A veil was drawn by the family – and by Hardy – over what went wrong for Horace. Drinking can be part of the upward swing into mania; the depression that follows is worse for the sufferer but may be easier for others to deal with. Horace continued to swing between periods of equilibrium – when he could write reviews, play the organ for the inauguration of a new church in Fordington, even preach a sermon against intemperance – and flare-ups of drinking and bad behaviour followed by moods of suicidal depression. The suggestion of homosexuality has been raised and found plausible by some, although there is no evidence to support it. Manic depression seems enough to explain Horace’s drinking bouts, his inability to keep jobs, his increasing dependence on the protection of his successful brothers, his guilty feelings towards his family and his spiralling moods, up and down. Doubts about his religious faith would make things more difficult with his parents and add to his guilt.
In April 1862 it was Hardy’s turn to behave unpredictably. Giving little notice to anyone, he made up his mind to leave Mr Hicks’s office. He said goodbye to Dorchester and Bockhampton, and announced that he was going to find work in London. He had been there only once in his life, as a child with his mother. Now he was shaking off mother, home, all the web of experiences and associations that had formed him but also cramped him in the country. It was a brave move.
5. The Londoner
Hardy arrived in London in April 1862 and remained for five years, until July 1867. He went home every Christmas, and had a visit from his father in the first year, and another from his sister Mary; three of his Sparks cousins were working in London. Otherwise he was on his own. He set out to become a Londoner, and he felt that he succeeded. He walked till he knew ‘every street and alley west of St Paul’s like a born Londoner’, and he always insisted on his familiarity with London life.1 His own account of these years makes him sound like the most determined and conscientious of cultural tourists. He took in exhibitions, galleries, churches, libraries, museums, dance halls, theatres and opera houses. He haunted second-hand bookstalls in Holywell Street, east of Bun-hill Fields.2 He went several times to hear Dickens read – he must have heard David Copperfield, which taught him a good deal about London – and to hear John Stuart Mill speak on the hustings, and to the House of Commons to listen to Lord Palmerston. When Palmerston died, he got tickets for the funeral in Westminster Abbey, very conscious of the fact that the great man had entered the house only a year after the deaths of Foxand Pitt, and while Sheridan still lived.
He went out to see the illuminations for the wedding of the Prince of Wales, and had his waistcoat buttons torn off and his ribs ‘bent in’ as he struggled to get out of the crush. He enrolled for French classes at King’s College. He took himself to a phrenologist in the Strand to have his bumps surveyed and came away no wiser. He travelled on the earliest underground railway line at the first opportunity. He offered himself as an extra in a professional stage production, being interested in trying to write a play himself, and appeared on stage at the Haymarket. He stood in Rotten Row to watch the rich being driven round in their open carriages during the Season. He noticed the tired clerks walking in Oxford Street, and the shop women, and the girls who hired themselves out in the dance halls. By his own account he saw ‘the first load of rubbish shot for the making of the Embankment and the first train go over Hungerford Bridge’.3
His plan was to make his mark in London and to work his way to success, and he was ready to give every bit of his energy to achieving his ambitions. The difficulty that arose was that he was not sure quite what sort of success he aspired to. The most striking thing about these five packed years is that when he left London he had the germ of his first novel in him, 440 pages drawn from ‘the life of an isolated student cast upon the billows of London with no protection but his brains’ and meant as a ‘dramatic satire of the squirearchy and nobility, London society, the vulgarity of the middle class, modern Christianity, church restoration, and political and domestic morals in general, the author’s views, in fact, being obviously those of a young man with a passion for reforming the world… the tendency of the writing being socialistic, not to say revolutionary’.4
How did the young architectural assistant turn into the socialistic novelist and satirist? He set off for London knowing almost nothing of life in the capital beyond the fact that his mother had worked there and liked it so much that she wanted to leave the country and earn her living there. She failed, as we know, but he surely went with her approval. He seems all the same to have set off with small preparation; but they both knew that he was breaking the ties that might have kept him, as assistant to a Dorchester architect, in working contact with his builder father and demonstrating his ambition to become a different sort of person. He was going to London to find out what he might do or discover there. That being said, he understood that his training in Hicks’s office was the only solid qualification he had to offer, and equipped himself with two letters of recommendation to London architects who might be willing to start him off in a job, one from his father, and a return ticket.
