Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  In May 1863 he left his Kilburn lodgings for Paddington, where he took a single second-floor room at the back of a house in Westbourne Park Villas, No. 16.18 Perhaps he had discovered that he was not a sharer. He may also have wanted to be more central and liked the idea of being close to Eliza. In fact, Eliza left London in the year he moved, but she is said to have considered herself engaged to Hardy until 1867, when the engagement was broken off after he flirted with her sister – or so it was alleged by her niece many years later.19 Like the Mary Waight story, the entanglement with Eliza Nicholls is not much more than a family tradition.20 If we accept that there may be some truth in the stories, they suggest he was a susceptible young man who found himself dealing with more than he could handle. A note from April 1865 indicates general gloom about women and his chances of finding the right one: ‘There is not that regular gradation among womankind that there is among men. You may meet with 999 exactly alike, and then the thousandth – not a little better, but far above them. Practically therefore it is useless for a man to seek after this thousandth to make her his.’21 Two months later, on his twenty-fifth birthday, he wrote, ‘Not very cheerful. Feel as if I had lived a long time and done very little… Wondered what woman, if any, I should be thinking about in five years’ time.’ This suggests he was not in a settled relationship with any woman, even though in 1865 he was perhaps engaged to Eliza and also preparing to spend Christmas with Miss A. He wrote some sonnets, ‘She, to Him’, in the voice of a woman addressing a man who has let her down, dated 1866. They are notable as an early attempt to present a woman’s view of things, and they indicate that this is a writer at work rather than a lover, and that he is more interested in finding the right words for the injured speaker than in any feelings of his own.22

  Hardy took himself to the dance halls whose names he remembered from the worldly Fippard’s talk: Willis’s Rooms, also known as Almack’s, in King Street; St James’s, with its painted and gilded walls and blue-cushioned sofas; the Argyle off Regent Street; and, further afield, Cremorne Gardens, now buried beneath the Lots Road Power Station. He had played enough for others to dance to have dancing in his blood, and at these places there was no difficulty in finding a partner, and many of the girls were prepared to sell more than their dance-floor skills. The blatancy and scale of the sexual arrangements in London were impressive. Dorchester had its poor little houses of ill fame, tucked away in the back streets of Fordington, but in London you could hardly miss the prostitutes. Hardy’s relative poverty and fastidiousness may or may not have made him resistant to the possibilities on offer, but he did take some turns on the dance floor, and was interested enough in the girls to listen to them talking. ‘The Ruined Maid’ is one of the best of the poems he wrote in London and may have originated in what he observed at the dance halls. It is not a subtle poem – it does not need to be – but makes its point by its directness, and gives a slap in the face to middle-class Christian morality. At the office, his colleagues joked about famous courtesans who served the rich, Cora Pearl and ‘Skittles’; Hardy’s poem shows a young countrywoman explaining her new-found prosperity to a friend who chances to run into her in London:

  – ‘At home in the barton you said “thee” and “thou”,

  And “thik oon”, and “theäs oon”, and “t’other”; but now

  Your talking quite fits ’ee for high compa-ny!’ –

  ‘Some polish is gained with one’s ruin,’ said she…

  – ‘I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

  And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!’ –

  ‘My dear – a raw country girl, such as you be,

  Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined,’ said she.23

  The rhythm bounces along, and the irony makes its point. The language is effective too, or rather the two languages, since this ruined maid is bilingual, like Hardy himself. ‘At home in the barton’ – a barton is a cow yard – suggests that she may have been a milkmaid, an occupation he would give to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, who also had two languages.

