The friendship with Leslie Stephen remained low key, partly no doubt because Stephen’s faith in Hardy as a novelist was fading. In 1880 he wrote to a friend, ‘there is no one now who is to the rising generation what Mill and Carlyle were to us; nor have we a really good novelist… to replace the old idols.’6 Fortunately Mrs Anne Procter, the ancient literary lady to whom Stephen had introduced Hardy before his marriage, stepped into the breach. She already took a great interest in his work, and she invited him to bring Emma to meet her as soon as she heard they were in London, and took a liking to her.7 Mrs Procter was now nearly eighty, widowed, and had seen one daughter, a gifted poet, die young, and another fall into a decline, but she faced such blows gallantly, kept her salon in regal style and even managed to be coquettish. Hardy thought she moved through rooms of celebrities ‘like a swan’, and he noticed a ‘momentary archness’ in her glance now and then. Another of her admirers, Henry James, carried a flirtation with her to the point of making a formal, if light-hearted, proposal of marriage.8 James saw in her ‘a kind of window into the past’, and like Hardy loved the fact that she had known everyone in the literary world from childhood on. She received on Sunday afternoons in her flat in Queen Anne’s Mansions, and here Hardy often saw Browning, then at the height of his fame. Hardy was pleased to meet the great man, but Browning liked lions, and Hardy was shy, and they failed to make much of an impression on one another. Mrs Procter also tried Hardy with Tennyson, taking him to dine with the laureate when he was in London for his annual visit. Mrs Tennyson received lying down ‘as if in a coffin’, wrote Hardy, but got up to greet him, and her husband was genial and forthcoming, strikingly dressed in a shirt with a large loose collar and wearing old steel spectacles. He explained that they hated London but needed to come up once a year, because they got rusty living on the Isle of Wight. Hardy thought him quite unlike his portraits and was especially taken with the humorous twitch to his mouth as he talked. He said A Pair of Blue Eyes was his favourite among Hardy’s novels and told him stories about misprints in his own work, ‘airy’ changed to ‘hairy’ pleasing him particularly. Hardy was charmed, and the Tennysons warmly invited him to visit them in Freshwater. Yet he never went, even though he and Emma had read Tennyson’s poetry from their earliest days together, and she would have adored to go. Perhaps that was part of the difficulty, feeling that he could not go without Emma, and that she might dominate the conversation or say awkward things, her style far from that of the self-effacing Emily Tennyson. Yet it would have been an easy trip from either London or Dorset, and it was a missed opportunity.
One clue to the state of things between Hardy and Emma at this time comes from the account written by Richard Bowker, the young London representative of Hardy’s American publishers Harper, who had just serialized The Return of the Native. Bowker, newly arrived in London in the summer of 1880, called on the Hardys in Tooting in July and wrote about it in his journal. It is the earliest description of them as a couple, Hardy just forty, Emma thirty-nine:
I was received in a pretty parlor by Mrs Thomas Hardy, with her Kensington-stitch work, and her pet cat; she is an agreeable youngish English lady, immensely interested in her husband’s work, and we were at once good friends. Hardy presently came down, a quiet-mannered, pleasant, modest, little man, with sandyish short beard, entirely unaffected and direct, not at all spoiled by the reputation which Far from the Madding Crowd and its successors have won for him. He was originally an architect, and had little thought of writing novels. Told me he had the greatest difficulty in remembering the people and incidents of his own stories so that Mrs Hardy had to keep on the look-out for him. We three fell to discussing a title for a new story which he is writing… Before I went, tea and cake were served. I came home, having made two pleasant friends I think.9
Hardy’s remark about not being able to remember the people or incidents in his writing and having to rely on Emma to put him right is a joke, even if Bowker did not notice it. But it is a joke that makes you wonder whether Emma, so ‘immensely interested in her husband’s work’, could be rather too ready to intervene with comments and suggestions. Hardy’s humorous words sound like a very gentle, affectionate mockery of her behaviour and mark the early stages of what was to become a problem. Both were victims of the limitations placed on genteel women. Emma still had nothing to do except embroidery, keeping a cat, ordering about a servant or two and shopping. Hardy did his best to entertain her, escorting her to see the Lord Mayor’s show and to her fashionable dressmaking establishments in Regent Street.10 He also took her for another French holiday in the summer of 1880. But these diversions could not fill the emptiness in her life. In his memoirs he says that it was in the Tooting house ‘that their troubles began’ and that ‘they seemed to begin to feel that “there had passed away a glory from the earth”.’11 She made no progress with her own writing and became one of those wives who regards her husband’s work as ‘our work’ and refers to it in that way in public.