This seems to have been the sum of his practical preparations. The train journey was the same as the one he had made with his mother eleven years before, and he is unlikely to have wasted his money on anything better than a bench in the unheated third class. He had a few pounds saved up, but neither work nor lodgings fixed. He knew Horace Moule’s other Dorset protégé, Hooper Tolbort, who was already there, preparing for the Indian Civil Service examination, and his Sparks cousins. James had been learning carpentry and the building trade from a London uncle for some time, Nat had joined him, and Martha was in service as a lady’s maid.5 None was in a position to give him much support, since working men put in long hours and a steady six-day week, and female servants were not encouraged to invite male guests to call on them at the area door.
The train still took the best part of four hours to get to Waterloo. When, later, he described the arrival in London of a poor country traveller, he wrote of the walk across Westminster Bridge, preferred to Waterloo Bridge, for which a toll of a halfpenny was charged; and how everyone held handkerchiefs to their mouths to strain off the river mist from their lungs.6 The river and the air above it were bad for you. It was only four years since the stink rising from the Thames had been so foul that Parliament had been forced to abandon its sittings. Sewage works were now in hand, but they took time, and there would be another cholera epidemic in 1866.
London was a filthy city. There were too many people, too many horses, too much smoke and coal dust, not enough light. There was dirt in the river, in the streets, in the air, dirt that got into your clothes. A foggy day turned white linen brown in a few hours. Tom described one in February when it was ‘almost pitch dark in the middle of the day, and everything visible appeared of the colour of brown paper or pea-soup.’7 He noticed that the trees were sooty and how ‘swarthy columns of smoke’ rose from the massed kitchen chimneys every morning, spreading out to form a haze that darkened the sun and gave the air its city smell.8 ‘To me London gardens always seem faded & dirty,’ he wrote later.9 Even a privileged traveller such as the young Henry James, arriving in London like Hardy in the 1860s, with a credit note for £1,000 in his wallet, was oppressed by London at first. Opulent, yes, but vast, hideous, vicious, neither cheerful nor charming, he wrote home; he saw a ‘huge general blackness’ and streets of low black houses like ‘so many rows of coal scuttles’.10
James was quickly installed in Mayfair in a comfortable set of rooms for gentlemen, and he had introductions to the right people. Within days he was dining with Leslie Stephen, Ruskin, William Morris, meeting Frederic Harrison, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Charles Dickens’s daughter Mamey, and feeling that London was not so bad after all; then he set off for Oxford with more introductions. What Hardy faced was the poor man’s tramp looking for lodgings. London was a city of lodgers and lodging houses, mostly mean places where slops and ashes were carried up and down narrow stairs all da
y and hovering landladies’ daughters were best avoided; being a lodger provided a dismal rite de passage and a good story for nineteenth-century novelists from Trollope to Wells. Hardy has a rueful account of calling at one lodging house where the cousin of a Dorset acquaintance turned him away and added a stern warning of the difficulties he was likely to face. ‘Wait till you have walked the streets a few weeks, and your elbows begin to shine, and the hems of your trousers get frayed, as if nibbled by rats! Only practical men are wanted here.’11 Somehow he found a temporary bed.
The next morning he was out with his letters of recommendation. The first, to Benjamin Ferrey, an architect his father had worked for in Dorset, met with kind words and a promise of help – but then nothing. The disappointment was more than made up for by a piece of astounding luck. A pupil of Ferrey and friend of Hicks, John Norton, with no work to offer, took pity on Hardy and suggested he should come in and do some drawings in his office for token payment, allowing him to look around for something better. Within a week Arthur Blomfield, one of the most successful architects in London, asked Norton if he knew anyone who could do Gothic ecclesiastical drawing, and, on 5 May, Hardy started work for Blomfield at a salary of £110 a year.12 This was something to write home about, although the sad fact is that not a single letter exists to tell us what he communicated to his parents or how often he wrote to them.
