Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

8. A description from Chapter 3 of Desperate Remedies.

  9. The note on the boat trip is from Hardy’s ‘Poetical Matter’ notebook, cited by Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982), 112. Catherine Pole (1845–91) was the daughter of James Pole, the butler at West Stafford House, not far from Bockhampton. She went to London with her mistress Emily Fellowes when the latter married in 1872, and herself married a Londoner, landlord of a pub in Shepherd’s Market, and died young.

  10. Hardy’s first cousin Nat Sparks left London at about the same time that he did and went to work in Somerset, becoming a restorer of violins and other musical instruments. He married Mary Hardy’s college friend Annie Lanham in 1877 and settled in Bristol. His son, confusingly also named Nat Sparks, became a fine artist. He disliked Thomas Hardy and resented what he felt were the superior airs of the Hardy family. In fact, Mary and Kate Hardy kept up friendly relations with the Sparkses – there are letters to show this – but Hardy himself did become distant and formal towards them. Nat talked and wrote about Hardy at various times – e.g., in letters cited by Robert Gittings, The Young TH, 115 and Note 17, where he claimed that Hardy had wanted to marry his aunt Martha. More of his views appear in Celia Barclay’s Nathaniel Sparks: Memoirs of Thomas Hardy’s Cousin the Engraver (1994). Lois Deacon took up the idea of a love affair between Hardy and Tryphena and expanded it into a book written with Terry Coleman, Providence and Mr Hardy (1966), which takes off into fantasy.

  11. The story of a love affair between Hardy and Tryphena, with the birth of an illegitimate son, caused a stir, but no hard evidence has ever been produced to support it. Tryphena attended Stockwell Training College on a scholarship from Jan. 1870 to Dec. 1871, did very well and was immediately appointed headmistress of a small girls’ school in Plymouth at a salary of £100 a year. Her sister Rebecca went to live with her. After six years she resigned her post in order to marry a local publican, Charles Gale. There were four children, and she died young of cancer in 1890. Hardy wrote his poem ‘Thoughts of Phena’ in memory of her.

  12. There was some communication between them later. In 1902 Hardy told his sister Mary he had heard from Martha, announcing the coming visit to England of two members of her family, May and Ethel. A letter from Kate Hardy to her cousin Jim Sparks, 2 Dec. 1902, confirms that a grandson of Martha was brought to see him and was christened in Puddletown Church (Sparks Archive, Hardy Collection, Eton College). Martha died in 1916. According to Emma Cary’s son James, many of the Cary family became schoolteachers in Queensland. Letter from James Cary to TH, 11 Sept. 1925, DCM, B5.

  13. The Mystery of Edwin Drood did not begin to be serialized until the spring of 1870.

  14. Robert Gittings speculated that his cousin Martha Sparks might be his source, perhaps the most likely, although it could have been another of the several maids he knew well.

  7. LYONNESSE

  1. One of the first reviews of Desperate Remedies was in the Athenaeum, 1 Apr. 1871, 398–9, and praised a character as ‘really almost worthy of George Eliot’. When Far from the Madding Crowd began to be serialized, the Spectator guessed that Eliot was the author. The comparison with French novelists comes from an unsigned article in the Saturday Review, 2 Aug. 1873, 36, 158–9.

  2. Henry Holt of Holt & Williams in New York was quick to acquire Hardy’s work. In June 1873 they started with Under the Greenwood Tree and went on to A Pair of Blue Eyes in July, then Desperate Remedies the following Mar. Far from the Madding Crowd would follow in Nov. 1874.

  3. Emma described herself as the fair sister, Helen being the dark one, and because of A Pair of Blue Eyes people expected her to have blue eyes like the heroine. When she described herself in 1892, however, she said her eyes were dark.

  4. Most likely a slightly dislocated hip that went untreated.

  5. Emma Hardy to Lady Grove, 23 Jan. 1906, Letters of E & F Hardy, 32.

  6. Rawle (1812–89) was consecrated Bishop of Trinidad in June 1872 and returned to the West Indies, where he remained until his death.

  7. By then it had become important to him to fix every detail of their life together, but the poem is a plod: ‘Green slates – seen high on roofs, or lower / In waggon, truck or lorry – / Cry out: “Our home was where you saw her / Standing in the quarry!” ’ In another version of his visit, given to Eden Philpotts in a letter of 24 Oct. 1915, he was taken back to the manager’s house and given gin and hot water at the end of his visit. Perhaps there were two visits?