In London the introductions continued. The son of his publisher George Smith invited him to dinner with Matthew Arnold, who modestly explained he was only a hard-worked school inspector; however, on being asked his views on style, he unhesitatingly recommended Swift as a model for narrative writing. Two other writers also present, both at the beginning of their careers, were Henry James and Richard Jefferies, neither of them likely to adopt Swift as a model. Hardy had no reason to like James personally after his review of Far from the Madding Crowd. He was also conscious that they were too far apart in their approach to writing fiction to find common ground, since the sort of people Hardy wrote about did not register on James at all, and James, in Hardy’s view, was without poetry, humour or spontaneity in his writing. He nevertheless admired him as a novelist, and he and Emma both read his novels. Of Jefferies, Hardy had nothing to say, surprisingly, since his essays and stories of Wiltshire life and landscape, ecstatic in their response to nature and detailed in their account of the men and women who worked the land, had something in common with his own work. He may have been simply too high-flown for Hardy; but when Jefferies published his striking study of rural labourers, Hodge and His Masters, in 1880, Hardy responded by attacking the use of the word ‘Hodge’ as a general and demeaning term.12 Jefferies never had Hardy’s success. He had to grind at journalism to make money, and he died relatively young of an untreatable and agonizing spinal disease.
Lord Houghton, better known as Monckton Milnes, Liberal politician, friend of Swinburne and champion of Keats, whose Life and Letters he had brought out when Hardy was still a child, expressed a wish to see more of Hardy. The painter W. P. Frith, best known for his panoramic studies of crowds, Derby Day, Ramsgate Sands and The Railway Station, became a friend, and at his studio Hardy met Sir Percy Shelley, only surviving son of the poet he idolized and about as different from Percy Bysshe as could be imagined. Another figure from the past was a well-wrapped-up old lady who, Frith assured him, had been the dedicatee of Byron’s Childe Harold. Hardy was greedy for such remnants of the past. He went to talk to the Chelsea Pensioners yet again. He also took himself to Chislehurst to watch the funeral of the young Prince Imperial, killed in Africa, carefully observing the Prince’s uncle Joseph as he passed in order to get the Bonaparte features fixed in his mind.
Lowell, the American minister in London, was another he met; the cheerful Du Maurier, illustrator and novelist, and the Pre-Raphaelite Thomas Woolner, who sculpted Hardy’s old hero, John Stuart Mill. Not everyone was so agreeable. ‘Also met a Mrs H., who pretended to be an admirer of my books, and apparently had never read one,’ he noted after a party. He attended an International Literary Congress, where he met Monsieur de Les-seps, followed by a Soirée Musicale at the Hanover Square Club, to meet members of the Literary Congress again, plus members of the Comésdie-Française, and wondered why he was there. In short, he lived the literary life much as it still goes on.13
He acquired a reader’s ticket at the British Museum and w
ent to the great reading room to study the background for his historical novel. The plan for The Trumpet-Major included an account of George III and his family staying in Weymouth during the Napoleonic Wars, as well as references to the Captain Hardy who served with Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. The setting was mostly Weymouth and the steep-sided downs behind it, where the English regiments were encamped and where a few villages were placed, and the wild isle of Portland, across which the heroine walks to see her lover’s ship, the Victory, passing at sea in full sail until she disappears over the horizon. It is neatly told and slight, a harmless pot-boiler written as though Hardy had made up his mind to avoid conflicts with editors about propriety or any possible comparisons with modern French novelists, and it reads almost like a book for children. There is some vivid description, an exciting scene with the press gang, military drill and a lot of rustic foolery. Also a bland heroine Anne with a row of tight curls across her forehead, who dithers between two brothers, the faithful soldier John – the Trumpet-Major – and his sailor brother Bob, fickle as every sailor is known to be. Leslie Stephen saw it and declined it as a serial. Hardy tried to sell it to Blackwood (‘it is above all things a cheerful story, without views or opinions’) with no better luck, then to Macmillan’s Magazine. It was finally taken by Good Words, whose editor obliged him to remove swear words and references to Sunday travel.14 They paid him £400 and it ran throughout 1880, and simultaneously in America, bringing in another $500.15 Smith, Elder published a three-volume