A second piece of luck was that another trainee architect in Blomfield’s office suggested they share lodgings, since he had found some which would do for two. His name was Philip Shaw; he was a gentleman and had his own silver to prove it: Hardy noticed the landlady rattling it about, resentfully he thought. Since Hardy had no possessions at all beyond a bag of clothes and books, the lodgings suited him well enough. They were in Kilburn, at 3 Clarence Place, a small terrace of houses where Quex Road meets the Edgware Road; in those days, there were still fields and farms all about, and the driver of the local omnibus asked, as he set off, ‘Any more passengers for London?’ Shaw had intellectual tastes and sometimes read aloud to his fellow lodger in the evening. Hardy remembered him choosing Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and it may have been this reading that first encouraged him to go to the National Gallery and look at paintings. Soon he was making daily visits and keeping a notebook on schools of painting. Shaw was a good fellow, ready to lend Hardy his dress coat when the occasion demanded – Hardy was invited to an architectural conversazione – and he even thought of inviting him to Bockhampton, intending to show him off. He wrote to his sister Mary, saying that Shaw would be ‘considered a great gun’ in the parish and explaining to her how to pronounce ‘kon-ver-sat-zi-on-e’.13
His letters to Mary are few and not expansive, but they do give a glimpse of a young man eager to learn and to get on, and to pass on his discoveries. ‘Do not send back the Sat. Revs [Saturday Reviews] but take care of them and put them in your box, so that I may have them when I want them.’ Thackeray ‘is considered to be the greatest novelist of the day’. Barchester Towers ‘is considered the best of Trollope’s.’ Here are the first indications that he was thinking critically about novel writing. ‘I tried the Underground Railway one day – Everything is excellently arranged.’ The Metropolitan Line opened in January 1863, running from Paddington to Farringdon Street, the trains divided into three classes, third class at 3 d., half the price of first. It was an instant and overwhelming success, and by the middle of the next decade was carrying 48 million passengers a year.14
Hardy often described his five years in London as his student years, and with good reason. Some of his activities have already been listed, but, not content with his busy cultural programme, he kept up his own music, buying a second-hand violin and playing in the evenings, tunes from the Italian operas, accompanied on the piano by his fellow lodger. He also taught himself shorthand. He bought himself books: a pronouncing dictionary, a rhyming dictionary, a guide to English literature and many volumes of poetry. He wrote poetry of his own with increasing vigour and confidence. Most of it he destroyed; much of what has survived is curious rather than achieved, but some is good by any standards, and all proof of a passionate commitment to words.
During his first months in London the International Exhibition was an attraction, so powerful that he gave it as one of his reasons for moving to London. He had after all missed the 1851 Great Exhibition, and it was planned as an attempt to revive the glories of its predecessor. It opened just after he arrived, near Hyde Park Gate in South Kensington, covering twenty-four acres with its glass-domed buildings, and remained open for six months. There were photography galleries and machinery galleries; William Morris showed his wallpapers and tapestries; a statue of Shakespeare presided. Hardy often went after his day’s work, going on to the Kensington Museum reading room, where he had access to a free library. He managed to escort his cousin Martha to the exhibition at least once, and went with Moule when he turned up in London in August. Moule stayed at his bachelor hotel, the Old Hummums in Covent Garden, and gave Hardy dinner there after taking him to a Jesuit service in Farm Street; whether this was simply open-minded or whether he was actively curious about Catholicism, it also looks like a gesture of defiance of his father. He was in town partly to see Tolbort, who had just achieved his examination triumph in the Indian Civil Service examinations, and also because he was currently planning to study law and was, in fact, admitted to the Middle Temple later in the year. This turned out to be another false start. A few months later he wrote to Hardy from Dorchester saying, ‘I am quite right again’, indicating that he was recovering from being not ‘right’ at all and knowing that Hardy would understand what he meant.15 Hardy may or may not have seen him in Dorset at Christmas. When Horace went down into his black places, he was out of anyone’s reach; when he came up, he was still the same charming and energetic person – the best friend.
