Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  33. TH to Edmund Gosse, 22 Jan. 1920, Letters, VI, 3.

  34. This is from Florence Hardy’s letter of 3 Apr. 1937 to Morris Parish about Joshua J. Foster, a few years younger than Hardy, son of the Dorchester bookseller James Foster, listed in the 1861 Census as bookseller and printer. Florence reported that ‘JJF told me this himself, and he was the only person I ever spoke to who remembered T.H. at that early age.’ Letters of E & F Hardy, 346.

  35. Life, Chapter 2, first paragraph.

  36. ibid.: ‘he had sometimes… wished to enter the Church.’

  37. The present John Antell told me that it was well known in the family that Jemima Hardy disapproved of large families and had not wanted one herself.

  38. He told his second wife, Florence, and she passed it on to R. L. Purdy in 1933. Timothy Hands has questioned whether Shirley was likely to have preached in this way, saying that both his character and the ethics of Tractarianism made it unlikely (Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher?, 1989, 10). But it seems unlikely that Hardy would have imagined it, and there is plenty of evidence of clergymen objecting to village people getting above themselves – see, for example, Joseph Arch’s Life.

  39. James Criswick, Walks Round Dorchester (1820).

  40. TH to Lady Pinney, 20 Jan. 1926, Letters, VII, 5. Robert Gittings suggests in The Young TH, 34, that Hardy’s response to the hanging ‘supplied at least part of the emotional power of his best-known novel’. Gittings also accuses him of finding some sort of sexual meaning in hanged women. His ideas have been taken up by other writers, e.g., Howard Jacobson in his novel Peeping Tom.

  41. Household Words, 30 Oct. 1852, cited in Philip Collins’s Dickens and Crime (1994).

  42. TH to W. Stebbing, Oct. 1926, Letters, VII, 46.

  43. Life, Chapter 2, section ‘July 1856’.

  4. FRIENDS AND BROTHERS

  1. Barnes, born in 1801 in north Dorset, had published poems both in English and in the dialect. He was now a widower and his school was failing. It closed in 1862, when he was given a ‘Literary Pension’ of £30 a year by the government, and a living at Winterborne Came, three miles from Dorset, where he settled in the parsonage.

  2. According to Hardy’s great-nephew John Antell the Hardy family spoke what he calls ‘old Dorset’, in which pronunciation, grammatical construction and some vocabulary would all differ from standard English. Hardy said they did not speak the local dialect at home, only with the men who worked for his father, but ‘old Dorset’ and the dialect would certainly have shaded into one another.

  3. Swithin St Cleeve’s Granny Martin in Two on a Tower, written in 1881–2, Chapter 2. Swithin’s father was a clergyman who married beneath him, his mother a village girl who was not accepted by the local gentry. Both parents die young, and Swithin, brought up by his maternal grandmother, is a very clever boy and has been sent to the grammar school.

  4. In his novel A Laodicean.

  5. He become curator of the Dorset County Museum in 1883.

  6. This was in 1833. Handley Moule, Memories of a Vicarage (1913), 56–7.

  7. In 1854 there was an outbreak of cholera in the Millbank Prison in London, where 700 convicts were held, and the Home Secretary, learning that the Dorchester barracks were empty, simply packed off all the prisoners and their warders to Dorset. In Moule’s parish the women were used to taking in washing from the barracks to earn money, and within days of the prisoners’ arrival two women had arranged to do washing for them. In another few days there were cases of cholera in Fordington, and people began to die. The disease was not yet understood, and those who could fled, but Moule stayed. Fires in the streets were thought to purify the air, and he made such bonfires, using them to burn linen and bedding and to heat cauldrons to disinfect. He held open-air services. He hardly expected to survive himself but worked steadily, visiting, comforting, burning, boiling and praying. His school was closed, but he sent two of his sons out on ponies to millers in the area, asking them to release river waters to wash out the local ponds. He aimed to confine the outbreak to Fordington, and he succeeded.

  8. Meanwhile Dr John Snow was establishing how it travelled through an infected water pump in London and a parcel of infected clothes in Yorkshire, but he had not yet published his findings, and the disease was still a mystery, like the plague. It killed quickly and spread through bacteria, for which water and soiled clothing were ideal agents.

