and patron, eager to give guidance and encouragement and to discuss books and ideas, whether the Greek dramatists or modern developments in science and how they bore on religion. No one had ever talked with Tom like this before, and Horace gave him time, attention and affection. He did not mind his immaturity and woeful lack of polish, but enjoyed having a disciple as much as Tom enjoyed learning from him. This was the second passion of Hardy’s life. Mrs Martin had given him an éducation sentimentale; Horace Moule enrolled him with what seemed like princely grace into the fellowship of those who live by the written word, whether as readers or writers, and into an intellectual world wider than Tom had yet encountered. Here was a scholar who read Greek as fluently as English and who had attended two universities, a gentleman, easy and graceful, who knew about the world. He knew where to stay when he was in London; who was writing the most significant new books; the correct way of referring to a titled person; and how to lecture to working men, as he did in November 1858, speaking about Oxford to the Dorchester Working Men’s Mutual Improvement Society. Were any of Hardy’s cousins in the audience? Probably not.

  Horace introduced Hardy to the newest and cleverest of the weekly magazines, the Saturday Review, London based naturally, in which social issues were discussed and religion treated with small respect. He even began to write for it occasionally himself. He bought himself books on geology and science that alarmed his father, because they cast doubt on accepted religious ideas, and handed them on to Hardy. Horace’s upbringing had been more robustly Christian than Tom’s, but, making his way in metropolitan literary journalism, he could not miss the spread of scepticism, and he was too quick and intelligent to ignore it. Just one example he must have been aware of: two German philosophers, David Strauss in his Life of Jesus and Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity, had presented the Christian religion as a purely human invention with no divine element. Both were translated into English, in 1846 and 1854 respectively, and made their mark. The translator went on in 1857 to start publishing novels of rural and clerical life under the name George Eliot. In the Moule household the ideas of Strauss and Feuerbach would be anathema if they were ever mentioned. This in itself made a problem for Horace, who wanted to talk about ideas.

  Tom’s situation was different and easier. Christianity was something he had taken for granted as part of the fabric of his daily life, and Christian theory was not discussed in the family. He read the Bible, he knew all the church services and most of the psalms by heart; indeed, the year was a sequence of church festivals quite as much as it was a sequence of the natural seasons for him. And he remained a fully practising Christian into the 1860s, but his mind was on the move, and with Horace he began to see that there were questions to be asked and lines of thought to be followed that eroded the old faith. As their friendship ripened, they read the notorious Essays and Reviews of 1860, religious pieces that offended the orthodox by their attacks on doctrine and by their textual criticism of the Bible. Hardy also claimed to have been an early admirer of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, though it is not clear exactly when he read it, or how much it influenced his thinking at that time. He could well have found his own way along the path towards free thought, but Horace was an encouraging companion on the journey and, with his access to books, guided his steps at many points. By 1865 he was introducing him to the work of Auguste Comte, whose Positivist philosophy replaces the worship of God with that of humanity.

  The discovery of Comte still lay ahead. In 1860 the Christian side of the argument was bolstered for Tom by his other friend Bastow, who gave him a parting present of a Bible when he finished his term with Hicks, and kept up a correspondence for some time, urging ‘dear old Tom’ to piety.14 There was also a brief religious revival in Dorchester in the same year, when Mr Moule put his energies into a mighty Christian putsch and for some heady months filled the churches with revitalized congregations. Hardy appears to have been receptive to this and took to annotating his Bible, marking what has been interpreted as a moment of spiritual significance on ‘Wednesday night April 17th / 61, ¼ to 11’.15 He had nothing to say about his youthful spiritual enthusiasm when he wrote his memoirs in old age, but in 1861 he bought himself another Bible, a prayerbook and a volume of John Keble’s popular religious poetry, The Christian Year, clear indications of piety.

  Keble is the first English poet whose work he records buying for himself. He had read Horace, Ovid and Virgil in the original, and some of the Iliad. Scott’s ballads and narrative poems were favourites, and his interest in English poetry grew as he had access to more. In the Moule household Cowper, Milton, Longfellow and Tennyson were read, and the fact that poetry was written in the family was important too. Some time between 1857 and 1860 Hardy wrote the earliest of his poems to survive. It is about place, time and change, which were destined to become steady Hardy themes. Not many poets have made such a good start.16 He writes about what he knows and goes straight for his subject, the cottage at Bockhampton:

  It faces west, and round the back and sides

  High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs,

  And sweep against the roof…

  The simplicity is Wordsworthian, and there is already the characteristic Hardy layering of time. The oak tree outside is ‘from a seed / Dropped by some bird a hundred years ago’. The poet speaks both as observer and as the child putting a question to his grandmother about her memories, making three distinct blocks of time. She gives her answer, quite formally, ending with a lovely evocative phrase, ‘So wild it was when first we settled here.’ It is a confident poem, and it makes you like the poet. There is one oddity, in his giving it the dignity of a Latin title, ‘Domicilium’ (meaning ‘Home’). Latin would have been meaningless to Granny Hardy. It is here as an offering from one side of his divided self to the other.

