Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  10. Personal communication from John Antell, great-grandson of Jemima’s younger sister Mary Hand and her husband, John Antell of Puddletown.

  11. Kate Hardy to cousin Jim Sparks, 2 Dec. 1902, Sparks Archive, Hardy Collection, Eton College.

  12. E.g., to her sister Martha after she emigrated to Canada. In July 1870 TH’s first cousin Louisa Sharpe, daughter of Jemima’s sister Martha, wrote to Jemima from Canada recalling how TH had written for his mother on 11 Jan. 1858: ‘a letter from you written by my cousin Thomas dated Jan. 11 1858’. DCM, H. 1975.316.30.

  13. Henry Moule was appointed to Fordington, a village with a rough population, so close to Dorchester that it had become part of it. He had seven sons, of whom Horace particularly was Hardy’s friend.

  14. TH to Lytton Strachey, 20 Apr. 1921, thanking him for the gift of his book on Queen Victoria. Letters, VI, 84.

  15. Caroline Leonora Murray married Lord Ilchester in 1812 and died in childbirth at Melbury House in January 1819, her death recorded in the diary of Lady Susan O’Brien, her husband’s aunt, according to her sister Amelia Matilda Murray’s Recollections, from 1803 to 1837 (1868).

  16. Amelia Matilda Murray, Recollections. Miss Murray lived from 1795 to 1884 and was the fourth daughter of Lord George Murray (1761–1803), Bishop of St David’s, who invented and organized the first telegraphic communication. In acknowledgement of this, Pitt gave a pension to his widow after his early death, and a dowry of £70 to each of his daughters.

  17. She seems to have gone with her previous employer too, but she specified the time of her last visit when she went through London with her son in 1849. See Life, Chapter 1, section ‘A Journey’: ‘Mrs Hardy had not been to London since she had lived there for some months twelve years earlier.’

  18. Life, first section of Chapter 1: ‘She resolved to be a cook in a London club-house; but her plans in this direction were ended by her meeting her future husband, and being married to him at the age of five-and-twenty.’ (In fact, she was twenty-six when she married.)

  19. It happens that Hardy drew a plan of Stinsford House in his architectural notebook, and it shows that the library was one of the largest rooms. A facsimile of Hardy’s architectural notebook in the DCM was published in 1966 with notes by C. J. Beatty. The plan of Stinsford House is on p. 44.

  20. Dr F. B. Fisher, quoted in Life in Thomas Hardy’s Dorchester 1888–1908, (Beaminster, 1965), 21.

  21. Handley Moule, Memories of a Vicarage (1913), 67.

  22. Jo Draper’s booklet Regency, Riot and Reform (2000) gives a useful summary.

  23. Entry dated 30 Oct. 1870, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1978), ‘Memoranda, I’, 6–7.

  24. He died in 1852.

  25. Celia Barclay suggests in her study of Thomas Hardy’s cousin, Nathaniel Sparks: Memoirs of Thomas Hardy’s Cousin the Engraver (1994), 30, that Jemima went back to the Maiden Newton vicarage after Murray moved to London and worked as a cook for ‘Hon. William Scott MA’, and the information must have come through the Sparks family, i.e., her sister Maria, brother-in-law James and their children.

  26. Life, Chapter 20, taken from diary entry for 14 Aug. 1892.

  27. Census for 1841. Shirley kept four servants. He married later.

  28. Robert Gittings in The Young TH suggests Kingston Maurward House, 7.

  29. The 1841 Census gives Herbert Williams, banker, aged thirty-four, with wife, Marie, aged thirty-five, and seven servants.

  30. See Celia Barclay, op. cit., 30–31.

  31. Life, Chapter 20, entry for 4 Aug. 1892.

  32. Life, first section of Chapter 1, for her wanting to be a cook in London. For her remark about rustic and quaint country neighbours, May O’Rourke reports Hardy telling her this about his mother, Hardyana (1966), 8–12.

  33. Hardy told this to Edmund Blunden in July 1922, as he related in The Great Victorians, ‘Notes on Visits to Thomas Hardy’, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 171.

  34. Life, Chapter 35, reporting a speech made by Hardy on opening Bockhampton Reading Room and Club on 2 Dec. 1919. He also spoke of there having been a water mill, homes for parish paupers, predating the workhouse system, and old Elizabethan houses of stone, with mullioned windows, near the withy bed.

  35. Hardy pointed out the pit to Sydney Cockerell on Wednesday, 30 June 1926, telling him that his father had helped the smugglers. British Library Add. MSS 52663.

  36. The story, set in the 1830s, was first published in 1879 in the New Quarterly Magazine and in America in Harper’s Weekly. It was collected in Wessex Tales.