  9. Handley Moule, Memories of a Vicarage, 62

  10. Information from Handley Moule’s Memories of a Vicarage and J. B. Harford’s Biography of Bishop Moule (1922).

  11. Information from The Memory of the Just is Blessed: A Brief Memorial of Mrs Moule of Fordington (1877), 56, quoting a letter of 20 Apr. 1871 which mentions Horace writing to her ‘almost every year’ about the death of the fifteen-month-old baby.

  12. From ‘The Muffled Peel’, 1858:

  Flow gently, sweet Frome, under Grey’s gleaming arches,

  Where shines the white moon on thy cold sparkling waves;

  Flow gently tonight, while time silently marches

  Fast hastening to lay the Old Year in her grave.

  13. See H. and H. Moule, Fordington Times Society (1859), privately printed.

  14. Bastow went first to London and then Tasmania, where he practised as an architect. His letters are in the DCM. None of Hardy’s has survived, and the correspondence dwindled away within a few years.

  15. Timothy Hands, Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher? (1989), 14.

  16. A manuscript in his hand adds a note, ‘[T. Hardy’s [first del] earliest known production in verse] (originally written between 1857 and 1860 this being a copy some years later.)’ See Variorum Poems, 3.

  17. Life, Chapter 2, section ‘Student and Architect 1860–61’.

  18. The story about Martha comes from the family of her brother Nathaniel Sparks. For Mary Waight, the only evidence is the word of a granddaughter who was five years old when her grandmother died: see Thomas Hardy Proposes to Mary Waight (Beaminster, 1964), a leaflet reporting Constance M. Oliver’s words to J. Stevens Cox in 1963. Mary Waight was born in 1833. She worked in a Dorchester shop selling mantles, i.e., coats. She married George Oliver in 1865, bore a son the same year, and her husband emigrated alone to the US almost at once. She kept a lodging house at 1 West Walks in Dorchester and died in Jan. 1915. She never spoke about Hardy, and the story was told by her daughter-in-law, who said there had been a signed photograph of Hardy in her possession but which had disappeared.

  19. Asked about his boyhood by a journalist, Hardy, in his forties, described it as ‘uneventful and solitary’, which may have been simply a way of dealing with the journalist; but the ‘solitary’ invites a question about Mary, so close to him in age and so little mentioned in his own accounts of his life. TH to William Henry Rideing, journalist compiling collection ‘The Boyhood of Living Authors’, Letters, I, 13 Dec. 1886, 158.

  20. Life, end of Chapter 37, his own note dated 23 Dec. 1925.

  21. All the other students at Salisbury were Queen’s Scholars at this time. There was a government grant to cover this, and it was highly unusual for any students to be paid for by their families. Teacher training colleges for young women were first set up in England in the 1840s by two competing religious groups, the Church of England and the Nonconformist British and Foreign Bible Society. Both were supported by the government, which gave them grants to cover the costs of non-paying students. They were known as ‘Queen’s Scholars’, and most had been pupil teachers in their schools. Mary had not, which may be why she was not taken as a scholar at first. The Salisbury college was one of the first, founded in 1841 (it closed in 1978). A similar college for young men at Winchester was founded in 1840.

  22. From an anonymous account by a student of the 1850s printed in Clare Conybeare’s Short History of the King’s House, Salisbury [1987], 10.

  23. Jude the Obscure, Part III, Chapter 3.

  24. Jude the Obscure, Part III, Chapter 1. This is Sue speaki
ng to Jude when he visits her. ‘She told him about the school as it was at that date, and the rough living, and the mixed character of her fellow-students, gathered together from all parts of the diocese.’

  25. Frederick Maurice in his ‘Lectures to Ladies on Practical Subjects’ in 1855, cited by Ray Strachey in The Cause (1928), 168.

  26. The first women’s colleges in Oxford and Cambridge were started in the 1870s. Mill’s The Subjection of Women appeared in 1869. Florence Nightingale became a public heroine by her work during the Crimean War and set up her School of Nursing in 1861 at St Thomas’s Hospital.

