admininfluence on Thomas Hardy.
Like Dickens, he was also highly critical of Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.
Thomas Hardy was born in Upper Bockhampton, a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford to the east of Dorchester in Dorset, England in 1840.
His father Thomas worked as a stonemason and local builder. His mother Jemima was well-read.
She educated Thomas until he went to his first school at Bockhampton at age eight.
For several years he attended Mr Last’s Academy for Young Gentlemen in Dorchester. Here he learned Latin and demonstrated academic potential.
However, a family of Hardy’s social position lacked the means for a university education and his formal education ended at the age of 16 when he became apprenticed to James Hicks, a local architect.
Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862; there he enrolled as a student at King’s College, London.
He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. Hardy was in charge of the excavation of the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church prior to its destruction when the Midland Railway was extended to a new terminus at St Pancras.
Hardy never felt at home in London. He was acutely conscious of class divisions and his social inferiority. However, he was interested in social reform and was familiar with the works of John Stuart Mill.
He was also introduced to the works of Charles Fourier and Auguste Comte during this period by his Dorset friend, Horace Moule. Five years later, concerned about his health, he returned to Dorset and decided to dedicate himself to writing.
In 1910, Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit.
Hardy’s first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher. He showed the novel to his mentor and friend, the Victorian poet and novelist, George Meredith who felt that The Poor Man and the Lady would be too politically controversial and might damage Hardy’s ability to publish in the future.
Hardy followed his advice and gave up on trying to publish it. Later, he destroyed the manuscript so that no copies of it exist today.
After he abandoned his first novel, Hardy wrote two new ones that he hoped would have more commercial appeal, Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) which he decided to publish anonymously.
In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a novel drawing on Hardy’s courtship of his first wife was published under his own name. The term “cliffhanger” is considered to have originated with the serialised version of this story (which was published in Tinsley’s Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left literally hanging off a cliff.
Hardy said that he first introduced Wessex in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his next novel. It was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Over the next 25 years Hardy produced 10 more novels.
The Hardys moved from London to Yeovil and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878).
In 1885, they moved for the last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother. There he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), the last of which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a “fallen woman” and was initially refused publication.
Its subtitle, A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented, was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle-classes.
Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, met with even stronger negative outcries from the Victorian public for its frank treatment of sex, and was often referred to as “Jude the Obscene”.
Heavily criticised for its apparent attack on the institution of marriage through the presentation of such concepts as erotolepsy, the book caused further strain on Hardy’s already difficult marriage with Emma Hardy.
While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life, and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898.
Initially therefore he gained fame as the author of such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).
His book The Mayor of Casterbridge was used in Zimbabwe as an Ordinary Level literature in English set book at the turn of the 21st century.
However, since the 1950s Hardy has been recognised as a major poet, and had a significant influence on The Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Phillip Larkin and Elizabeth Jennings.
Most of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances.
Hardy’s Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire, and much of Berkshire, in south west England.
In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he married in 1874. Although they later became estranged, her death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him.
After her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places linked with their courtship, and his Poems 1912-13 reflect upon her death. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior.
He remained preoccupied with his first wife’s death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry.
Hardy became ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died at Max Gate just after9 pm on January 11, 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed; the cause of death was cited, on his death certificate, as “cardiac syncope”, with ‘old age” given as a contributory factor.
His funeral was on January 16 at Westminster Abbey, and it proved a controversial occasion because Hardy and his family and friends had wished for his body to be interred at Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma.
His executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted that he be placed in the Abbey’s famous Poets’ Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma and his ashes in Poets’ Corner.
Shortly after Hardy’s death, the executors of his estate burnt his letters and notebooks. Twelve records survived, one of them containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s.
Hardy’s birthplace in Bockhampton and his house Max Gate, both in Dorchester, are owned by the National Trust. — BBC/The Herald.
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