  8. Her remarks in this paragraph are from her own writing published after her death as Some Recollections of Emma Hardy, ed. Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings (1961), as are her remarks about neighbours.

  9. The four phrases come from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, Wordsworth’s ‘Phantom of Delight’ and Shelley’s ‘Song’: ‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou / Spirit of Delight!’

  10. The poem clearly describes the end of his first visit, although he suggests it might have been the second in Life, Chapter 5. The dark dawn, alley of bare boughs overhead in the garden, clammy lawn, candlelight in the house, all point to Mar., not Aug.

  11. He gave them to Henry Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes, according to his own testimony in Life, Chapter 5.

  12. Louisa Sharpe was acting as mother to a brood of younger siblings. As the years went by, she is likely to have heard something of cousin Tom and his work, but she did not try to contact him again. She outlived him by many years, reaching the noble age of ninety-seven and dying in 1941.

  13. Life, Chapter 5.

  14. Some Recollections, 35.

  15. Millgate points out in Biography Revisited, 119 and note, that there is a pencilled note of a scene something like this by Hardy in the endpapers of a German prose textbook in R. L. Purdy’s private collection, reading: ‘Sc. rusty harrow – behind that rooks – behind them, 2 men hoeing mangel, with bowed backs, behind that a heap of couch smoking, behind these horse & cart doing nothing in field – then the ground rising to plantn.’ So there were no other lovers in view.

  16. All three are in the DCM.

  17. Lyonesse was the name given to a mythical land between Land’s End and the Scilly Isles from which came King Arthur and Tristram: ‘that sweet land of Lyonesse’, according to Spenser in the Faerie Queene; it was ‘Lyones’ in Milton’s Paradise Regained.

  8. THE TRUE VOCATION

  1. This is from the Hardys’ friendly but objective neighbour Evangeline Smith. See Michael Rabiger’s account of the papers of Harold Hoffman in The Thomas Hardy Year Book (St Peter Port, 1981). Hoffman interviewed Evangeline Smith in 1939 and noted what she said about Jemima’s complaints. Hoffman’s papers are held at Miami University of Ohio. This is the only record of her views, given long after Mrs Hardy’s death, and uncheckable, but likely to be true.

  2. From Hardy’s Notebooks, ed. Evelyn Hardy (1955), 31, quoting from a letter by Emma dated Oct. or Nov. 1870.

  3. Biography Revisited, 122 and note. The Shakespeare is in the DCM.

  4. The quotation is from Scott’s 1830 introduction to his novel The Monastery, first published in 1820, in which he apologizes for its clumsy construction.

  5. Simon Gatrell gives a full and clear account of these striking additions and changes, based on his study of the manuscript, in Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (1988).

  6. Tim Dolin, in his introduction to the 1998 Penguin Classics edition, on p. xxiii, writes of Hardy disowning the first published version as ‘the careless work of his youth’. He also suggests, on p. xxiv, that ‘The dominant love romance of 1872 was a paltry confection for subscribers to circulating libraries, he implied.’ See also Hardy’s remark in a letter to Florence Henniker that ‘the “Mellstock” choir’ consisted of ‘the characters that I like best in my own novels’. 30 Dec. 1896, Letters, II, 141.

  7. Under the Greenwood Tree, Part I, Chapter 8.

  8. ‘Great Things’, first printed in 1917, lists cider, dancing and love as three great things for him, and ass
ociates the last two.

  9. Denys Kay-Robinson, The First Mrs Thomas Hardy (1979), 104, ‘Because of her lameness it is improbable that she could walk much, or dance.’

  10. Under the Greenwood Tree, Part II, Chapter 7.

  11. ibid., Part V, Chapter 2.

  12. ibid., Chapter 1.

  13. The unsigned article was written by Charles Kegan Paul, who had been a clergyman in Dorset. He lost his faith and became a publisher and writer, and a friend of Hardy. See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (1971), 121.

  14. In Life, Hardy says what he felt as a rejection from Macmillan came in Aug., and that Emma wrote to him urging him to stick to his writing, but Macmillan’s letter is dated Oct., when Hardy was with Emma in Cornwall.

