32. The house, 7 Peter Street, is no longer there; its site is now covered by a car park.
33. F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 290.
34. The typescript, made much later by Florence Dugdale, is held at the DCM, H.6213. It is subtitled ‘A story of fair passions, and bountiful pities, and loves without stain’. The original manuscript is no longer extant, but there are a few notes relevant to the novel in Emma’s diary.
35. Life, Chapter 8.
36. She has a passage in The Maid on the Shore about ‘poor little rustic Rosabelle’ who had ‘never breathed the dear smokiness of London life and was… a mere country maiden, sweet and pure, gently nurtured it is true, but bearing the signs of complete rusticity’, which looks like an allusion to her own situation.
37. Hardy, however, told Virginia Woolf in 1926 that he had seen her mother when he visited Leslie Stephen at his friends, the Lushingtons, in Kensington Square: ‘She used to come in and out when I was talking to your father.’ Also that he saw a Stephen baby in a cradle whom he thought was Virginia, born in 1882, but may have been Vanessa, born in 1879. This from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, III (1979), 99, 97.
Part Three 1875–1905
11. DREAMING THE HEATH
1. The mansion is said to have been the home of Robert Young (1811–1908), a Dorset dialect poet who took the pseudonym ‘Rabin Hill’. He was a friend of William Barnes, but there is no evidence that Hardy knew him.
2. Life, Chapter 8, note from Nov. 1877.
3. Life, Chapter 8.
4. Especially since Annie Lanham, Mary’s friend, was already pregnant and Nat needed some persuading to marry her. See Celia Barclay, Nathaniel Sparks: Memoirs of Thomas Hardy’s Cousin the Engraver (1994), 37. The Sparks family built up strong resentments against Hardy for his stand-offishness, a good deal of it chronicled in Barclay.
5. 13 Nov. 1876, Emma Hardy Diaries, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1985), 103.
6. Michael Millgate suggests she may have been the ‘Jenny Phillips’ whose name appears in one of Hardy’s song books, and he thinks her family may have been descended from the ancient Phelips family of Corfe Mullen. He also argues that she is a model for Tess, which in certain respects is plausible.
7. The poem first appeared in 1922 in Late Lyrics and Earlier, undated. The manuscript from which it was printed bears no signs of revision, but that does not mean it had not been worked over.
8. He means Eustacia, of course. Book IV, Chapter 3. A ‘reddleman’ is one who deals in red dye, used for marking sheep.
9. The Return of the Native, Book I, Chapter 1.
10. ibid., Book V, Chapter 5.
11. ibid., Book IV, Chapter 1.
12. Simon Gatrell, Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (1988), 42.
13. ibid., 41.
14. Frank Hedgcock’s ‘Reminiscences of Thomas Hardy’, published in the National and English Review in 1951, relating to two interviews in July 1910.
15. The Return of the Native, Book IV, Chapter 2. They sound like Lulworth Skippers, butterflies that favour ‘arid localities and steppes’ outside England (A Field Guide to Butterflies and Moths by Ivo Novak, 1980) and in England are found only around Swanage and the coast from Swanage to Devon, according to Charles Knight and Margaret Brooks’s Complete Pocket Guide to British Butterflies (1982).
16. The Return of the Native, Book I, Chapter 6.
17. ibid., Chapter 5.
18. ibid., Book IV, Chapter 5.
19. ibid., Chapter 6.
20. TH to George Smith, 5 Feb. 1877, Letters, I, 47.
21. TH to John Blackwood, 13 Feb. 1877, Letters, I, 47.
22. Blackwood’s comments given by Simon Gatrell in Hardy the Creator, 33, 43.
23. Stephen’s remark cited by John Paterson, The Making of ‘The Return of the Native’ (1960). Also given by F. W. Maitland for 1877 in The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906).
24. George Smith of Smith, Elder did publish it, in three volumes, in Nov. 1878.
25. Life, Chapter 9, dated note.
26. This and the reviews cited by R. G. Cox in his Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1995).
27. See unpublished letter from Emma Dashwood to Emma Hardy, 1883, DCM, H.6252.7. ‘I hope your stories will emerge one after the other and pleasantly astonish the literary world, they have been concocting in your brain long enough and should now see the light.’
28. Described in ‘The Musical Box’: ‘the dusky house that stood apart, /And her, white-muslined, waiting there / In the porch with high-expectant heart’. Hardy himself says this poem refers to their time at Sturminster Newton in Life, Chapter 8.