  Hardy fell more deeply in love with poetry than with any of the girls he met in London and gave more of his attention to it. He studied Palgrave’s anthology The Golden Treasury, an inspired gift from Moule; this newly published collection of lyrical poetry, from the Elizabethans to the Romantics, set up Shakespeare, Milton, Gray and Wordsworth as the great models. He imitated Shakespeare in two of the ‘She, to Him’ sonnets. Palgrave also crammed his book with the sweet, elaborate verse forms of the Elizabethan and Stuart poets that delighted Hardy, although he did not begin to imitate them until later. He included the two greatest odes of Keats – ‘To Autumn’ and ‘To a Nightingale’ – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and a good deal of the unpolitical Shelley. This was when Hardy first read Shelley’s ‘Lament’ with its tremendous first line, ‘O World! O Life! O Time!’ It became one of his most admired lyrics, with its message of joy taking flight, of grief taking the place of delight and its tolling ‘No more – O never more!’ As an anthology should, it led him to read more of these poets. He also bought himself Swinburne’s newly published Poems and Ballads and was so excited by them that even when he had to go out he could not resist reading as he walked along the street.

  He kept many notebooks, in one of which he jotted down words and phrases that pleased him, some listed from dictionaries, e.g., ‘gadder to emborder sworder (solr) to plush to tiddle, to slidder, a dallier tid (nice) a noier (an-) to pucker holder tucker dandler fondler philter live in clover’. Also ‘to call for, call in, call up (past days) call off, call together (the difft happy hours)… carry high, carry me away, carry back to, carry me down to future years, carry forth (her eyes carried f. the tale of her heart), carry on, carry out’. There were quotations from poets he was reading, like his friend William Barnes with his ‘the leanen apple tree’, ‘her shade a-whiv’ren black’. You can watch Hardy accumulating words, entranced by their shapes, their sounds and richness, stacking them up like a bee storing pollen. The shorthand he was learning was put to use in the notebook to cloak any mention of improper parts of the body like the breast, or of sexual desire or activity, and also for the word ‘imitate’, which he set beside some of the quotations. Poor Hardy, suffering pangs of guilt for even thinking of imitating great writers. He needed someone to tell him it is what writers have always done, teaching themselves by imitating what they most admire.

  He sometimes delivered impromptu talks of his own on poets and poetry to his fellow architectural students. He also began to submit his poems to magazines. Everything he sent was rejected. He felt his solitary situation. For him there was none of the support that sustained other young aspirant writers and artists, nurtured by educated families, public school and university, so that they had an established body of knowledge, a critical audience and a network of friends before they were in their twenties. Tennyson, William Morris, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Leslie Stephen all had such support. Rossetti missed the university but had educated parents and rapidly made friends with Morris and his group.24 Hardy had neither the background nor the temperament that would allow him to become part of a group. Moule was the only friend whose advice he could call on, and he had distracting problems of his own. The single piece of work Hardy succeeded in getting published was a short comic essay printed in Chambers’s Journal in 1865, ‘How I Built Myself a House’, written in the first place to amuse his colleagues. It is entertaining, but humorous journalism was not going to be his path to fame.

  If he had come to London to escape from a divided life, he soon saw that he had failed. The divisions were if anything sharper than ever. His office colleagues were from middle-class families with backgrounds utterly unlike his. His women friends were servants in households in which the divisions of class were absolute. His Sparks cousins were workmen, and, what’s more, James, the elder, seems to have been a radical, possibly even a republican. When Hardy wrote a fictional portrait of him, he ma
de him speak with a true revolutionary ring of the ‘useless lumber of our nation that’ll be the first to burn if there comes a flare’.25 Talk of burning, a fire and a flare sounds more like a Continental revolutionary than an English carpenter. Whether James and Nat belonged to the Carpenters’ Union or not, they would have known that its leader, Robert Applegarth, was prominent within the Reform League, founded in 1865 to press for an extension of the vote to working men. It happened that the offices of the Reform League were on the ground floor of 8 Adelphi Terrace, which was also the house to which Blomfield moved his offices in 1863. The reformers were much despised by Blomfield’s ‘Tory and Churchy young men’ – this is Hardy’s description of his colleagues. They amused themselves by letting down ‘ironical bits of paper on the heads of members’, and once nearly came to ‘loggerheads’ with the resident Secretary of the League. Although this semi-jocular reference is all Hardy had to say about London politics in the 1860s in his memoirs, it must be remembered that he wrote them long after he had resolved to abstain from political comment. At the time he must have had at the very least mixed feelings about the question of reform, and his years in London coincided with a period of dramatic political struggle, fiercely fought. There were demonstrations and near-riots, and the Reform League supported John Stuart Mill when he stood for Westminster in the 1865 election.