  27. Under the Greenwood Tree, Part IV, Chapter 2.

  28. Diary of Wynne Alfred Bankes, pupil of Moule, cited in Biography Revisited, 60, from DCRO.

  5. THE LONDONER

  1. Life, Chapter 4, section ‘1869’. The rest of the information in this paragraph comes from the Life, from his letters to his sister Mary, from later letters (on hearing Mill, see below note 26) and from poems dated by him to the 1860s. Some is inferred from his other writing, e.g., going into Rotten Row, which he described in both his first unpublished novel, as we know from the comments of a publisher, and in A Pair of Blue Eyes.

  2. In Life, Chapter 14, he writes ‘In evening to bookstalls in Holywell Street known to me so many years ago.’

  3. So Hardy told Sydney Cockerell on 26 July 1917, standing on Adelphi Terrace. Cockerell diary for 1917, British Library Add. MSS 52654.

  4. Life, Chapter 4, section ‘1869’.

  5. Celia Barclay, Nathaniel Sparks: Memoirs of Thomas Hardy’s Cousin the Engraver (1994), 32, for information about James and Nat in London.

  6. This is Picotee arriving in Feb., in The Hand of Ethelberta.

  7. TH to Mary Hardy, 19 Feb. 1863, Letters, I, 3–4.

  8. The Hand of Ethelberta, Chapter 32.

  9. TH to Florence Henniker, 21 Apr. 1912, Letters, IV, 211.

  10. See Leon Edel’s Henry James: The Untried Years (1953), 288–91, with quotations from his letters to his family on his arrival in London in Mar. 1869.

  11. Life, Chapter 3, section ‘A New Start’.

  12. For reference: Hardy’s salary was better than Gosse’s starting pay of £100 a year at the British Museum, less than the £250 Eliza Lynn Linton earned by journalism in a year, and a great deal less than the £400 a year allowed to the young Swinburne by his father.

  13. TH to Mary Hardy, 17 Aug. 1862, Life, Chapter 3.

  14. TH to Mary Hardy, 19 Feb. 1863, Letters, I, 4; TH to Mary Hardy, 19 Dec. 1863, Letters, I, 5; TH to Mary Hardy, 5 Oct. 1865, Letters, I, 5. Information from Christian Wolmar’s The Subterranean Railway (2004), 39, 41, 81.

  15. Horace Moule to TH, 2 Mar. 1863, DCM H. 4469.

  16. George Somes Layard, Mrs Lynn Linton: Her Life, Letters and Opinions (1901), chapter on the 1850s, when she arrived in London.

  17. Life, Chapter 3, section ‘At Blomfield’s’.

  18. This house is still standing. Clarence Place in Kilburn has gone.

  19. Eliza Nicholls (1840–1914) is a shadowy figure. R. L. Purdy heard about her from her niece in the 1950s, who said Hardy had given her his photograph, which she produced, and a ring, and said they were engaged for several years, and that she was the original for Cytherea in Desperate Remedies, which seems particularly far-fetched. She was the daughter of a coastguard official who worked at Kimmeridge in Dorset until 1861, when he moved to Findon in Sussex and ran a pub there. Millgate believes that there was an ‘understanding’ between them from 1863, when she left London, which lasted until 1867, and it is true that Hardy visited Findon in 1866, when he drew the church. It is possible, but not certain, that she inspired the ‘She, to Him’ sonnets. She never married and is said to have called on Hardy after the death of his first wife. Caution is necessary with stories given by descendants because well-known men attract claims of this kind.

  20. See Chapter 4, p. 57 and Note 18.

  21. Note dated in Life, Chapter 3, section ‘At Blomfield’s’.

  22. There were probably more than four sonnets in the sequence originally, but these were the ones he thought worth saving and published in his first collection, Wessex Poems and Other Verses, in 1898.

  23. Printed in Poems of the Past and the Present, published 1901, the poem has a note at the end reading ‘Westbourne Park Villas 1866’.

  24. An obvious exception is George Eliot, who triumphed over the disadvantages of being female, low-born, provincial, denied university education and irregular in her sexual life, by having a brain so large and a personality so strong that she imposed herself on Victorian society through her writing as no one else did.

