Thomas Hardy
Page 49
34. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934), 213.
35. Life, Chapter 18, note dated 8 Dec. 1890.
36. Biography Revisited, 251, citing Purdy’s report of a conversation with Dorothy Allhusen (née Stanley) in 1931 in which she said, ‘We all hated her.’
37. Life, Chapter 12.
38. Edmund Gosse to his wife, 22 July 1883, cited in Edmund Gosse, Portraits from Life, ed. Ann Thwaite (1991).
39. The population remained below 10,000 into the twentieth century. Fordington Field began to be enclosed in the 1870s.
40. Emma Dashwood to Emma Hardy, 1883, DCM, H.6252.7.
41. The ‘Facts’ Notebook has been usefully edited by William Greenslade (2004).
42. He dated it when he printed it in 1909 in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses.
43. ‘The Conformers’ is not dated. The section in which it appears, close to ‘He Abjures Love’, is rather oddly headed ‘Love Lyrics’.
15. THE BLIGHTED STAR
1. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Chapter 44.
2. One modern critic, Lawrence Lerner, calls it ‘the most unsatisfactory ending of all Hardy’s novels’, describes him as writing against the grain, not wanting to renounce or modify his pessimism ‘under the pressure of a happy ending’. Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’: Tragedy or Social History? (1975), 64.
3. R. H. Hutton in the Spectator, 26 Mar. 1887.
4. Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (1985 ed.), 91.
5. Life, Chapter 17, note dated under 15–21 Oct. 1888.
6. TH to Florence Dugdale, 22 Apr. 1912, Letters, IV, 212.
7. Cited by David Lodge in his essay ‘The Woodlanders: A Darwinian Pastoral Elegy’ in Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature (1981), 79–94.
8. He told J. A. Symonds he thought The Woodlanders‘rather a failure towards the end’. 14 Apr. 1889, Letters, I, 191.
9. Life, Chapter 20.
10. Jude the Obscure, Part I, Chapter 4.
11. Edmund Gosse in Cosmopolis, 1 (Jan. 1896), 60–69, reprinted in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1995), 269.
12. The research of Charles Booth and Beatrice Webb showed that about a third of the population lived in poverty and that there was bitter class hatred. The English translation of Marx’s Das Capital appeared in 1884, and there were riots in the West End in Feb. 1886 and Nov. 1887.
13. T H to J. A. Symonds, 14 Apr. 1889, Letters, I, 190.
14. ibid.
15. Harrison’s article was in the Fortnightly, Feb. 1920. Hardy’s response is described in Biography Revisited, 488 and note, based on Florence Hardy’s letter of 24 Feb. to Sydney Cockerell, and her later conversation in 1933 with R. L. Purdy, in whose collection the letter is.
16. Life, Chapter 14, note dated May 1886.
17. This was in answer to a review of his poems by Alfred Noyes, who alleged that Hardy believed in a malign force in charge of the universe. 20 Dec. 1920, Letters, VI, 54.
18. ‘God’s Education’ was printed in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses and originally called ‘His Education’.
19. Life, Chapter 27, note dated 7 Apr. 1889.
20. TH to H. Rider Haggard [n.d. but the Haggards’ son died in Feb.], Letters, I, 135.
21. The ballad-style poem is about a mother who procures an abortion for her daughter which kills her. Hardy wrote it in 1904 and later told Galsworthy he had wanted to make ‘a tragic play’ of the subject and shaped some scenes before realizing it would never be put on.
22. Life, Chapter 16.
23. The poem is dated 1896 on the manuscript.
24. TH to Thomas Macquoid, 29 Oct. 1891, Letters, I, 245.
25. TH interview with Frank Hedgcock in 1910, Interviews and Recollections, 92; TH to George Douglas, 30 Dec. 1891, Letters, I, 249.
26. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, last words of Chapter 15.
27. From Hardy’s 1892 preface to the fifth edition.
28. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Chapter 15.
29. Already cited in Chapter 13, TH to Henry Massingham, 31 Dec. 1891, Letters, I, 250.
30. Life, Chapter 18.
31. See interesting arguments in Linda M. Shire’s essay ‘The Radical Aesthetic of Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (1999).
32. D. F. Hannigan in the Westminster Review, Dec. 1892, reprinted in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 244–8.
33. The first English edition of 1,000 copies was in three volumes, published by Osgood, McIlvaine on 29 Nov. 1891. Harper & Bros published the first American edition in Jan. 1892.