  Mill was an intellectual hero to Hardy by his own account, and he went to hear him speak at Covent Garden during the campaign. This is his careful description of the occasion, written forty years afterwards:

  The appearance of the author of the treatise On Liberty (which we students of that date knew almost by heart) was so different from the look of persons who usually address crowds in the open air that it held the attention of people for whom such a gathering in itself had little interest… He stood bareheaded, and his vast pale brow, so thin-skinned as to show the blue veins, sloped back like a stretching upland, and conveyed to the observer a curious sense of perilous exposure… the cameo clearness of his face chanced to be in relief against the blue shadow of a church which, on its transcendental side, his doctrines antagonized.26

  Hardy had of course no vote himself, any more than his father.27 Mill was returned in the election and gave his support in Parliament to Gladstone’s Reform Bill, which was defeated in the following year, to considerable anger among reformers and working men. A cholera epidemic, a bad harvest and a rise in the price of bread led to riots in the East End. Applegarth and his union and Reform League friends offered to restore order, if they were listened to on the subject of electoral reform. The government fell, and the Conservatives came in, headed by Lord Derby as Prime Minister, which seemed unpromising.

  On 2 July the Reform League held a rally in Trafalgar Square that drew 80,000 men. A second rally was planned in Hyde Park for 23 July. To prevent it, the Prime Minister had the park gates locked, but the crowds were so great that park railings bent and may either have burst under the pressure or been deliberately broken. This was surely the day that prompted Hardy to write the words ‘Hyde Park – morning’ around the title of Shelley’s revolutionary poem The Revolt of Islam in his own recently acquired copy.28 Here is an indication of quite another Hardy than the mild, polite assistant to Blomfield: instead, a young man reading about revolution and going out to look sympathetically at a great body of workers protesting against injustice. There was some stone-throwing, but when troops were called most of the men dispersed. That evening, however, some went into Chester Square and threw more stones through the windows of the Police Commissioner, watched by Matthew Arnold and his wife from their adjacent balcony. Arnold went to the House of Commons to find out what was being done about this outrage and came home furious at what he perceived as the weakness of the police.29

  Reform meetings continued. In December there were two more, the first held in the grounds of Beaufort House, Kensington, at which the speakers acknowledged the help of Gladstone and Mill. The following evening there was another at St James’s Hall, to which many MPs came. In May (1867) the League called another rally. This one was formally prohibited by the government. No notice was taken by organizers or men, and 100,000 of them gathered defiantly, to be met by 10,000 police and troops. Despite this there was no violence and the crowds again went home quietly, but the Prime Minister admitted that the government had ‘suffered some slight humiliation in the public mind’. The Home Secretary resigned, and the reformers felt they had won the moral victory. After this even the Conservatives and Lord Derby felt that a degree of reform was a safer option than a continuation of demonstrations and possible riots nationwide, and a second Reform Act, adroitly steered by Disraeli, was presented and passed. London’s electorate was increased by 41 per cent. Male householders and lodgers in rooms worth ten pounds a year got the vote. Hardy should have qualified, the first man in his family to do so, but by August, when the Act went through, he had left London.