  37. See Robert Gittings The Older TH, 55–6. He found in the parish register that Hardy’s great-grandmother had an illegitimate son who died in infancy, and that in 1796 a girl was born to a Mary Head and a John Reed, baptized seven years later, in 1803, as Georgiana Reed at St Mary’s, Reading, and presumably given up by Mary Head, who then moved south to Dorset, where she met her future husband, Thomas Hardy. Other parts of Gittings’s research which appeared to link Mary Head’s story with that of Tess have been shown by Michael Millgate to be inaccurate.

  38. Fanny Robin is the maid whom Sergeant Troy deserts to marry her mistress, Bathsheba, in Far from the Madding Crowd. Tess is the heroine of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, seduced by her ‘cousin’ Alec. She calls her baby ‘Sorrow’ and baptizes him herself before he dies.

  39. TH to Florence Henniker, 27 Oct. 1918, Letters, V, 283.

  2. CHILD

  1. He would certainly have learnt later that, although in Christian imagery the snake is a symbol of evil, in Greek mythology it signifies fertility and wisdom.

  2. Opening words of Life. The census lists twenty-two children in Higher Bockhampton alone, with many more in the surrounding area.

  3. Hardyana (1969), 229. Interview with Harold Voss.

  4. He told Sydney Cockerell about hearing his parents on 12 Jan. 1927. British Library Add. MSS 52664.

  5. Life, Chapter 38, section ‘Notes by F. E. H.’.

  6. TH made the handkerchief rabbit for Middleton Murry’s daughter in the 1920s, and said he had not done it or seen it done for seventy-five years. Interviews and Recollections, 159.

  7. Timothy Hands, Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher? (1989), 5 and note. Stinsford Church accounts for 1842 to 1871 show that Hardy’s father was paid sums of up to £15 a year for work he did for the church.

  8. J. Stevens Cox in Hardyana (1964), 56, on apples grown at Bockhampton. On 12 June 1913 Mary Hardy wrote to TH saying their brother Henry’s garden was like their father’s, listing the vegetables in order: large beds of carrots, onions and parsnips, a patch of broad beans, a line of peas and potatoes recently hoed up. DCM, H.1975.316.22.

  9. Life, Chapter 38, section ‘Notes by F. E. H.’.

  10. Life, Chapter 1, first section.

  11. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982), 38, Note 34, gives a reference to G. H. Moule, Stinsford Church and Parish (Dorchester, 1940), 27–8.

  12. Sydney Cockerell noted Hardy’s words about the skull on 30 June 1926 when they drove to Stinsford and Bockhampton and past his first school. British Library Add. MSS 52663. It is a grisly one.

  13. Life, Chapter 1, first section.

  14. Life, Chapter 16, passage from journal dated 15–21 Oct. 1888.

  15. Both stories in Life, Chapter 1.

  16. Hardy told this to the publisher Newman Flower in his seventies. Interviews and Recollections, 176.

  17. Hardy told T. E. Lawrence this story in 1925. Interviews and Recollections, 184.

  18. Life, Chapter 1.

  19. TH to William Archer in interview of 1901, Interviews and Recollections, 68. Hardy also said, in a speech made in 1910 on accepting the freedom of Dorchester, that he had seen a man in the stocks in Dorchester ‘in the back part of this very building’.

  20. Life, Chapter 1, section ‘Birth and Boyhood 1849–50’.

  21. ‘The Roman Road’ in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (
1909).

  22. Life, Chapter 1, section ‘Birth and Boyhood 1849–50’.

  23. ‘Childhood among the Ferns’ was first printed in the Daily Telegraph on 29 Mar. 1928 and collected in Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).

  24. Life, Chapter 1, first section.

  25. Celia Barclay, Nathaniel Sparks: Memoirs of Thomas Hardy’s Cousin the Engraver (1994), 32.

  26. The MS letter signed ‘Mary’, dated Hitchin, 11 Dec. 1846, begins ‘My dear Mother’. DCM.

  27. He lived from 1816 to 1878, had four children and became an alcoholic. By family tradition he was one of the inspirations for Jude.

  28. They were a couple, John and Martha Horsman, according to the 1851 Census. The attractive school building is still standing, but is now a private house and somewhat changed.

  29. Contributory evidence to the supposition that Jemima was not a confident writer.

  30. Life, Chapter 7. Hardy cancelled the passage, but it has been restored in later editions.

  31. Hardy’s words in Life, Chapter 1, section ‘A Journey’.

  32. The third-class fare on the London and South Western Railway in 1850 was 3 s. for an excursion train, which meant travelling in open carriages.