  25. This is Sol Chickerel, one of two brothers, country-born carpenters working in London, in The Hand of Ethelberta. Other remarks are made to his sister, who has bettered herself: ‘you keep to your class, and we’ll keep to ours’ and ‘you’d better not bide here, talking to we rough ones.’ And she says, ‘My brother… represents the respectable British workman in his entirety, and a touchy individual he is… on points of dignity, after imbibing a few town ideas from his leaders.’ Robert Gittings believes that Hardy based Sol, ‘a carpenter of radical tendencies’, on his cousin James, and in The Young TH, 103, quotes from a letter from the younger brother, Nat, about James, describing him as ‘a real loyal Rad’. Gittings does not give a date for the letter but says that James was then working at Windsor, hence the ‘loyal’ – possibly satirical? I have not been able to trace the letter.

  26. The description was written in a letter to The Times, 20 May 1906, reprinted in Chapter 28 of Life. Either Hardy was using old diary notes or his memory was phenomenal.

  27. A search of the register of electors for Bockhampton and Dorchester in 1851/2 shows that Thomas Hardy’s name was not entered. Nor was it entered for 1866/7.

  28. Gittings describes in The Young TH, 79, this annotation in Hardy’s copy of Queen Mab and Other Poems, bought and inscribed by Hardy in 1866. The Revolt of Islam is a political epic in twelve cantos, originally written under the title ‘Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution in the Golden City, A Vision of The Nineteenth Century’. It alludes to the French Revolution but transposes the action to the East. The revolution is set off by an incestuous brother and sister, both ardent feminists.

  29. Park Honan, Matthew Arnold (1981), 240–41.

  30. Life, Chapter 3, section ‘At Blomfield’s’.

  31. See Delmore Schwartz’s ‘Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy’, on which I draw here, printed in Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Albert Guerard (1963).

  32. Horace Moule to TH, 2 July 1863, from Dorchester, DCM, H. 4470.

  33. Horace Moule to TH, 21 Feb. 1864, DCM, H. 4471.

  34. So Hardy says in the Life, Chapters 3 and 19. Note however that Arthur Benson, in a conversation about Newman with Hardy in 1904, thought he heard him say ‘I joined the RC Church for a time, but it has left no impression.’ See Chapter 19 below, p. 284.

  35. According to his poem ‘A Confession to a Friend in Trouble’, dated 1866.

  36. Diary of Wynne Albert Bankes in DCRO, quoted in Biography Revisited, 68. Millgate also quotes from R. L. Purdy’s notes of a conversation with Florence Hardy in 1933 giving the story of Moule having an affair with a Mixen Lane Dorchester girl who went to Australia, adding the gruesome extra that the son of the girl was hanged. Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982), 154.

  37. Horace Moule to TH [fragment undated but probably June 1867], DCM, H.4472.

  38. First printed in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses in 1909, placed and dated ‘16 W.P.V. 1866’.

  39. MS title ‘An Exhortation’. First printed as ‘A Young Man’s Exhortation’ in Late Lyrics and Earlier in 1922, fifty-five years after he wrote it, dated and given its place of composition as Westbourne Park Villas.

  40. They also represent his withdrawn state. This is roughly what T. S. Eliot described years later as an objective correlative. First printed in Wessex Poems and dated 1867.

/>   41. In Wessex Poems.

  42. It lasted long enough for Sydney Cockerell to have it handsomely bound in 1917, but Hardy later burnt it. See Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 10 Feb. 1917, and note, Friends of a Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, ed. V. Meynell (1940), 295.

  Part Two 1867–1874

  6. THE CLEVER LAD’S DREAM

  1. Hardy’s own description in Life, Chapter 4, section ‘End of Summer 1867’.

  2. Used at the end of Under the Greenwood Tree: ‘Tippiwit! swe-e-et! ki-ki-ki!’

  3. Hardy says in Life, Chapter 4, section ‘1869’, that the manuscript was read by only three people, Macmillan, Morley and Meredith, and he told Cockerell that he was the fourth person to read it, but this is clearly wrong because it must have been read by Chapman’s reader and Tinsley, and it seems unlikely that Moule would write a letter of recommendation without having read it.

  4. ibid.

  5. TH to Alexander Macmillan, 10 Sept. 1868, Collected Letters, I, 8.

  6. Information from Hardy’s published letters and from Life, Chapter 4, section ‘1869’.

  7. Emma Gifford, who became his first wife, remembered it as yellowish in 1870.