34. W. P. Trent in the first issue of the Sewanee Review, Nov. 1892, reprinted in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 221–37.
35. Robert Louis Stevenson from Samoa to Henry James, 5 Dec. 1892. Henry James to Robert Louis Stevenson, 17 Feb. 1893, both from P. Horne, Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999), note on 249. Tess has always had its detractors. Someone complained to me recently of ‘Tess’s violet eyes’, suggesting this was a novelettish touch. In fact, Hardy says her eyes are ‘neither black nor blue nor gray nor violet’.
36. Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy, 131.
37. TH to Mrs Fawcett, 14 Apr. 1892, Letters, I, 264.
38. Life, Chapter 21.
39. The Well-Beloved appeared in 1897, and, although it has never been popular, it was admired by Proust, who gives his narrator a little educational speech about Hardy to Albertine in ‘La Prisonnière’, Vol. XII of À la recherche du temps perdu. The sculptor hero falls in love regularly from the age of nine, each time with a girl who seems to embody his dream of a ‘well-beloved’, but only temporarily. Each soon loses what he thought he saw in her and she becomes ‘a corpse’ to him. The chief charm of the book lies in the descriptions of the Isle of Portland (renamed the Isle of Slingers), home of the hero and the three generations of women he falls in love with. See below, Chapter 18.
40. Collected in Life’s Little Ironies (1894).
16. TOM AND EM
1. There was a third, Randall, mentioned in Walter Gifford’s letters to Emma, who was considered an unsuitable visitor and seems to have suffered from some disability.
2. TH to Elspeth Grahame, 31 Aug. 1907, Letters, III, 270.
3. TH to Florence Henniker, 23 Aug. 1899, Letters, II, 227, and Life, Chapter 25.
4. Frank Hedgcock reported in 1951 his visit in 1910, when she talked about her little emendations and referred to ‘our books’. Interviews and Recollections, 92.
5. Alfred Pretor to Emma Hardy, letter dated 1899, DCM, cited in Denys Kay-Robinson, The First Mrs Hardy (1979), 174.
6. Raymond Blathwayt’s interview in Black and White, 27 Aug. 1892.
7. It was sold to Howard Bliss in 1924, and he found that 106 pages were partly or wholly in Emma’s hand. He insisted that he found this interesting, but when he got into financial difficulties later he sold it back to the Hardys. See Florence Hardy to Howard Bliss, 14 Dec. 1924, Letters of E & F Hardy, 217.
8. Mabel Robinson to Irene Cooper Willis, 17 Dec. 1937, DCM.
9. F. Stevenson to S. Colvin, Sept. 1885, and to D. Norton Williams, also 1885, both cited in Biography Revisited, 250.
10. Cited from a Gissing letter of 22 Sept. 1895 in Interviews and Recollections, 50.
11. Gertrude Atherton’s Adventures of a Novelist, 258, given in Interviews and Recollections, 26.
12. It appeared May 1895 in the Ladies’ Home Journal and is cited in Interviews and Recollections, 41.
13. Emma Hardy to Revd Bartelot, 3 July 1912, cited in Denys Kay-Robinson, The First Mrs Hardy, 6–7.
14. Emma Hardy, Alleys, and Spaces. Poems and Religious Effusions (1966 ed., first published privately by F. G. Longman of Dorchester in 1912).
15. ‘An Old Likeness (Recalling R. T.)’ was published in 1922 in Late Lyrics and Earlier. Rosamund Tomson had died in 1911.
16. TH to Florence Henniker, 1
6 July 1893, Letters, II, 24. His last surviving letter to her is dated Dec. 1891.
17. These three words set off a search for evidence of a love affair, and Lois Deacon devoted years to trying to prove that Tryphena bore Hardy a child. The book she wrote with Terry Coleman, Providence and Mr Hardy (1966), was taken seriously by many before Robert Gittings disproved most of it in his The Young TH in 1975, and Michael Millgate concurred in his 1982 Thomas Hardy: A Biography, where he said no evidence ‘capable of withstanding scholarly or even common-sensical scrutiny’ had been produced by Deacon.
18. In a letter of 30 Aug. 1898 he told Mrs Henniker, ‘I have not yet been to Exeter, though I had hoped to get there this summer,’ and in Sept. he announces he is going, on his bicycle, and chiefly to see the cathedral. Letters, II, 199, 201.
19. Interviews and Recollections, 228, citing Lady Tweedsmuir’s recollection of what she had been told by Margaret Newbolt.