edition of 1,000 copies in October 1880 for which they paid £200, so it kept the pot boiling well enough.16 £1,000 a year was an income that put you in the highest levels of middle-class earnings, and, although Hardy was not regularly earning that much, he must have been setting aside substantial sums. His determination to promote his reputation then led him to a striking further step: he wrote to Queen Victoria’s private secretary, offering her a copy of The Trumpet-Major and pointing out that it featured her grandfather George III. When the offer was accepted, he explained that the details of the King’s appearance had been given to him by ‘an aged villager’ who had actually seen him. Whether the Queen would be as struck by this as Hardy hoped, he did himself no harm. A few months later he dispatched a second copy to the Prince of Wales.
He remained uncertain about the pleasures of London life. On the last day of 1878 his father wrote to him to say his mother was ill, that they had ‘drunk both their healths in gin and rhubarb wine’ and hoped to have a visit soon. Hardy responded quickly, going down in chill weather, and alone.
Feb. 1 To Dorchester. Cold. Rain on snow. Henry seen advancing through it, with wagonette and Bob [the horse], to the station entrance. Drove me to Bockhampton through the sleet and rain from the East, which shaved us like a razor. Wind on Fordington Moor cut up my sleeves and round my wrists – even up to my elbows. The light of the lamp at the bottom of the town shone on the reins in Henry’s hand, and showed them glistening with ice. Bob’s behind-part was a mere grey arch; his foreparts invisible.17
Not even the sleet shaving like a razor stopped him noting the details, and Hardy was always as interested in describing bad weather as good. He found his parents in tolerable health, though they must have felt the absence of both of their daughters. He talked a great deal with his father, who told him stories of old times; also to local people, always making notes: ‘A villager says of the parson, who has been asked to pray for a sick person: “His prayers wouldn’t save a mouse.” ’ And during his two weeks’ visit he walked with his usual energy, one day as far as Portland, where the wind blows so fiercely you can be blue with cold in half an hour.
Thinking about his parents, he reflected that both were getting on for seventy, then regarded as the normal life span. Kate was away, and, although Mary was returning to Dorchester, it was as headmistress of the National School, which would keep her busy. He began to consider building a house for himself in the area. He could afford it, but what Emma would think of the idea was another matter. They had married as two people isolated by their defiance of their families. She remained isolated, and if Hardy meant to return to the fold, where she had no wish to be and felt unwelcome to his mother, their life together would be changed for the worse as she saw it. It would no longer be a great adventure, more like a sort of captivity. But there was not much she could do if he made up his mind. She deserves some sympathy. But the shifting feelings in a marriage, and in a family, are as complex and unpredictable as cloud formations. In August, Hardy spent another week at Bockhampton, and this time he persuaded Emma to come down to Weymouth to join him for a second week. His sisters were at home, Jemima consented to make some expeditions with them, and everything went well. By the next spring he was writing to his brother Henry about the possible purchase of a ‘plot of ground we want to get in Dorchester’.18
So there were two processes running counter to each other in this period. Hardy was achieving the sort of success he wanted, he and his work were in demand, he was making enough money to live comfortably in a middle-class suburb, to belong to a club in town and to take Emma to fashionable hotels in France when they spent a holiday touring in Normandy in the summer of 1880. He could just about hold his own at dinners and in a salon, and he had the confidence to offer the Queen his book. Emma still compelled him physically: a paragraph in his poetry notebook describes how he watched her reading by candlelight behind a screen in his firelit study, a shadow of her head thrown on to the ceiling and wall, light ‘shining through the loose hair about her temples’ and reaching her skin ‘as sunlight through a brake’.19 It reads like a foretelling of Tess. At the same time he was feeling the pull of his old home, turning back to the places and people of his past. He worried about the condition of his parents: their generation was dying off. Mr Moule followed his wife and son to the grave early in 1880; his mother’s brother William Hand also died in 1880 and her sister Mary’s husband John Antell soon after. Who was to say how much longer before they too went, taking not only themselves but their precious stores of memory and knowledge?