  33. So he told Stewart M. Ellis in 1913, who described the conversation in an article in the Fortnightly Review, Mar. 1928, just after Hardy’s death. Cited in Interviews and Recollections, 110.

  34. TH letter to Florence Dugdale, 18 Nov. 1909, about the actress playing Bathsheba in a production of Far from the Madding Crowd: ‘she gave the real B. quite startlingly to me, seeming just like my handsome aunt from whom I drew her.’ Letters, IV, 58.

  35. Life, Chapter 1, ‘A Journey’.

  36. In the DCM.

  37. Life, Chapter 1, section ‘Birth and Boyhood 1849–50’.

  38. The census for 1851, taken in June, shows that Kingston Maurward House was empty.

  3. THE BOOKISH BOY

  1. We don’t know where his Bockhampton cousins, the children of his uncle James Hardy, were educated, but one of them, Augustus, a year older than Thomas, left Dorset, settled in Twickenham and raised his children there. One of his sons, Henry, became an Anglican clergyman, and his son Basil Augustus went to Oxford and became head of the choir school of Chester Cathedral. Augustus died in 1916, and Hardy wrote a letter of condolence to the eldest son, Albert; and there is a sparse occasional exchange of letters, initiated by the Revd Henry, who invited Hardy to visit him in Fifeshire in 1906 when he went to Aberdeen – Hardy declined – and sent a card for his seventy-second birthday. See Letters, V, 151.

  Uncle James’s eldest son married a local girl and the second, Walter, died as a child in 1844. The girl, Theresa, born in 1843, remained all her life at Bockhampton, eccentric, reclusive and disliked by Thomas Hardy’s family.

  Uncle James is known to have given violin lessons as well as being a builder. He lived until 1880, but the two families were not on close terms.

  2. See, for instance, the history of Joseph Arch, whom Hardy knew and admired later when he was a trades union organizer and MP. Arch was born in Warwickshire in 1826. His father owned his own cottage, and his mother was a strong-willed, intelligent woman – she had been a nurse and laundress at Warwick Castle – but Arch got only three years of schooling and went to work when he was nine, scaring crows in the fields for a farmer twelve hours a day for fourpence (the experience Hardy gave to Jude). The best his mother could do for him was to encourage him to read in the evening, and she died early. He worked his way up as a ploughboy and hedge-cutter. He wrote his own Life (1898).

  3. James Savage, History of Dorchester (1832) gives the time of the arrival of the London post and the name of the local paper, Dorset County Chronicle and Somersetshire Gazette, in full, founded in 1821.

  4. Savage, op. cit. The theatre was put up in Back West Street in 1828 by the theatre manager Henry Lee.

  5. Captain Frederick Hovenden, in charge of defence measures during risings of 1830, to the Home Office, from Barbara Kerr, Bound to the Soil: A Social History of Dorset 1750–1918 (1968).

  6. For Hardy pulling the carriage, Life, 50, giving Florence Hardy as source, in conversation with R. L. Purdy and written down by him in his private notes, 1931. A search of the electoral registers shows that Hardy’s father acquired a vote only in 1885.

  7. Life, Chapter 38, Florence Hardy’s notes made after drive with TH, 4 Nov. 1927.

  8. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 39, ‘On Casterbridge Highway’, and Chapter 6, ‘The Fair; the Journey; the Fire’.

  9. Life, Chapter 38, Florence Hardy’s notes dated 27 Oct. 1927.

  10. ibid. This is Florence Hardy’s rendering of his words. Robert Gittings suggests the men were smugglers sitting on their casks, although it may seem unlikely that they would hide them from a small boy. Another possibility is that they were strolling actors.

  11. A Pair of Blue Eyes, Vol. II, Chapter 9.

  12. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Chapter 43. The Return of the Native, Book 4, Chapter 5.

  13. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 14 Oct. 1917: ‘My husband says he did not like going to school as a boy.’ Letters of E & F Hardy, 133.

  14. Anonymous article ‘My Famous Schoolfellows’ in Sunday at Home, 1915, reprinted in Interviews and Recollections, 1. Author P. claimed to have been at school with Hardy and sometimes walked home with him. Jemima Hardy described her husband and father-in-law as having curly hair in her description of their appearance when she first knew them, given to Hardy 14 Aug. 1892: see Life, Chapter 20.

  15. Farmer Locke, talking in 1931 to Llewelyn Powys at the unveiling of the statue of Hardy in Dorchester; given in Interviews and Recollections, 4.