  15. Hardy’s second wife, Florence, put forward suggestions that Hardy was pressurized into marrying Emma by the Holders, but this does not fit with Hardy’s own account of the sequence of events.

  16. In 1920 Vere H. Collins asked him about his poem ‘I Rose and Went to Rou’tor Town’, which clearly alludes to this visit, and what the evil mentioned in it was. Hardy replied ‘Slander, or something of the sort’. Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate 1920–1922 (New York, 1928; reprinted St Peter Port, 1971), 26.

  17. TH to Florence Hardy, 9 Mar. 1913, from Boscastle where he was staying, a propos the ritualistic services now held in the church at St Juliot.

  18. Some Recollections of Emma Hardy, ed. Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings (1961), 20.

  19. Her letter to Hardy is quoted in Hardy’s Notebooks, 31, written apparently in late Oct.

  20. Some Recollections, 18–19.

  21. Horace Moule to TH [n.d. but 21 May 1873], DCM. Moule’s point about Hardy understanding the woman better than the lady was echoed by Virginia Woolf, who complained that he could not draw a lady. Moule may have made amends in an anonymous piece in the Saturday Review praising Hardy as ‘a writer who to a singular purity of thought and intention unites great power of imagination… without resorting to mere surprises or descending to what is ignoble’. Moule had earlier reviewed Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree in the same journal, always anonymously. This one is dated 2 Aug. 1873, 36, 158–9.

  22. Life, Chapter 6, last page. Part of the entry at least was clearly written later. The Backs are the wide grassy grounds stretching between the colleges and the river.

  23. ‘Midnight on Beechen, 187–’ It is of course 1873.

  9. EASY TO DIE

  1. Life, Chapter 7, and interview with Frank Hedgcock in 1910, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 93.

  2. James reviewed Far from the Madding Crowd in the Nation, 24 Dec. 1874, Lang in the Academy,2 Jan. 1875.

  3. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 50 and Chapter 4.

  4. ibid., Chapter 8.

  5. ibid., Chapter 3. We have been told in Chapter 2 that she is not using a side saddle: ‘I can ride on the other: trust me,’ she tells her aunt. Hardy’s graphic and detailed description of her riding feats prompts the question as to whether he ever saw Emma ride without her habit and side saddle, enjoying herself in the same way.

  6. ibid., Chapter 15.

  7. Henery Fray describing Bathsheba’s sacking of her dishonest bailiff in Chapter 8.

  8. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 12.

  9. Lang’s review appeared in the Academy on 2 Jan. 1875 and is partly reprinted in R. G. Cox’s Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1995). This passage, 35.

  10. Joseph Arch, Life (1898), 110.

  11. Hardy himself said he heard Arch speak in his essay ‘The Dorsetshire Farm Labourer’ (1883).

  12. Joseph Arch, Life, 35.

  13. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 41.

  14. TH to Smith, Elder, 4 Dec. 1873. Hardy did not know at this stage who would be illustrating the book.

  15. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 2.

  16. ibid., Chapter 11.

  17. J. M. Barrie, ‘Thomas Hardy: The Historian of Wessex’ in the Contemporary Review, 56, 57 (1889), printed in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 156–66.

  18. Life, Chapter 7.

  19. F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906), 273. Neither Stephen nor Hardy explained who the other Leslie Stephen was.

  20. ibid.

  21. Minny Stephen to Anny Thackeray [n.d. but 1874], cited in Henrietta Garnett, Anny: A Life of Anne Isobella Thackeray Ritchie (2004), the source given as ‘MS to AIT’ from Eton Ritchie Papers at Eton College Library.

  22. F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 266.

  23. Leslie Stephen to TH, 12 Mar. 1874, printed in R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), 338–9.

  24. ibid., 13 Apr. 1874.

  25. Life, Chapter 7.

  26. From his Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873).

  27. TH to Leslie Stephen, 18 Feb. 1874, Life, Chapter 7.

  28. Emma Gifford to TH, July 1874, printed in The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1978), 17.

  29. TH to Geneviève Smith, 6 Jan. 1874, Letters, I, 26.

  30. He was Basil Montagu, an illegitimate but acknowledged son of the fourth Earl of Sandwich by Martha Ray, brought up at Hinchingbrooke and sent to Cambridge.