29. ‘On Sturminster Foot-Bridge’, dated 1877 in the MS.
30. She was Julia Duckworth, and their four children were Toby, Vanessa, Virginia and Adrian.
31. Life, Chapter 8, dated notebook entry.
32. Millgate, in Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982), 191, suggests she was the Jane Phillips who registered the baby in Nov.
33. My transcription of unpublished letter, TH Snr to Kate Hardy, 13 Nov. 1877. DCM, Kate Hardy and Lock Collection, A2 and H.2003.453.
34. The house is now 172 Trinity Road.
12. HARDY JOINS A CLUB
1. Life, Chapter 8.
2. Garrett Anderson, Hang Your Halo in the Hall: A History of the Savile Club (1993), 52. The Irving evening is mentioned on p. 53.
3. Life, Chapter 10, and TH to Walter Besant, 17 Mar. 1879, Letters, I, 63. Hardy had received a flattering letter from Besant [7 Mar. 1879] praising The Return of the Native as ‘the most original the most virile and most humorous of all modern novels’ – a curious description but likely to make Hardy look favourably on joining Besant’s club. Besant’s letter cited in Biography Revisited, 194.
4. TH to Charles Kegan Paul, 21 June 1878, Letters, I, 57.
5. Cited in Biography Revisited, 182.
6. Leslie Stephen to Charles Eliot Norton, 5 Aug. 1880, F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906), 341.
7. Life, Chapter 10.
8. ibid. She told Hardy about Henry James’s proposal, which he doubted, but James himself told his mother about it. It was a gesture that clearly gave both parties pleasure without either taking it seriously. See Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London (1962), 355. James went to her funeral in 1888, with Browning, who had been encouraged as a young writer by her husband.
9. Interviews and Recollections gives this, 12–13, taken from E. McCluny Fleming’s R. R. Bowker: Militant Liberal (1952), 146.
10. Life, Chapter 10.
11. Life, Chapter 9.
12. Hardy’s essay ‘The Dorsetshire Farm Labourer’ was published in Longman’s Magazine in July 1883. He describes improvements in their lives but laments the breakdown of rural communities and says they have ‘lost touch with their environment’.
13. All this from Life, Chapter 10.
14. For Leslie Stephen, Smith, Elder records, Life, Chapter 9; for Black-wood, TH to John Blackwood, 9 June 1879, Letters, I, 64–5.
15. The US serialization was in Demorest’s Monthly Magazine.
16. It was remaindered in 1882.
17. Life, Chapter 9.
18. TH to Henry Hardy, 20 Apr. 1880, Letters, I, 73.
19. Cited in Biography Revisited, 190–91; from ‘Poetical Matter’ notebook, dated 19 Jan. 1879.
20. TH to Edmund Gosse, 14 Feb. 1922, Letters, VI, 115.
21. A note made in Jan. 1881, printed in Life, Chapter 11.
22. Mary Hardy, writing from her headmistress’s house in Bell Street, to Emma Hardy, 28 Jan. 1881, DCM, H.6302.
23. All from Life, Chapter 11.
13. THE TOWER
1. TH to George Greenhill, a mathematician, Professor at the Royal Artillery College in Woolwich, 6 Apr. 1881, Letters, I, 88.
2. I assume this is because he recommended the King’s Arms in Dorchester as ‘fairly comfortable’ two years later to an American visitor, Brander Matthe
ws. You can still stay there.
3. A letter from Hardy dated 4 June 1881 gives Dorchester but asks for his proofs to be sent to Tooting. His next letter, dated 22 June, is from Tooting, announcing the imminent move to Wimborne.
4. Life, Chapter 11.
5. Astronomers had travelled all over the world in 1769 and arrived at a good result, which they hoped to improve in 1882 and succeeded in doing. Transits come in pairs, eight years apart, but then do not happen again for about a century. The 1882 transit had been preceded by one in 1874.
6. He said he had other towers in mind also, one being the brick obelisk set up in the eighteenth century over an Iron Age hillfort known as Weatherby Castle, at Milborne St Andrew; the other, Horton, north of Wimborne, is described by Pevsner as ‘a megalomaniac folly, called “observatory” in 1765, when it must have been quite new’. It is a six-storey brick tower, hexagonal, with pointed windows and domed turrets. But Charborough is clearly the chief inspiration. It is still not open to the public.
