Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  I don’t think there has been such a winter since Granny went to Church walking on the hedges… I have heard nothing from home during the sharp weather except the Dorchester news which has been that the Bockhampton folk had to live wholly on potatoes. No bakers could get there I know: but don’t be alarmed. Henry is young and strong and they killed a pig quite recently, but I suppose they don’t wish to risk Bob’s legs if they can avoid it… I should very much like to come and see you again. All this dull weather Katie has been quite lonely and so have I. I wish we could have been with you – if you would have liked us. Yours affectionately, M. Hardy.22

  The wistful last words suggest a degree of uncertainty about her welcome, but Emma was at her best when most was asked of her.

  In February, Kegan Paul advised Hardy to consult Sir Henry Thompson, specialist in bladder disease, who came, examined Hardy and said he did not think an operation necessary, though he told him he must continue to rest. By now he had only five more instalments to write and was recovering his strength. His sickbed notes are charming.

  Jan. 31. Incidents of lying in bed for months. Skin gets fair: corns take their leave: feet and toes grow shapely as those of a Greek statue. Keys get rusty; watch dim, boots mildewed; hat and clothes old-fashioned; umbrella eaten out with rust; children seen through the window are grown taller.

  Feb. 7. Carlyle died last Saturday. Both he and George Eliot have vanished into nescience while I have been lying here.

  ‘Nescience’, as Hardy lovers know, was a favourite word and means having no knowledge, particularly appropriate for George Eliot who, alive, had so much.

  Feb. 21. A. G. called. Explained to Em about Aerostation, and how long her wings would have to be if she flew, – how light her weight, etc., and the process generally of turning her into a flying person.23

  A. G. was Alfred Greenhill, an engineer friend of Hardy, interested in aeronautics, and aerostation was aerial navigation. They perhaps shared a joke about Emma being a ministering angel to Hardy, and how differently she would have to be constructed before she could take to the skies. It sounds like a cheerful scene, the two men complimenting and teasing her, as though the hard work she had put in through the winter had earned her some lightness of being.

  13. The Tower

  In April 1881 Hardy was able to get up again and spend his days by the fire, feet on the mantelpiece and pen in hand – so he described himself in a letter to a friend.1 He said he was not writing much, but in fact he was working on the twelfth and last instalment of A Laodicean, and he finished it by the end of the month. The result was poor and scrambled together, but it was a triumph to have got it done at all, and to have kept the severity of his illness from Harper’s. Now Emma was able to go into town again when she liked, and he made his first outing in a carriage, and then resumed a daily walk. Together they went for another consultation with Sir Henry Thompson and were reassured. After this they made up their minds to leave London for Dorset yet again. Hardy blamed the bad metropolitan air for undermining his health and believed he would work better in the country. The search for a building plot had been set aside during his illness, but it was not forgotten. Meanwhile they must rent a house.

  In June they were in Dorchester, staying at the King’s Arms while they looked about.2 They found what they wanted in Wimborne, near the Hampshire border and ten miles north of Bournemouth and the sea. Wasting no time, they went back to Tooting to pack up their things and moved in before the end of the month.3 It was Emma’s third Dorset home. Memories of their good days living at Sturminster above the Stour may have played a part in their decision, since Wimborne also stood on the Stour. It has water meadows to the south and west, a cluster of streets with handsome old houses and a minster church dating back to the twelfth century. Hardy had thought of moving there in the year after their marriage, when his house-hunting led him past the minster at dusk and he had gone in to hear an organist playing, lit by a single candle, and was pleased by the music and the brilliance of the candlelight in the dark arcaded building. But what they rented was once again a solid modern brick villa, as close to the railway station with its good service to London as to the river or the minster. Lanherne, The Avenue, had been built for a gentleman, with stables and a carriage house at the end of the garden. Not needing the stables, Hardy allowed a neighbour to use them and chose to charge him nothing. He found immediate pleasure in the well-planted garden, the conservatory and the vine on the stable wall, and he made a careful note of what was growing, from Canterbury bells and Sweet Williams to ‘strawberries and cherries that are ripe, currants and gooseberries that are nearly ripe, peaches that are green, and apples that are decidedly immature’.4 On the night of 25 June they were in the garden to enjoy a new sight in the sky, a large comet named after the Australian astronomer who had predicted it, Tebbut’s Comet.

