Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  Macmillan brought out a complete edition of The Dynasts in November 1910. It is in small type and runs to 525 pages, and it has a portrait of Hardy, engraved from a painting made by his sister Mary, as frontispiece. He is almost smiling, and his hair, eyebrows and moustache are now quite white and look as soft as cotton wool.

  PART FOUR

  1905–1928

  20. Convergence

  Letters from strangers came to Hardy from all over the world, and in August 1905 one with a Weymouth postmark caught his fancy. It was from a Florence Dugdale, who was holidaying on the coast; she declared herself a true admirer of his work and asked if she might call on him. He replied, ‘Dear Madam, As you are not going to print anything about your visit I shall be at home to you some afternoon this month, if you will send a post card a day or two before you are coming.’ 1 She seems to have made her visit, to have met Hardy but not Mrs Hardy and left such a good impression that she was invited to call again. Towards the end of the year she was back. As her home was in the London suburb of Enfield, she must have made a particular effort to travel to Dorset again. After this second visit, when she again failed to meet Emma, she sent Hardy flowers. He thanked her in a letter in January 1906, with an assurance that she had not stayed too long. She was twenty-six.

  A few months later, in May, Hardy gave his publisher instructions to allow the publication of The Pocket Thomas Hardy, a selection of his prose and verse put together by an unknown journalist called Alfred Hyatt. Hyatt was Florence Dugdale’s best friend in Enfield, so this was without doubt in response to a request from her, and it suggests she was not shy about asking favours. She and Hyatt both aspired to be writers, he as a poet – he went about in a cloak and broad-brimmed hat like Tennyson – and she through journalism and writing for children. It was a coup for her to get permission from the great Hardy for Hyatt’s booklet. He ran his own tiny press and produced hand-printed books. But he was delicate – tubercular, in fact – and had not many years to live. After his early death Florence wrote that he was ‘more to me than anything else in the world’ and that she would ‘gladly have died’ for him. 2 She makes it sound as though he was the true romance of her life.

  Florence was a hero worshipper, kind and sensitive, and also determined, and she learnt to be devious. She gave various accounts of her first meeting with Hardy, none of which fits with the evidence of his first two letters to her. One was that she was taken to meet Mrs Hardy at Max Gate that August by Mrs Henniker, only to be told by a ‘page’ that Mrs Hardy was not at home, although she was clearly upstairs, and entertained to tea by a cheerful Hardy. 3 But Florence did not meet Mrs Henniker until 1910, when Hardy introduced the two women. She seems to have given two of her sisters different stories, telling one that she had been introduced to Hardy by W. T. Stead, the journalist, and another that she met Emma Hardy at a women’s club in London, the Lyceum, before she met Hardy; yet her first meeting with Emma at the Lyceum was in 1910. 4 A further variant has her making friends with both Mr and Mrs Hardy when they met by chance on holiday in Dorset, and being invited by Mrs Hardy to stay at Max Gate as a result. 5 If Florence was trying to protect herself from any suspicion that she had pursued Hardy, and from any prying into the details of their early relationship, she did not set about it very efficiently. She emerges as someone whose word is not always to be believed.

  Hardy found no fault with his new admirer. She was young enough to be his granddaughter, and she showed herself as sweet-natured and deferential. She was also very pleasant-looking, with dark hair and large grey eyes – ‘large luminous living eyes’, he wrote in his poem ‘After the Visit’. Her manner was mild, her voice gentle and she moved lightly on her feet:

  Come again, with the feet

  That were light on the green as a thistledown ball,

  And those mute ministrations to one and to all

  Beyond a man’s saying sweet. 6

  In all this she was unlike Emma. Where the two women were alike was in their love of reading; Florence shared Emma’s enthusiasm for Tennyson and had even given a talk on The Idylls of the King to the Enfield Literary Society. Her background was modest, her father being the son of a Wareham blacksmith, something that was never mentioned, although Hardy was delighted when he found there was a Dorset connection. Mr Dugdale had risen to become headmaster of a Church of England school at Enfield in his twenties and gone on to be a pillar of the community and the local Conservative Party. Florence was one of five daughters, all brought up to understand that they must earn their own livings. At fifteen she became a pupil teacher, and in 1905 she was still teaching in her father’s school. It was a rigidly controlled faith school, which she disliked, and keeping order in classes of forty boys took more strength and energy than she could easily muster. She was delicate and often ill, and the quietness of her voice was partly a result of persistent throat infections. She realized she must find some other occupation, and in 1906 she took up the old-fashioned position of lady’s companion in the household of Sir Thornley Stoker, a rich Dublin surgeon with an invalid wife.

  The snobbery of the age made her understandably reticent about her early working life. To admit to having worked as a pupil teacher would have been humiliating, and she chose to describe her job as a companion as ‘staying with friends’. She seems to have divided her time between Dublin and London from 1906 to 1910, when Lady Stoker had to be moved to a nursing home. In both cities she made the hearts of old men beat faster. Sir Thornley grew warmly attached to her and, when he learnt of her ambition to write, gave her a typewriter; then, when his wife died, he presented her with an antique ring. Hardy’s approach was different: his way of making sure they kept in touch was to ask her to do occasional research for him at the British Museum reading room. She insisted later that she worked unpaid for him. 7

  A letter from Hardy to Florence in April 1907, when he was living in a flat in Hyde Park Mansions, proposes a meeting at the South Kensington Museum: ‘I will look for you in the architectural gallery at 4 – say by the Trajan column.’ It is reminiscent of his early meetings with Florence Henniker, and in September of the same year he sent a story of the second Florence’s to the editor of the Cornhill with a letter of recommendation. ‘The Apotheosis of the Minx’ is a sad little impression of a sensitive suburban schoolmaster and a vulgar girl who jilts him for a grocer, regrets it and dies young: it is perfectly readable, if no more than that, and it was accepted. Hardy explained to the editor that ‘Her family is an old Dorset one which I have known of all my life.’ 8 This might just possibly have been true, and to others he sometimes described Florence as his cousin, which was not true by any stretch of the imagination. 9 A web of small deceits was being woven.

  Armed with her typewriter from Sir Thornley, she taught herself to type, and one use she made of it was typing for Hardy. He was at pains to explain that ‘my young friend and assistant… is not really what is called a “typist”… only doing my typewriting as a fancy.’ 10 But it meant that when in 1909 she joined the Lyceum Club – established in 1904 at 128 Piccadilly as a meeting place for women with an interest in the arts – she could describe herself as Hardy’s secretary. 11 That winter she talked again to the Enfield Literary Society, and this time her subject was Thomas Hardy. She was writing for children’s annuals, and the Oxford University Press took her The Story of Mr Prickleback as one of their Story Readers.

  In the summer of 1909 an operatic version of Tess was produced at Covent Garden, the work of an Italian librettist and German-American composer, Baron d’Erlanger. It had opened in 1906 at the San Carlo in Naples, coinciding with an eruption of Vesuvius that closed the opera house, then played in Milan. When Hardy understood that Emma wanted to be present at the first performance, he asked Edward Clodd, who had not yet met Florence, to be the young woman’s escort, and Clodd agreed. The first night was a social event, the soprano being the same who had premiered Madame Butterfly, and Queen Alexandra was in the royal box. Clodd was intrigued by the si
tuation, took Florence out to dinner and saw her back to her club after the performance. He too found her charming, and when Hardy hinted that she would benefit from sea air, Clodd invited the two of them to Aldeburgh together. That August they stayed for ten days. Hardy’s relations with Emma were by now such that he felt no need to account even for such long absences. The holiday was a success for him and for Florence: they went sailing, they spent a day at Cromer, and they were photographed together beside a breakwater on Aldeburgh Beach. Even getting stuck on a mud bank in the treacherous tidal estuary of the river and having to be rescued did not spoil their pleasure. ‘Hardy and the Lady are enjoying themselves,’ wrote Clodd to his friend Clement Shorter, who also knew them both. From now on Florence naively confided in Clodd, and Clodd passed on titbits to Clement Shorter, editor of the Sphere magazine, who knew all those involved, including Emma; and Hardy and the Lady were invited every spring and autumn to Aldeburgh. 12 Meanwhile the opera failed. D’Erlanger apologized to Hardy for not having proved worthy of him and sent him £34 in royalties. 13