7. Hardy did visit Charborough House but not until 1927, when he was invited to lunch.
8. Two on a Tower, Chapter 1.
9. From Hardy’s 1895 preface to the book.
10. The German physicist Rudolf Clausius formulated the basis of the Second Law in 1850, but only in 1863 did he express it in the familiar form, ‘Heat cannot of its own accord move from a colder to a hotter body.’
11. Two on a Tower, Chapter 4.
12. ibid., Chapter 11.
13. Hardy calls Swithin ‘the Adonis-astronomer’ in Chapter 8 – the manuscript shows he inserted the ‘Adonis’ as an afterthought, on folio 64.
14. Two on a Tower, Chapter 14.
15. ibid., Chapter 8.
16. ibid., Chapter 7.
17. ibid., Chapter 36.
18. TH to Henry Massingham, 31 Dec. 1891, Letters, I, 250. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was put on for the first time under that name in England in 1889, although there had been performances earlier in the 1880s under other titles such as Nora.
19. See Chapter 4 for an account of Hardy’s grandmother as the original for Gammer Martin.
20. The story was ‘Benighted Travellers’, which appeared in England and the US, and was collected in A Group of Noble Dames as ‘The Honourable Laura’. A Laodicean was published in the US in Nov., in England in Dec. 1881.
21. Life, Chapter 11.
22. As it happens, he did jot down some notes about writing fiction at this time, but they are thin and unilluminating, and he soon set them aside. They are given in Chapter 11 of Life.
23. Hardy adapted Far from the Madding Crowd for theatrical performance in 1879, while living in Tooting, passed it on for further work to Comyns Carr and submitted it to the St James’s Theatre. It was turned down, but Mrs Kendal, who had read it, described it to Pinero, from which he wrote his own play, The Squire, with a strikingly similar plot. Hardy objected in letters to The Times and other papers in Jan. 1882, and his own, or partly his own, version, with melodramatic additions, was put on as a result. It ran for over 100 performances in London but was disliked by the critics, and by Hardy himself. No script survives among his papers.
24. Life, Chapter 12.
25. Hardy’s wording for the advertisement placed in the Athenaeum, 2 Dec. 1882, cited by R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), 44.
26. Havelock Ellis’s review is printed in R. G. Cox, Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1995), 103–32.
27. Two on a Tower, Chapter 7.
28. ibid., Chapter 14.
29. ibid., Chapter 3.
30. Emma Hardy to Mary Haweis, 13 Nov. 1894: ‘He understands only the women he invents– the others not at all.’ Letters of E & F Hardy, 6.
31. TH to Edmund Gosse, 21 Jan. 1883, Letters, I, 114.
32. Life, Chapter 13.
33. Quoted in Interviews and Recollections, 16–17.
34. Helen Holder to Emma Hardy [13 or 15 Aug.?], 1881, DCM, H.3605.
35. Helen Holder to Emma Hardy, 28 Nov. 1882, DCM, H.6306.
36. ‘The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid’ is poor stuff, which he regretted. ‘Our Exploits at West Poley’ is an excellent and exciting children’s story with a theme along the lines of Pagnol’s Manon des Sources.
37. TH to Joseph Eldridge, declining to nominate the Liberal candidate for South Dorset, 8 June 1892: ‘I am & have always been compelled to forego [sic] all participation in active politics, by reason of the neutrality of my own pursuits, which would be stultified to a great extent if I could not approach all classes of thinkers from an absolutely unpledged point – the point of “men, not measures” – exactly the reverse of the true politician’s.’ Letters, I, 272.
38. TH to Percy Bunting, editor of the Contemporary Review, 12 Oct. and 5 Nov. 1883, Letters, I, 121, 123.
14. THE CONFORMERS
1. Hardy describes the touring players admirably in a note dated 14 Aug. 1884, printed in Life, Chapter 13.
2. Life, Chapter 13.
3. Biography Revisited, 228, for details of the lease.
4. This was Virginia Woolf’s description when she visited Max Gate in 1926.
5. The Woodlanders, Chapter 8. He also wrote a poem, ‘The Pine Planters (Marty South’s Reveries)’, printed in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses. Marty goes further here and makes the trees’ sighing signify grief that they have not remained undeveloped seeds, safe from storm and drought.
6. ‘Some Romano-British Relics Found at Max Gate, Dorchester’, text of speech read by Hardy at Dorchester meeting of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club in 1884. Printed in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. H. Orel (1990).