  Hardy began to think of a story with an astronomical theme. In 1881 astronomers were preparing to travel round the world to observe the rarely occurring Transit of Venus in front of the sun, due to take place in December 1882, which would allow a more exact measurement of the distance between the sun and the earth to be calculated.5 Hardy incorporated the Transit of Venus into his tale, making his young hero an astronomer eager to get to the Pacific to gain a good observation point. He also applied for permission to visit the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Visitors were not normally allowed, and he was sent a form to fill in, inquiring whether he had an observatory of his own or planned to build one. He replied disingenuously that he was ‘sketching the plans for one’ and wished to ascertain ‘if a hollow memorial pillar, with a staircase inside, can be adapted for the purpose of a small observatory – and how it can be roofed so as not to interfere with observations – etc. etc.’. He was also asked to produce ‘the name of any gentleman of either of the Scientific Societies of London, or who has repute in Science to whom you are known’. Hardy offered three names eminent enough to unlock most doors, although only one, Thomas Huxley, was a scientist. He added Tennyson and Lord Houghton for good measure and was admitted to the Observatory in December 1881, where he presumably found answers to his questions.

  He wanted to know whether a tower could be converted into an observatory, because he had decided his hero would install one in an existing tower, lent to him by the lady on whose land it stood. Hardy had three Dorset towers in mind, but his principal model was in the park of Charborough House, an eighteenth-century mansion five miles from Wimborne.6 This tower, a magnificent construction, with stairs and rooms, was put up in the 1790s and improved fifty years later. There was no question of asking to visit it, because Dorset landowners did not open their properties to the public, but, in July, Hardy took Emma and his sister Kate for a jaunt to see an Iron Age camp, Badbury Rings, in a hired wagonette, and, as they passed Charborough and glimpsed the tower over the wall of the estate, their driver told them this was ‘heiress land’, meaning that it had passed down through the female line. The present owner, Miss Drax, lived there alone and unmarried, a quiet little lady, he said. She had inherited from her mother, Jane Erle-Drax, the previous heiress, while her father was a mere young officer, with nothing but good looks and a smooth manner to recommend him. Jane Erle-Drax had been thirty-nine when they married in 1827; he was twelve years younger and he took her name. Their only child, Maria Caroline Sawbridge-Erle-Drax, inherited it in 1853 and was now the quiet little lady, living in entire seclusion.7

  Hardy snapped up gossip and snippets of information like this and used what he wanted. He set his tower on a private estate, made its mistress an older woman and her lover a clever boy. His tower stands far from the house, on a small tree-covered hill in the middle of a great ploughed field of ninety acres, which, as Hardy points out, provides a better barrier than a lake. He has it built over what might have been a Roman camp, and it emerges from trees into the open sky ‘a bright and cheerful thing, unimpeded, clean, and flushed with the sunlight’.8 He claimed that Two on a Tower centred on the contrast
between the hero’s astronomical studies, voyaging through the vastness of space, and the intimacies of love between him and the older woman, and that he had intended to ‘set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe’.9 In practice the lives of characters in a novel cannot seem ‘infinitesimal’, because they have to claim the foreground of the writer’s imagination and our attention, and, whatever Hardy intended, it is not the starry spaces but Viviette and Swithin who fill the foreground of this novel, with the questions raised by their love – whether they can or will marry, whether she will wreck his life, or he hers, and how they can manage to keep any secrets in a country village where the farm labourers and the domestic servants know just about everything that is going on – all pressed urgently and effectively. Viviette, Lady Constantine, is the 28-year-old wife of a baronet, Swithin a poor, clever boy of nineteen, and their love leads to many complications. Once again, Hardy was raising the question of the poor man and the lady.