  Hardy now began to arrange more elaborate trips in which Florence Dugdale accompanied him when he went to look at cathedrals and other places of interest. In October they travelled with his brother Henry to York, Durham and Edinburgh. The following March she and Hardy went together, unchaperoned, to the Isle of Wight to visit Swinburne’s grave; then they spent Easter at Aldeburgh. That spring she borrowed a flat in Baker Street, where she introduced Hardy to her sister Ethel, who brought her small son along. Hardy took the child on his lap and spoke to him with grandfatherly kindness. Florence also encouraged him to take a place of his own in town and introduced him to a woman writer with a flat to let. Her impression was that Hardy was ‘very much taken in hand and “run” ’ by Florence, an ‘efficient, business-like young woman’. 14 He did not take the flat, but he helped Florence to find work as a journalist by recommending her to the Evening Standard and the Standard got its reward when he allowed them to print the profile she prepared for his seventieth birthday. Various other editors had letters from him recommending her work as a journalist and a short-story writer.

  Florence was grateful for what he did for her, and fond of him, but she was never in love with him. He was not a figure of romance like poor Hyatt, now dying of tuberculosis, but a strictly literary hero. He gave her encouragement and got her paid work, and there was considerable cachet in being associated with him as his secretary and protégée. He took her on agreeable holidays. She was flattered that he was in love with her and wrote poems about her, but he was an old man. The balance of power was on her side. He was eager to grant her favours. He could not ask for more than her companionship.

  He was also married. He seems never to have considered a formal separation, let alone divorce, from Emma, although he gave his opinion publicly early in 1912 that divorce should be granted at the wish of either party, if that party prove the marriage to be a cruelty to him or her (provided that children continued to be maintained by the bread-winner). 15 He could well afford to maintain Emma and set up somewhere else on his own, but a divorce would have taken time, and what grounds would he be able to give for one? And where would he have lived? He had put down his roots at Max Gate and had no wish to leave. More than that: something held him to Emma, not just fear of what she might do, or of scandal, but the years they had lived together. He did not like to be alone, so that even the company of a woman he hardly talked to, who kept out of his bedroom, whom he kept out of his study, and who was at enmity with him on fundamental points like religion and his family – even her company was preferable to being alone. He had to endure the situation even if he lost Florence as a result, by not being able to offer her marriage.

  In May, Edward VII died. Hardy, invited to write a poem, explained that he did not feel ‘any impulse, or faintest power, to write anything upon the sudden termination of the late reign. I will not attempt to explain why.’ 16 To Agnes Grove he wrote, ‘I fear the new court will not be much more intellectual than the old. I am inclined to go away on the day of the funeral, to avoid the frightful crush.’ 17 Yet he could not resist watching the procession as the King’s body was taken to Westminster, and the funeral cortège three days later, from the windows of the Athenaeum. In his absence, Emma invaded his study: she wrote to a friend about ‘ensconcing myself in the Study in his big chair foraging – he keeps me out usually – as never formerly – ah well, I have my private opinion of men in general and of him in particular!’ 18 After this she joined him in London, where he had taken a flat at 4 Blomfield Terrace in Maida Vale. And now things moved on in a surprising way.