  31. A story was put about by Hardy’s second wife that Emma travelled to Bockhampton to speak to Hardy’s parents, or so Henry Reed told Michael Millgate. Reed said that Florence Hardy told him Emma travelled to Bockhampton before her marriage in an unannounced visit intended to make the Hardy family accept her, with disastrous results. There is no other source for the story, nothing written down, Florence Hardy was hostile to Emma, and everything she said about her has to be taken with caution. It seems unlikely that Emma would have considered making such a difficult journey alone across country to seek out people she did not know. She had no money and no friends in Dorset. Her own family would not have approved, and what could she have said to the Hardys? She would not have done it without Hardy’s agreement, and she had no need to ask for their approval once she had decided to do without her own parents’ – she and Hardy were in the same boat and planning to start their lives in splendid isolation. Biography Revisited, 134, Note 19.

  32. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 56.

  33. Hamilton Gifford to TH, 4 Sept. 1874, DCM, H.2587.

  34. ibid., 12 Sept. 1874, DCM, H.2588.

  10. A SHORT VISIT TO THE CONTINENT

  1. Some Recollections of Emma Hardy, ed. Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings (1961), 60, and The Emma Hardy Diaries, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1985). All quotations are taken from this facsimile edition.

  2. The church did not last very long but was pulled down and replaced a hundred years later, between 1974 and 1977, by a modern complex of buildings, a low church-cum-hall, day centre, sheltered housing and vicarage. Pevsner finds the fine old plane tree preserved on the site more interesting than the buildings, which might have pleased Hardy.

  3. Queen’s Road was renamed Queensway later.

  4. TH to Henry Hardy, Friday [18 Sept. 1874], Letters, I, 31.

  5. Life, Chapter 7.

  6. The house is no longer there. It stood just south of the junction of Hook Road with Ditton Road. See Mark Davison’s booklet Hook Remembered Again (2001), 11. Davison believes that a Francis Honeywell, who grew up in Weymouth before moving to Kingston upon Thames and knew Hardy, found the lodgings for him. Emma’s diary entry ‘Annie & the Retriever playing in the garden with Papa’ has been misinterpreted to mean that her own father, Mr Gifford, called on them, which of course he did not – the Papa was Mr Hughes.

  7. Tinsley to TH, 5 Jan. 1875, printed in R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), 335.

  8. The first edition was of 1,000 copies, the second of 500.

  9. Purdy, op. cit., 18.

  10. See Raymond Williams, ‘Wessex and the Border’ in The Country and the City (1973), 197.

  11. Hardy quotes this remark i
n the Life, Chapter 7.

  12. Leslie Stephen to TH, 13 May 1875, F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906), 276.

  13. The evidence of Emma’s dislike rests on what she said to an American friend, Rebekah Owen, in 1892, when they visited Swanage together. Asked about Ethelberta, which was partly written there, Emma said she disliked talking about it because it had ‘too much about servants’ in it. See Denys Kay-Robinson’s The First Mrs Hardy (1979), 94 (taken from Carl Weber’s Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square, 1952).

  14. Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (1984), 2.

  15. The Hand of Ethelberta, Chapter 23.

  16. For Katie’s pupil teaching, see records of Salisbury Teacher Training College for 1876, with summary of previous experience of scholars. Martha and her husband and children emigrated in May 1876. Hardy does not mention seeing her after her marriage, but you would expect them to have kept up some contact as long as she was in London.

  17. The Hand of Ethelberta, Chapter 29.

  18. ibid., Chapter 9.

  19. ibid., Chapter 7.

  20. ibid., Chapter 42.

  21. ibid., Chapter 25.

  22. ibid., Chapter 46.

  23. ibid., final chapter, headed ‘Sequel’.

  24. Leslie Stephen to TH, Aug. 1875, F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 276.

  25. ibid., 263–4.

  26. It is in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, published in 1917.

  27. This is from Sir George Douglas’s recollections, printed in Interviews and Recollections, 32–3. It was written much later, but Sir George first met the Hardys in 1881, six years into their marriage, and saw it as a happy one.

  28. Again, Rebekah Owen’s account, in Denys Kay-Robinson’s The First Mrs Hardy.

  29. All these quotations from Emma’s diary for 13 Sept. 1875, 65–7 in Richard H. Taylor’s edition.

  30. At this stage it was called ‘The Fire at Tranter Sweatley’s’.

  31. TH to William Minto, 4 Nov. 1875, Letters, I, 41.