  Swithin is given some impressive astronomical talk. ‘The actual sky is a horror,’ he says and ‘horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered… Impersonal monsters, namely Immensities… the voids and waste places of the sky.’ He talks of ‘a quality of decay’ in the sky that adds ‘a new weirdness to what sky possesses in its size and formlessness’, possibly an allusion to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, formulated at the mid century.10 ‘If you are cheerful, and wish to remain so, leave the study of astronomy alone. Of all the sciences, it alone deserves the character of the terrible.’11 This is what he tells Viviette, who is eager to hear and learn. There are times when he is so excited and absorbed by his intellectual pursuits that he forgets about her, and times when she asks herself if she is right to distract him from his ambitions and makes up her mind to leave him alone.

  The tower itself is the centre of the book, and Hardy makes it, as well as a solid structure, a poetic dream place where things are possible that are not allowed in the real world. It also sets the events of the story going and sees their conclusion. It is at various times observatory and work place, love nest, refuge, object of curiosity and suspicion, tourist attraction and place of death. He describes it with loving attention in all seasons and at all hours of the day and night. At the top of the tower, Viviette, wife of the landowner on whose estate it stands, first lays eyes on Swithin, a trespasser from the village, whose interest in astronomy has led him to use the tower as an observatory without asking permission. He is the orphaned son of a curate and a farmer’s daughter, brought up by his simple grandmother in the village but educated at the local grammar school. He is gifted, and ambitious to become nothing less than the Astronomer Royal, as he announces to Viviette. He is also a strikingly beautiful young man. She grants him permission to continue working in the tower – her husband is away indefinitely in Africa – and offers to assist him with his astronomical ambitions in every way. To begin with she purchases the equipment he badly needs. It is not long before she realizes she might ‘soon be plunging across the ragged boundary which divides the permissible from the forbidden’.12

  The book has a strong sexual charge and is especially insistent on Viviette’s wooing of the boy. She is Venus to his Adonis, only a successful Venus.13 One day she finds him sleeping in the tower and cannot resist cutting off one of his curls to keep. Hardy writes of her ‘superiority of experience and ripeness of emotion exercising the same peculiar fascination over him as over other young men in their first ventures in this kind’.14 When she has lunch served to him in her library, it is highly symbolic: first pheasant – the landowner’s food, traditionally denied to the lower classes – and then an apple, ‘in whose flavour he recognized the familiar taste of old friends robbed from her husband’s orchards’.15 She sits down to talk to him with ‘warm soft eyes which met his own with a luxurious contemplative interest… [and a] voice not far removed from coaxing’.16 Later in their romance Swithin’s voice becomes husky with desire when he says, ‘I won’t go away from you,’ and she yields to ‘all the passion of her first union with him’: as straightforward an account of a sexual embrace as could then be made.17 Ten years on, Hardy told a friend that ‘ever since I wrote “Two on a Tower” in 1881 – I have felt that the doll of English fiction must be demolished.’18 This suggests he knew exactly what he was doing, and why.

  Marriages between older women and young men were also very much in the news. Hardy’s friend Anny Thackeray had recently married, at the age of forty, a cousin seventeen years younger, to the intense disapproval of Leslie Stephen. In 1880 George Eliot, a few months before her death, married a man twenty years her junior. In the same year the 67-year-old Baroness Burdett-Coutts caused general consternation by announcing she was going to marry her secretary, a young American half her age, and against all advice the marriage went through in February 1881. Hardy’s Viviette was not yet thirty, but she was still an older woman, and Hardy knew that for a baronet’s wife or widow – there is doubt over her status for some time – to be attracted to a village youth was a shocking theme for the 1880s. But his tone is easy and his sympathy strongly with Viviette, as she and Swithin flout the conventions of class, age and morality.