  Emma delivered a lecture at the Lyceum Club. Florence was present, and at the end she went up to Emma to congratulate her. She must have thought hard about whether to do this and consulted with Hardy, because it committed both of them to a more sustained and complicated deception. As it turned out, Emma was not difficult to deceive. Charmed at finding herself appreciated by someone, she at once invited her new friend to tea at Blomfield Terrace and then for a weekend at Max Gate. She had no idea that Florence knew the place, or its master, already. She eagerly took up Florence’s offer to help her with her writing, and to approach publishers for her. The deference and flattery in Florence’s letters to her are thickly laid on but they went down well with Emma, and Florence did some typing for her, including her short novel The Maid on the Shore, and even tried to place her work with publishers. Emma believed that Florence was her ally and friend, and when Hardy was given the Order of Merit in the Birthday Honours, she deputed her to keep an eye on him and check that he was properly got up to receive his award.

  As in a black farce, Florence found that Mr and Mrs Hardy were competing for her company, assistance and affection. She added an extra strand to the plot with her own indiscreet letters to Clodd about her two admirers. For two and a half years, from the summer of 1910 until November 1912, the three played out a bizarre triangular game. In September 1910 Hardy and Florence spent five days at Aldeburgh. In September, Florence was at Max Gate helping Emma. William Strang came to draw Hardy, and Hardy persuaded him to draw Florence too, although he had never drawn Emma. In October, Hardy managed to take Florence to Bockhampton and introduce her to his sisters, without letting Emma know. Florence wrote to Clodd, ‘The “Max Gate menage” always does wear an aspect of comedy to me. Mrs Hardy is good to me, beyond words, and instead of cooling towards me she grows more and more affectionate. I am intensely sorry for her, sorry indeed for both.’ 19

  In November, Hardy was awarded the freedom of the Borough of Dorchester at a ceremony attended by Emma, Florence, Mary, Henry and Kate Hardy. He joked that he had already made free with the town in his writing and spoke of the disappearance of all the shopkeepers of his youth. Afterwards the Dorchester Debating and Dramatic Society put on a performance of The Mellstock Quire, adapted by a local chemist, A. H. Evans, from Under the Greenwood Tree, which delighted Hardy, although not Florence. 20 She was further exasperated by the poem he was writing on the death of his cat, described as his only friend. When she objected that the cat was not by any means his only friend, he explained that he was ‘not exactly writing about himself but about some imaginary man in a similar situation’. On the same day Emma asked Florence if she had noticed ‘how extremely like Crippen Mr TH is, in personal appearance. She added darkly that she would not be surprised to find herself in the cellar one morning… I thought it was time to depart or she would be asking me if I didn’t think I resembled Miss Le Neve.’ Emma then suggested that she and Florence might go to live abroad together for some months. It would have ‘a good effect’ on Hardy, she believed. 21 Florence made an excuse.

  She did, however, agree to spend the Christmas of 1910 at Max Gate, and on the festive day a frightful row blew up. Hardy told Emma he was taking Florence to meet his family at Bockhampton, and Emma objected that they would poison Florence’s mind against her. After a sharp exchange Emma retreated to her attic, while Hardy strode
off to Bockhampton alone, not returning until half past eight in the evening. Florence vowed to herself that no power on earth would ever persuade her to spend Christmas at Max Gate again. 22

  The year 1911 continued much the same, except that Florence now avoided Max Gate, and there are no surviving letters from her to Emma after January 1911. Perhaps Emma had been right in fearing that Florence would be turned against her. Emma was writing her Recollections in the attic, unknown to anyone. In them she returned to what she remembered as an idyllic childhood in Portsmouth, to her time in Cornwall and her gallops along the coastal paths there. The narrative ends with her wooing and marriage, described calmly and without a bitter word. Hardy introduced Florence to Mrs Henniker, for whom she began to do secretarial work. A second story attributed to Florence was fulsomely recommended to the Cornhill and appeared there. ‘Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer’ begins with an allusion to Hardy’s ballad ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’ and consists largely of transcriptions from newspaper reports of the career, trial and hanging at Ilchester of a real horse thief, James Clace, in the 1820s, collected by Hardy in his notebooks. 23 In April he and Florence visited Hereford, Lichfield and Worcester cathedrals in a family party consisting of his brother Henry and her sister Constance, and then they went together to Aldeburgh as usual.