  We don’t know what Horace said about ‘Domicilium’. It should have been praise, but he was not always encouraging. Tom was not Horace’s only protágá, and he gave extremely effective advice to another, a Dorchester boy from a shopkeeping family whom he encouraged to sit for the Oxford Local examinations and later for the Indian Civil Service: Hooper Tolbort came first in the whole of England in both and was embarked on what promised to be a glorious career. Hardy knew Tolbort well, was pleased for him and hoped for the same magical encouragement from Horace. The dream that he might get to a university had become strong in him, but when he asked Horace for his opinio
n on the matter, he did not get the answer he wanted. The disappointment, painful and with an edge of humiliation, can be felt even in the account Hardy wrote in old age. Horace advised him to stick at architecture, since his father expected him to start earning by the age of twenty-one. He also advised him to give up his Greek, a clear indication that he did not consider his scholarship good enough. Hardy still thought it might be, but he took the advice. ‘He felt bound to listen to reason and prudence’ is how he puts it.17 He did not let this spoil their friendship. It was much more important to him than his pride.

  Horace had now given up Cambridge himself and was acting as tutor to two boys, preparing them for university entrance, staying in a house in the cathedral close at Salisbury. Tom, reaching his twentieth birthday, had proved his worth to Mr Hicks, who began paying him 15 s. a week – a modest amount, but the change from total dependency to being able to rattle a few coins of your own in your pocket is a tremendous one. He always insisted that he was a late developer, but this was a step forward into adult life, allowing him to make his own decisions. He was able to get himself a room in Dorchester, going home at weekends yet free to spend his weekday evenings as he liked, unobserved by his family. His interest in girls had not gone away. He is said to have flirted with his pretty older cousin Martha Sparks, and even to have proposed marriage to a Dorchester shopgirl, Mary Waight, but Martha left for London, and Mary turned him down.18

  Another young woman, hovering like a pale shadow behind him, was his sister Mary, so close to him in age and so little mentioned in his own accounts of his life. As small children they necessarily shared a room in the small cottage and ran about together in the garden, and he spoke of her once as his ‘earliest playmate – a kind little sister, sharing with him, gladly, all she had, proud of him beyond words’. There was no doubt of his importance in her life, while his affection was more occasional, fading when he was busy with other people, with his work, with his dreams and ambitions.19 After her death he remarked that she had come into the world and left it without leaving a ripple, and it is abundantly clear that she was self-effacing and too modest to make claims on him.20 Still, in April 1860 he escorted her to Salisbury, where she was to have a higher education at a teacher training college. It was a surprising turn of events for the daughter of modest country people.

  Her parents had observed that she, like Tom, was an intelligent child and paid for her to go to a private school run by two ladies in Dorchester. She acquired the accomplishments expected of a well-brought-up early-Victorian girl, learning to paint and to play the piano – no violin for her. She wrote correctly and read widely, Wordsworth her favourite poet. She could sew, and absorbed domestic skills as she was bound to, growing up in a household without servants. All this would have been enough to launch her into the marriage market, the proper culmination of girlhood. But she was not brought up to think of her life in those terms. Jemima had no marital ambitions for her children, as we have seen, but was actively opposed to the idea of their marrying. The reason for her objection was never explained and seems to have been a theoretical one against the institution itself. Whatever she thought of her own marriage, she accepted or endured its limitations, but her daughter was to have a different sort of life. Hence the unexpected spectacle of the Hardy parents applying for a place at the Church of England teacher training college in Salisbury for their daughter. They asked Mr Shirley to recommend her, and they paid for her board and tuition: £4 a quarter, £12 a year. She was there for nearly three years, becoming a Queen’s Scholar in her second year, which meant her parents did not have to go on paying.21

  The Salisbury Teacher Training College, founded in 1841, was installed in a notably beautiful old house, known as the King’s House, in the cathedral close. In other respects it left a good deal to be desired. The young women were taught history, geography, arithmetic, grammar, drawing and music, with the emphasis on religious instruction – ‘8¾ hours a week’, with an extra hour for Church history. A student of the 1850s left an account of her experiences there: ‘I can only compare my first sensations on taking up my abode there to a shock produced by a sudden plunge into a cold bath… The rules were strict, the fare Spartan in its simplicity, and the amount of household work required to be done by the Students seemed to new-comers simply appalling… As for the education of that time, attainments were not high.’22 The object of the training was not to open the minds of the students or to encourage them to think for themselves but to turn out efficient Christian teachers with basic skills, no more. Much of their time was spent doing the domestic work they were required to contribute at the King’s House – in effect, they were household servants as well as students. The good was that those who passed through the system and gained a certificate were rewarded by the knowledge that they would be able to find regular work and support themselves.