  Swithin’s clergyman father had married a farmer’s daughter and been dropped by the gentry as a result; like Hardy, he is between two worlds, brought up in the village by his Gammer Martin, who bears some resemblance to Hardy’s grandmother, as we have already seen.19 Later in the book Viviette behaves still more disgracefully, when, finding herself pregnant by Swithin after sending him to the other side of the world on his astronomical expedition, she has not the courage to brazen things out and instead deceives a bishop into marrying her and passes off the child as his.

  Viviette and her story developed in Hardy’s mind through the summer and autumn of 1881, but he did not write anything down yet. He negotiated the sale of a short story through a ‘Newspaper Fiction Bureau’ and delivered it for Christmas publication, read the proofs for the serialization of A Laodicean, which continued until December, and in September the proofs for its publication in volume form.20 He enjoyed the proofreading because he was able to sit in the sunshine under his vine: ‘The sun tries to shine through the great leaves, making a green light on the paper, the tendrils twisting in every direction, in gymnastic endeavours to find something to lay hold of.’21 The green light on the paper is from Hardy the poet making notes, like the candlelight reaching Emma’s skin through her loose hair ‘as sunlight through a brake’, when he was ill in the winter. He believed, and said, that he was a poet and not a novelist, and that he wrote novels to make money; and his businesslike attitude to getting well paid for them, and relative indifference to making them as good as they could be, relate to this belief. His method was as far as possible from the perfectionism of a Flaubert, and he had very little to say about his approach to writing fiction. When a novel turned out badly for one reason or another, he dealt with it briskly, but he does not appear to have tormented himself; he never even considered withdrawing A Laodicean from publication. It was work done and paid for, and that was it.22

  The Hardys were now accepted as solid people and invited to dull provincial dinners, Shakespeare readings and even to the annual ball given by Lady Wimborne, where Hardy exchanged mild jocularities with his host. The eldest of the Moule brothers, Henry, who had first made friends with him and introduced him into his family, called on them in Wimborne; he was about to become curator of the Dorset County Museum, currently being built in Dorchester to the design of Hardy’s old boss, Crickmay. Emma suggested that Moule and Hardy might collaborate on a book about Dorset, Moule doing the pictures and Hardy the text, but Hardy thought it unlikely to make money and did not pursue the matter. In August he took Emma for a northern trip: visiting Edinburgh, Glasgow and Loch Lomond, and returning by way of Windermere and Chester. In September the Atlantic Monthly asked him for a new serial to appear simultaneously in America and England. He offered them Two
on a Tower, and the deal was made in January 1882, the story to run from May to December. Now he began to put on paper the ideas he had already developed in his head. ‘Thus ended 1881,’ he wrote, ‘with a much brighter atmosphere for the author and his wife than the opening had shown.’ The cheerfulness is rare enough to suggest that Hardy and Emma enjoyed their Christmas season in Wimborne.

  He had no difficulty in keeping up with the instalments of Two on a Tower and managed to cram in a great deal of other activity during 1882. In February a dramatized version of Far from the Madding Crowd opened in Liverpool, and he took Emma north to see it in March.23 On the way back they stopped in London to see Henry Irving in Romeo and Juliet, tickets provided by Irving as a fellow Savilian. In April he was in London to attend the funeral of Darwin at Westminster Abbey and to see ‘his’ play again, which had transferred from Liverpool to the Globe Theatre; it did not please him. In September he finished writing Two on a Tower and made a tour around the West Country with Emma, visiting Salisbury and the coast, Lyme Regis, Charmouth and Bridport. They travelled in horse-drawn coaches, and Hardy was proud of his wife when she complained about the ill-treatment of a horse: ‘E., with her admirable courage, would have interfered, at the cost of walking the rest of the distance: then we felt helpless against the anger of the other passengers who wanted to get on.’24 On their way home they called on William Barnes in his thatched vicarage near Dorchester, at Winterborne Came. He was now in his eighties, still sprightly, cared for by his unmarried daughter with the help of several servants in neat uniforms, still a good pastor to his parishioners and still a revered figure to other poets, Tennyson foremost among them.