  16. According to George (Dadie) Rylands, who wrote to James Gibson on 9 Nov. 1990, ‘my Great Grandfather was Rector of West Stafford (next parish to Stinsford) for 60 years. He had a large family – contemporary with Hardy: who as a boy on his way to Dorchester School had a glass of milk at the Rectory and later became a close friend. One son, Bosworth, a Master at Harrow, knew him best.’ True, although West Stafford was not on the direct way from Bockhampton to Dorchester. He goes on to describe his own visit to Hardy: ‘It was clear that he had very warm memories of the Stafford children in early days; I have a Golden Treasury given by one Great Uncle in memory of another to his sister Mary.’ This letter is in an archive given to me by the late James Gibson.

  17. Julia Green née Harding, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 3.

  18. TH to James Murray, 9 July 1903, Letters, III, 70.

  19. Interview with William Archer, Apr. 1901, printed in Interviews and Recollections, 67 (from Archer’s Real Conversations).

  20. TH to William Rothenstein, who had sent him The Village Labourer: 1760–1832. A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill (1911), by John Lawrence and Barbara Bradby Hammond, 11 Mar. 1912, Letters, IV, 206. Hardy said this happened soon after his return from Hatfield, i.e., in 1850, when he was nine or ten.

  21. Dorset County Chronicle, 22 May 1834. Cited by Jo Draper in Regency, Riot and Reform (2000).

  22. Life, Chapter 1, section ‘1852’.

  23. Biography Revisited, 49 and note, attributes this story to Nathaniel Sparks.

  24. Handley Moule recalls, in his Memories of a Vicarage (1913), how his father, the rector of Fordington, took him and two of his brothers by train to see the Exhibition.

  25. Hardy was well informed about the trains. See his story of 1893 ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, in which he describes the arrival of the heroine on an 1851 excursion train from Dorchester, having travelled with her little girl in just such an open carriage. It is early summer, and they are wearing cotton dresses; both are chilled and wet through. He tells us that some of the men travelled without hats, and the women put their skirts over their heads to protect themselves from the rain, getting their hips wet and cold in the process.

  26. It was suggested by Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman in Providence
and Mr Hardy (1966), that Tryphena was Rebecca’s illegitimate child, brought up as her younger sister. It is possible, but unproven in their book, and not likely to be proven or disproved at this date.

  27. Lord Salisbury gave £50 towards the Sharpes’ passage. I am indebted to Robin Harcourt Williams, archivist at Hatfield House, for this information.

  28. Hardy told Sydney Cockerell that he had ‘very little in common’ with Henry. Cockerell’s diary, 17 Apr. 1916, British Library Add. MSS 52653.

  29. It was supported by the British and Foreign Bible Society, a Nonconformist body, and also by the considerable Congregationalist community in and around Dorchester.

  30. Hardy describes a village confirmation in Chapter 24 of Two on a Tower, his young hero being an unenthusiastic candidate. In Chapter 22 the villagers comment that there has not been a confirmation for twenty years in the parish, and that in the past ‘The Bishops didn’t lay it on so strong then as they do now. Now-a-days, yer Bishop gies both hands to every Jack-rag and Tom-straw that drops the knee afore him; but ’twas six chaps to one blessing when we was boys.’ In a letter of 8 May 1923 to Arthur Benson he recalls that he was confirmed by the Bishop of Salisbury, Letters, VI, 194.

  31. In the Life, Chapter 1, penultimate paragraph, Hardy says the original girl ‘was by no means a model of virtue in her love-affairs’, but Marian is not so characterized. She takes to alcohol when working conditions are harsh, but otherwise she is trustworthy and loyal and tries to help Tess. Her chief bond is with her friend Izzy, who becomes her companion in their travels as itinerant labourers.

  32. ‘Lizbie Browne’ was written for the gamekeeper’s daughter, Elizabeth Bishop, a lively poem with a dancing rhythm, published in his first collection, Wessex Poems and Other Verses. It calls up her red hair, her gaiety and bright glance, regrets his failure to woo her, being too young, says she married someone else and was happy and had no reason to remember him. ‘The Passer-By’ (in Late Lyrics and Earlier) gives Louisa a voice to describe a young man – presumably Hardy – who passed her window and blushed at the sight of her, until she came to love him but too late – he stopped passing by. ‘Louie’, written in July 1913 (in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles), raises the phantom of ‘Louie the buoyant’ but says ‘She will never thrust the foremost figure out of view!’ (the foremost figure being that of his first wife, Emma), rather a backhanded compliment. Finally ‘To Louisa in the Lane’, a short, late poem in Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres, imagines meeting her ghost in the lane where they had passed one another when young. The real Louisa never married and lived out her life in Dorchester, but as far as we know they had no contact in later life. It was the memory of the young Louisa he cherished.