7. So Hardy told William Archer when he interviewed him in 1901. Interviews and Recollections, 69.
8. So he told John Middleton Murry in 1921, adding that ‘nothing had happened’ to bear out his fear. Cited in ibid., 154, taken from J. M. Murry, Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Portraits (1949).
9. Life, Chapter 20, in a passage contrasting the gaieties of the London Season with his home life.
10. ibid., Chapter 14.
11. Details of Wilde’s lecture taken from Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987), 184.
12. TH interview with Frank Hedgcock in 1910, Interviews and Recollections, 95.
13. Hardy reported by John Middleton Murry, Interviews and Recollections, 156.
14. The phrase is from his paper ‘Memories of Church Restoration’, given in 1906 and partly printed in ‘Thomas Hardy and Anti-Scrape’, The Times Literary Supplement, 23 Feb. 1928.
15. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Chapter 7.
16. ibid., Chapter 45.
17. ibid., Chapter 9; ibid., Chapter 14. Auden’s essay on Hardy is from the Southern Review, 1940, 6.
18. Life, Chapter 29: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge was issued complete about the end of May [1886]. It was a story which Hardy fancied he had damaged more recklessly as an artistic whole, in the interest of the newspaper in which it appeared serially, than perhaps any other of his novels, his aiming to get an incident into almost every week’s part causing him in his own judgment to add events to the narrative somewhat too freely. However, as at this time he called his novel-writing “mere journey-work” he cared little about it as art, though it must be said in favour of the plot, as he admitted later, that it was quite coherent and organic, in spite of its complication.’
See also TH to W. D. Howells, 9 Nov. 1886: ‘Accept my best thanks for your kindly notice of The M of C… It is what the book would probably have deserved if the story had been written as it existed in my mind, but, alas, was never put on paper. / I ought to have improved it much – for the greater part was finished in 1884 – a year & half nearly before publication. But I could not get thoroughly into it after the interval.’ Letters, I, 156. The interval was presumably the period in June and July spent in London for the Season that year, followed by his trip to Jersey with Henry in Aug.
19. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Chap
ter 7.
20. ibid., Chapter 20. This is a slight preview of Tess’s suffering when Angel rejects her.
21. ibid., Chapter 44.
22. Mabel Robinson (1858–1954), who wrote a long letter answering questions from Florence Hardy’s executrix, Irene Cooper Willis, 17 Dec. 1937, DCM. She met the Hardys in London in the 1880s and stayed with them at Max Gate.
23. I have taken this idea from Lawrence Lerner’s excellent Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’: Tragedy or Social History? (1975), 72.
24. Information about Abel Whittle of Maiden Newton from the Census and with kind help from David Smith. The 1871 Census does not give Whittle, who was presumably dead by then.
25. TH to Edmund Gosse, 30 Aug. 1887, Letters, I, 167.
26. All three quotations from Life, Chapter 14.
27. Written to Edmund Gosse many years later, in a year when he did not get to London, 13 Dec. 1916, Letters, V, 190.
28. Life, Chapter 14.
29. ibid., Chapters 13 and 19.
30. TH note, 15 Mar. 1890, in Life, Chapter 18 – after attending a crush at the Jeunes’.
31. This is what he wrote on the subject of shooting for pleasure, from a notebook kept at Wimborne, DCM fragment H.1958.57: ‘I meet with a keeper – tells me that one day this season they shot – (3 guns) 700 pheasants in the day – a battue– driving the birds into one corner of the plantation – when they get there they will not run across the open ground – rise on the wing – then are shot wholesale – they pick up all that have fallen – night comes on – the wounded birds that have hidden or risen into some thick tree, fall and lie on the ground in their agony – next day the keepers come and look for them. (They found 150 on the above occasion, next day.) Can see that night scene – moon – fluttering and gasping birds as hours go on – the place being now deserted of human kind.’
32. Biography Revisited, 227, citing a letter from her uncle Archdeacon Gifford to Emma Hardy, 6 Apr. 1885, letter in DCM.
33. Her marriage to John Stanley meant she was Bertrand Russell’s aunt – Stanley’s sister Kate married Frank Amberley, son of Lord John Russell. Both the Amberleys were admirers of John Stuart Mill, and Kate was a remarkable young woman with advanced ideas, an atheist and feminist who would have interested Hardy. Sadly, she and her husband both died young in the mid 1870s.
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