  Hardy was interested enough to think back on Mary’s experience when he decided to write about a women’s training college in Jude the Obscure thirty years later. He made Jude urge his cousin to go to the college, because it would give her a qualification as ‘first-class certificated mistress’, enabling her to earn a reasonable income and even allowing her a certain freedom of choice about where she worked – more than he felt he had as a stonemason. There was no doubt similar reasoning behind Mary’s going, whether she or her parents initiated the plan; the most likely originator, Jemima, had determined that her daughter should never go into service.

  Hardy also listed the backgrounds of the students at the college: they were ‘the daughters of mechanics, curates, surgeons, shopkeepers, farmers, dairymen, soldiers, sailors, and villagers’.23 The social level is clear: curates not clergymen, surgeons not physicians, soldiers not officers. Mary’s best friend at the college was an orphan, Annie Lanham, brought up by a relative, a miller at Affpuddle, near Bockhampton. Annie had no real home to go back to and earned her own living for years, until she married Mary’s cousin Nathaniel Sparks. Hardy wrote of the students as being ‘clipped and pruned by severe discipline’, and on top of that they were half starved. He makes Jude’s cousin Sue tell him, when he offers her a present, that she is ‘dreadfully hungry. They were kept on very short allowances in the College, and a dinner, tea and supper all in one was the present she most desired in the world.’24

  Hungry and inadequately taught as they were, these young women were pioneers. They probably didn’t know they were, any more than Hardy knew how curious it was that a college should have been set up for the daughters of the poor at a date when almost nothing was on offer in the way of higher education for girls of the higher classes. Queen’s and Bedford College had been established in London in 1848 and 1849 for female students, but one of their male founders felt obliged to declare publicly that the intention was not ‘to educate ladies for the kind of tasks which belong to our profession’.25 Florence Nightingale’s School of Nursing was not founded until 1861. Oxford and Cambridge were still closed to women. John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women was not yet written, and middle-class families had not begun to imagine that they might educate their daughters for careers.26 Women might set up schools on the principle of Mrs Micawber, without any preparation beyond putting up a brass plate, and young women might become governesses, but a governess was a wretched creature with no standing in the world. If she had been born a lady and down on her luck, her luck was unlikely to change again for the better. Whereas a teacher from a training college could get a certificate and a career without being a lady. Jemima Hardy wanted her daughters to make more of their lives than she or her sisters or her nieces were able to. The year before Mary went to college was the year her aunt Martha Sharpe died giving birth to her tenth child in Canada. Her aunt Maria Sparks brought up six children and of her daughters, the eldest, Rebecca, was still at home working as a dressmaker; Emma had gone into service until she married, in 1860, a poor carpenter from Somerset with no prospects, and started a family; Tryphena was still a child; Martha, the most enterpr
ising, had taken herself to London and gone into service as a lady’s maid. Mary would be nobody’s servant, and she would have a qualification.

  Hardy, who wasted no scrap of experience, also used the college in an early novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, written in 1871. He made Fancy Day a Queen’s Scholar at her ‘training-school’, and her father explains to a suitor his reasons for making her ‘work as a schoolmistress’: ‘that if any gentleman, who sees her to be his equal in polish, should want to marry her, and she want to marry him, he shan’t be her superior in pocket’.27 Mr Day is a gamekeeper, and on the whole a figure of comedy, but this is not just a comic explanation, because he has given thought to his daughter’s situation and done his best for her. Mr Day is more of a feminist than one would expect, and so it appears were Mr and Mrs Hardy. This is why in April 1860 their elder son escorted their eighteen-year-old daughter to college in Salisbury to qualify for a career. There he had his first look at a female ‘college’, a third-class version of his own dream of a university education.

  Since Horace Moule happened to be in Salisbury at the same time with his two pupils, it would have been natural for Hardy to visit him. No visit was mentioned, then or later. There may have been good reason for Hardy to remain silent, because it is likely that Horace was in a poor state to receive him. Whatever Hardy saw or failed to see, one of his pupils kept a diary in which he wrote that his tutor was a ‘Dypsmaniac’ [sic] and had DTs when they were in Salisbury. He did his best to persuade him to stop drinking, successfully for a short time. After this the party left Salisbury and presently moved to Saint-Germain, outside Paris, for the summer, and here Horace went missing. His unfortunate pupils searched for him in Paris, in the morgue among other places, finally sending for help from the Moule family.28 Henry and Charles went over to France, and at this point Horace turned up in England again. What this meant to the rest of the Moule family can be imagined. Hardy was in Fordington Church on 5 August to hear Mr Moule preach from a text in the Book of Job, ‘All the days of my appointed time will I wait, until my change come.’ It was now clear to him how bad things could be for Horace; the princely friend was all too liable to fall into the gutter. While it must have changed the nature of their friendship, it did not bring it to an end or lessen Hardy’s affection and dependence on him.