20. Since Hardy destroyed these diaries, there is no certainty about their dates or contents, but Florence Hardy saw them and told Edward Clodd in a letter of 16 Jan. 1913 that Emma’s ‘bitter denunciations’ of Hardy began ‘about 1891’ and continued ‘until within a day or two of her death’. Letters of E & F Hardy, 75.
21. Hardy said he shaved off his beard in 1890, but it is still there in photographs of 1891. Sydney Cockerell claimed that he persuaded Hardy to stop waxing his moustache, which must have been after 1911.
22. Note dated 17 Sept. 1892, given in Life, Chapter 20.
23. Note dated 28 Apr. 1888, given in Life, Chapter 26.
24. This from his preface, where Tryphena is simply ‘a woman’ recently dead.
25. Note dated Oct. 1892, Life, Chapter 20.
26. Letters, I, 287.
17. THE TERRA-COTTA DRESS
1. Quoted from a letter from Swinburne to Monckton Milnes dated 27 Dec. 1862, in James Pope Hennessy’s Monckton Milnes: The Flight of Youth 1851–1885 (1951), 143. I am indebted to Mark Bostridge for pointing this out.
2. MS Houghton 43/18, Trinity College, Cambridge, kindly sent to me by the librarian, David McKitterick. Mrs Henniker’s brother kept some of her ‘squibs’ in his diary for 1872. The word ‘airified’ is applied to someone who gives himself airs.
3. TH to Florence Henniker, 13 July 1893, Letters, II, 23.
4. TH to Florence Henniker, 2 July 1893, Letters, II, 20.
5. First printed in 1914 in Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries.
6. So Hardy told his friend Edward Clodd, according to his diary for 18 July 1896. Information from Biography Revisited, 313, and note on 581.
7. According to R. L. Purdy in Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), 113. He gives no source, but he must have had it from Florence Hardy, and she from Hardy himself, or possibly Mrs Henniker, whom she came to know well. The poem was printed in Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901. ‘Time-torn’ was originally ‘soul-sad’. Florence Henniker kept a bundle of manuscript poems given to her by Hardy, which have sadly disappeared.
8. TH to Florence Henniker, 6 Sept. 1893, Letters, II, 29. ‘I should call the book “The Statesman’s Love-Lapse, & other stories namely…” ’
9. TH to Florence Henniker, 16 Sept. 1893, Letters, II, 32.
10. TH to Florence Henniker, 28 Oct. 1893, Letters, II, 40. For details of their joint authorship, see R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, Appendix IV, 346–8.
11. So Hardy told Mrs Henniker. TH to Florence Henniker, 16 Sept. 1893, Letters, II, 32.
12. Review quoted by R. L. Purdy in Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, Appendix IV, 348.
13. Clement Shorter of the Sketch. Letter dated 25 Apr. 1894, Letters, II, 55.
14. Emma Hardy to Mary Haweis, 13 Nov. 1894, Letters of E & F Hardy, 6.
15. This was the belief of her nephew Gordon Gifford, who stayed with them a good deal at the time. He wrote a letter to the TLS, 1 Jan. 1944, claiming that Jude ‘was the first of the Hardy novels in which she had not assisted by her counsel, copious notes for reference and mutual discussion’.
16. TH to Florence Henniker, 10 Nov. 1895, Letters, II, 94.
17. Mrs Henniker left instructions before her death in 1923 that all of Hardy’s letters that she had kept – she destroyed a good number – should be given after her death to his second wife, whom she knew well and liked. The second Mrs Hardy considered publishing them, but decided against. She preserved them carefully, however, and left them to the DCM, and they were published in 1972.
18. TH to Arthur Henniker, 19 Oct. 1899, Letters, II, 233. Request for photograph, TH to Florence Henniker, 9 Nov. 1899, Letters, II, 236.
19. According to his poem ‘Concerning Agnes’, written after her death in Dec. 1926.
20. First printed in Wessex Poems and Other Verses, his first collection, in 1898.
21. Jude the Obscure, Part VI, Chapter 2.
22. Hardy mentions this in his preface to the 1912 edition of Jude.
23. TH to Florence Henniker, 10 Nov. 1895, Letters, II, 94.
24. Jude the Obscure, Part I, Chapter 11.
25. ibid., Part III, Chapter 9.
26. ibid., Part IV, Chapter 2.