  Hardy’s comprehensive silence on the subject of politics in his memoir also meant he said nothing of the American Civil War, or of the visit of Garibaldi to London in April 1864, when he was given the freedom of the city and an enthusiastic welcome. No one in London could have missed that, any more than the demonstrations of the 1860s, just as no one who took the trouble to go to hear Mill speak could have been unaware of the struggle for the extension of the vote. Hardy tells us that his first novel was written in a spirit of derision towards the ‘Tory and Churchy’ people he had been working among at Blomfield’s. He himself was no Tory, coming from a Liberal family and with a father who took an interest in politics. Could he be described as ‘Churchy’?

  In the mid sixties he was reading and annotating French radical philosophers and reformers, introduced to him by Moule: Fourier, who planned ideal cooperative communities without religion, and Comte, the first sociologist, the founder of Positivism, a humanist philosophy which held that man should rule his life on scientific, not metaphysical, principles, and that the worship of God should give way to that of humanity. Whatever Hardy made of all this – he was certainly interested – Mill’s arguments against religion in On Liberty, where he pointed to the failure of modern Christians to take their rules of behaviour from the New Testament, and protested against the Christian claim to know the whole truth, must have had a still stronger effect. Mill’s indictment was clearly reasoned and devastating, because it was applied to the contemporary practice of religion in England, suggesting it encouraged a ‘low, abject, servile type of character’ and showing it as morally damaging to the whole community. By whatever accumulation of reading and thinking it came about, by 1866 Hardy was no longer writing in his prayerbook or going to church regularly. Yet he found it hard to abandon religion altogether. For a while he had a fantasy of giving up architecture and devoting himself to writing poetry, supporting himself by becoming a country clergyman on the model of William Barnes. The problem was that it would make it necessary for him to obtain a university degree. As late as 1866 he wrote to Moule, who sent him a students’ guide to Cambridge; only then, after thinking it through carefully yet again, did he realize that he could not prepare to enter the Church ‘while holding the views which on examination he found himself to hold’.30 In other words, the arguments against religion had prevailed, and he was no more ‘Churchy’ than he was Tory. And with that decision, he also gave up any further thought of getting to a university.

  Losing faith in Christianity was like shedding a protective skin: intellectually necessary but also a melancholy process. The melancholy was perfectly expressed in the 1860s by Matthew Arnold in his poem ‘Dover Beach’, with its description of the world without faith as having ‘neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain’. Hardy arrived at his own conclusion with many fits, starts and meanders, reluctant to let go of something that had absorbed so much of his imaginative life at the same time that he was eager to join the ranks of the enlightened. He felt the draining away of the old joyous certitudes as we
ll as pride in the new clear thinking. This ambivalence made him into a poet who, in his later years, still sometimes celebrated belief alongside disbelief. He could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief, and especially the centrality and beauty of Christian ritual in country life, and what it had meant to earlier generations and still meant to some. So he could write about the wish that he might still be able to believe, as in his famous poem ‘The Oxen’; and about his memories of being a believer himself.31

  If Horace Moule was experiencing similar doubts, which seems likely, he was fiercely defended against them by his family. In one way it was fortunate that his brothers, all as pious as their parents, were there to help him back from whatever dangerous journeys he took into unbelief, depression or alcoholism. In the summer of 1864 he went to Switzerland with two of his brothers, much loved companions but also guardians. He was often in brilliant spirits, as when he sent Hardy some good advice on writing: ‘the grand object of all in learning to write well is to gain or generate something to say.’32 Again, he commented on a piece of prose Hardy sent him early in 1864: ‘a bright thought strikes me,’ he wrote, going on to suggest that Hardy might try to become London correspondent for a country paper. ‘Your chatty description of the Law Courts and their denizens is just in the style that would go down.’ This may not have been what Hardy hoped to hear, but at least Moule was giving him his attention. He also asked politely about Mary, ‘your sister… and your plans for her’.33 By then Mary was teaching in a village school at Denchworth, near Oxford. Hardy visited her there once, but she was so miserably lonely that she begged her mother to let her have her six-year-old sister to live with her. Jemima agreed, and Kate was sent to be Mary’s companion.