And he was sometimes oppressed by the problems between Emma and himself, knowing that she disliked the idea of settling permanently in Dorset, that she grieved over having no children, and being unlikely now to have any, and that she would like to be more involved in his work and more fully acknowledged for her involvement.
In the autumn of 1880 he was well into his new novel. It had a title that meant more to his generation than later ones, A Laodicean, taken from the Book of Revelation and meaning a person who blows neither hot nor cold but remains cool and indecisive. This was the heroine, daughter of a millionaire railway engineer who has left her a fortune and an ancient castle in Dorset which she loves for its antiquity but also wants to modernize. The early chapters were already written and being printed for serialization when, as though fate had decided to change the plot of his life, he was struck down by an illness so severe that it kept him out of action for many months. He does not describe or name the illness, but years later he called it an attack of bladder inflammation and says it recurred throughout his life, although never so badly as on this first occasion.20 He blamed a chill brought on by too much swimming off the Normandy coast in July, whose symptoms he must have ignored. He began to feel really ill in October, when he had to call in a neighbouring surgeon. Internal bleeding was diagnosed. Bladder infections are agonizingly painful and debilitating. It does not seem to have been caused by a stone but was rather a severe form of cystitis. Nowadays antibiotics work their wonders, but then suffering was likely to be prolonged, and patients had to rely on careful nursing care. Hardy endured a great deal of pain. Emma, aghast, asked the Macmillans’ advice, and they sent their own doctor. There was talk of an operation. Then they were told that if Hardy was prepared to rest in bed for several months, he might avoid the operation. This was the least dangerous course and fortunately what he chose to do.
His decision was not made only on medical grounds. He realized that an operation
and a stay in hospital would have made it impossible for him to go on writing, whereas from his bed at home he believed he might manage to keep up his commitment to deliver his monthly instalments to Harper’s. There was a good reason for this. He was being paid £100 for each of the twelve instalments of the new book, which was to be the first serial in the new Harper’s European monthly magazine, with Du Maurier’s illustrations, and there were ten more to be written and delivered: he stood to lose £1,200 if he failed, and he made up his mind he would not. He had to rely on Emma as he had never done before. She became his chief nurse and also his amanuensis, and as soon as he was able to they set up a programme of work which they kept to doggedly, day after day, as he dictated the novel to her from his bed. She was also responsible for keeping his publishers reassured, making light of his indisposition and insisting that there was nothing seriously amiss.
Worried as Emma was, it was also a high point for her. It gave her an occupation and responsibility. She was in charge of his health and his correspondence, and indispensable to his writing. The bitterly cold winter made extra problems in running the Tooting house and nursing, and in January snow was blowing in through window cracks and doors. ‘Our passage (downstairs) is sole-deep, Em says, and feet leave tracks on it.’21 She proved herself stalwart and good at what she had taken on. It was not easy, because his condition did not improve steadily but fluctuated in an alarming way. A Savile acquaintance, Edmund Gosse, came to see him and afterwards remembered getting the impression he had jaundice; he may well have had more than one affliction. In January one of his Puddletown cousins, Mary Hand, offered to come to help out, and, although it is not known whether she did come, Emma was ready to accept help or service from his family in a crisis. She kept in touch with Mary, one of whose letters survives from January; it suggests that Hardy had been suffering a relapse of some sort: ‘My dear Emma, I was very glad to hear from you but the iron has again entered my soul respecting Tom’s illness. I am glad you told me just how he was and I hope he is again recovering.’ And she goes on to describe conditions in Dorchester, where the schools are closed by the weather:
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