27. Information given by Florence Hardy to R. L. Purdy in 1933, cited in Biography Revisited, 25–6 and note.
28. ‘humanity’ replaces ‘morality’, which he wrote first.
29. TH to Edmund Gosse, 10 Nov. 1894, Letters, II, 93.
30. See second paragraph of Life, Chapter 24. Arthur Benson records Hardy’s remark in his diary for Nov. 1913, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
31. Jude the Obscure, Part I, Chapter 2; cf. passage in Chapter 1 of Life.
32. Hardy could have learnt about his accidental conception and the reluctance of both his parents to marry from his Sparks cousins. I think it slightly more likely he realized it when dealing with his father’s papers after his death. Since he never alludes to it, we do not know whether he ever discussed it with his mother, but he must have asked himself how welcome he was to her at birth, and even possibly whether she had tried to get rid of the pregnancy.
33. Alfred Sutro, Celebrities and Simple Souls (1933), 58, described lunch at Max Gate in 1895, at which he praised the newly published Jude. ‘Mrs Hardy was far from sharing my enthusiasm. It was the first novel of his, she told me, that he had published without first letting her read the manuscript; had she read it, she added firmly, it would not have been published, or at least, not without considerable emendations.’
34. W. D. Howells’s review in the Dec. 1895 issue of Harper’s Weekly is reprinted in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1995), 253–6.
35. Cited in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 283.
36. Hardy printed the letter in Life, Chapter 22.
37. TH told this to James Milne in 1905, Interviews and Recollections, 81, from The Memoirs of a Bookman (1934). Hardy recalled the Gosse incident in a letter to him of 14 July 1909, Letters, IV, 33. Another admirer of Hardy’s work, George Gissing, wrote privately to a friend of his view of Jude: ‘Jude I shall never be able to read again. It is powerful, yes; but its horribleness does not, I feel, faithfully represent the life it pretends to depict… But I greatly admire Hardy and am very sorry he will write no more fiction. His verse (a volume or two recently published) has but small value.’ Gissing to Eduard Bertz, 16 Nov. 1902, The Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz, ed. A. C. Young (1960), 314.
38. For his statement, see Life, Chapter 24. He also made the curious claim here that he was worried ‘whether he might not be driven to society novels’ and that for this reason he had felt he must keep a record of his experiences ‘in upper social life, though doing it had always been a drudgery to him’. In fact, Jude was not the last novel he published, The Well-Beloved appearing in volume form in 1897.
39. Life, Chapter 23, mentions his ‘quick sense of humour… which could not help seeing a ludicrous side to his troubles over Jude’.
40. He first called them �
��De Profundis’, later changed to ‘In Tenebris’, presumably because of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, published posthumously in 1905.
41. TH replying to the question about ‘Methods of Authors’ for an American newspaper, published in 1894, cited by Michael Millgate in his edition of Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice (2001), 131.
18. A WITCH AND A WIFE
1. TH to Florence Henniker, 30 Nov. 1895, Life, Chapter 23.
2. TH to Grant Allen, 7 Jan. 1896, Letters, II, 106.
3. R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), 77. It was reworked for America by Lorimer Stoddard and put on in Mar. 1897 under his name, successfully. Mrs Campbell never played Tess. Hardy revised his own version in 1924 for the amateur production in Dorchester, and this version was played in London in 1925 and 1929.
4. Mrs P. Campbell to Mrs S. Coleridge, 12 Jan. 1896, letter in DCM, quoted in Interviews and Recollections, 52.
5. Life, Chapter 23.
6. ibid. This was in 1896.
7. All this information from his letters of Feb. 1896, Letters, II, 108–12.
8. Emma Hardy to Mary Hardy, 22 Feb. 1896, printed in Letters of E & F Hardy, 7–8.
9. In 1902 Mary Hardy told her cousin Jim Sparks in a letter, à propos Max Gate, that ‘we never visit there.’ Mary Hardy to Jim Sparks, 1 July 1902, Sparks Archive, Hardy Collection, Eton College.
10. Hardy’s own account, although given in the third person in Life, Chapter 23.
11. TH to Florence Henniker, 1 June 1896, Letters, II, 122.
12. Life, Chapter 23.
13. TH to Florence Henniker, 17 Mar. 1903, Letters, III, 55–6.
14. She mentions the Rousseau and the Tolstoy in letters to Rebekah Owen, 14 Feb. 1899 and May 1900, Letters of E & F Hardy, 13, 21.
15. Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 31 Dec. 1900, cited in Biography Revisited, 376.