Blomfield’s offices were just off Trafalgar Square, at 9 St Martin’s Place. Either architects were particularly agreeable employers or Hardy was twice lucky, because here he was again spending his working hours in a relaxed and cheerful atmosphere among colleagues disposed to be friendly, on a superficial level at any rate. There were six articled pupils and two or three assistants, no formal instruction and not usually very much work to be done. His new boss was as musical as Hardy himself, and encouraged the young men to sing glees and part songs with him; and since Hardy could sight read, he made a useful addition to the office choir. Blomfield himself had a powerful bass voice, and Hardy described him as ‘a lithe, brisk man’. At thirty-three he was in the prime of life, a quintessential figure of the establishment, the fourth son of the Bishop of London, born at Fulham Palace, educated at Rugby School and at Cambridge, good at sport, especially on the river, good-natured and good-looking. He was kindly too, and within months of Hardy joining the office Blomfield put his name forward to become a member of the Architectural Association, of which he was the current President; and he was responsible for the invitation to the conversazione. There were many occasions on which he took his young assistant out with him professionally, and they got on well enough to form a friendship later in their lives; on the other hand there is no record of Hardy being invited to Blomfield’s house to meet his young wife.
Blomfield may not have known that Hardy’s cousins were carpenters and a lady’s maid, but he did know Hardy was the son of a country builder. Blomfield, son of one bishop and brother of another, moved in exalted circles. Hardy’s contemporary Eliza Lynn Linton, making her way as a writer in London, found doors opened to her because her grandfather was a bishop and her uncle a dean. ‘What humiliating snobs we are!’ she lamented, divided between shame and gratitude for the advantages they conferred on her.16 Hardy was on the wrong side of this sort of snobbery, and within a year of working for Blomfield he had understood how things lay. Although he won two Architectural Association prizes, one for the design of a country mansion, the other for an essay on the use of coloured bricks in modern architecture, he thought the judges condesce
nding in their attitude to him. He also found architectural drawing where he was merely copying and not originating designs ‘monotonous and mechanical’, and he decided quite early in his time with Blomfield that he had no hope of succeeding as an architect because it meant ‘pushing his way into influential sets which would help him to start a practice of his own.’17
He had come armed with one grand address that might have helped him into an ‘influential set’, that of his old love, Julia Martin, and before he had been in London for long he nerved himself to go to Bruton Street in Mayfair where the Martins were living. The door was opened by the butler he remembered from Kingston Maurward, looking much the same. The lady did not. She was now in her fifties, and whatever dreams Hardy had cherished of a revival of any kind of tender intimacy ended on the spot. He thought Mrs Martin was also disconcerted by his more or less adult appearance – a young man was a very different creature from a small boy, and there was no question of taking this Tommy on her lap – and their conversation was awkward. Graciously, she invited him to call again, but once was enough for him, and he did not return to Bruton Street. Yet neither put the other quite out of mind.
In October of this first year his father came to see him, accompanied by a family friend, ‘Miss A.’, who was looking for a ‘situation’ in London. Hardy wrote to Mary that the visit ‘went off all right’, that he took them to the opera at Covent Garden – Lurline by the Irish composer William Wallace – and that Mr Hardy, showing a natural interest in building works, inspected the Thames Tunnel and climbed to the top of the Monument. It does not sound as though Tom took his father into the office. ‘Miss A.’ or ‘H.A.’ remains one of the unidentified young women in Hardy’s life, but, since he was asking Mary three years later ‘will it be awkward for you if H.A. & I come down for Xmas day & the next…?’, it sounds as though she did find a situation in London and was friendly enough with Hardy for them to travel together at Christmas. It also looks as though he was interested in more than one girl, because he had another involvement with a lady’s maid working in Westbourne Park Villas, Eliza Nicholls. She too had a Dorset connection, although he seems to have met her in London, and he began to see something of her in 1862. In a letter of November 1862 he asks Mary, ‘Do you ever write to Eliza?’, just before mentioning Miss A. He may have been hoping that his sister would not mention either girl to the other.
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