Background

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in the village of Upper Bokhempton (now Higher Bockhampton), a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford, one mile from Dorchester, Dorset. His entire village consisted of eight houses inhabited by workers, and its population was about fifty people. His father Thomas worked as a stonemason and local builder, and married his mother Jemima in Beaminster, towards the end of 1839.

Education

Hardy was taught by his father to play the violin, and he often journeyed about the countryside playing for dances and storing up the impressions of rural life. Hardy, along with his two sisters and a brother were educated at home under the guidance of his mother. His mother, who was able to read but could not write, decided that his son deserves a better education than the one she got.

At the age of nine, Thomas was sent to study in the parish school in Dorchester. His classmates considered him to be modest and "party pooper". After school Thomas continued self-education - his mother insisted that he read a lot of "good" books.

When Thomas was 16 he graduated from high school and enrolled as an apprentice to John Hicks, a local architect and church restorer. When not at his drafting board Hardy studied the Latin and Greek classics and also continued to act as a fiddler at country dances and weddings.

In 1862 Thomas joined the architect Arthur Blomfield as an assistant in London, from whom he learned the art of restoring churches. There he went on to study architecture at King's College London.

Career

Hardy began writing poetry after moving to London in 1862. He send them to publishers, who quickly returned them. He kept many of the poems and published them in 1898 and afterward. Back in Dorchester in 1867 working for John Hicks, an architect in Dorchester, he wrote a novel, "The Poor Man and the Lady", which he was advised not to publish on the ground that it was too satirical for genteel Victorian tastes. Told to write a novel with a plot, he turned out "Desperate Remedies" (1871), which was unsuccessful.

Meanwhile Hardy had begun to work for Gerald Crickmay, who had taken over Hicks's business. Crickmay sent him to Cornwall, where on March 7, 1870, he met Emma Lavinia Gifford, with whom he fell in love. Their courtship is recorded in "A Pair of Blue Eyes" and in some of Hardy's most beautiful poems, among them "When I Set Out for Lyonnesse" and "Beeny Cliff."

Hardy could have kept on with architecture, but he was a "born bookworm," and in spite of his lack of success with literature he decided to continue with it, hoping eventually to make enough money to enable him to marry. For "Under the Greenwood Tree" (1872) he earned £30. The book was well received, and he was asked to write a novel for serialization in a magazine. In September 1872 "A Pair of Blue Eyes" began to appear, even though only a few chapters had been completed. "Far from the Madding Crowd" (1874), also serialized, was a success financially and critically.

Hardy preferred his poetry to his prose and thought his novels merely a way to earn a living. But his best novels - "The Return of the Native" (1878), "The Mayor of Casterbridge" (1886), and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" (1891) - were, at least in book form, much more than magazine fiction. The main characters were individuals moving before a chorus of rural folk and a backdrop of inhuman and uncaring nature. The people were dominated by the countryside of "Wessex," Hardy's name for the area in south-west England where he set most of his novels, and the area is as vividly memorable as the people.

Even Hardy's best novels, however, were marred by a characteristically awkward prose and overuse of coincidence, as were the lesser novels: "The Hand of Ethelberta" (1876), a comedy of society; "The Trumpet-Major" (1880), about the Napoleonic Wars; "A Laodicean" (1881), written while sick in bed; "Two on a Tower" (1882), about an astronomer and a lady; and "The Woodlanders" (1887), about an unhappy marriage. Good or bad, his novels brought Hardy money, fame, and acquaintance with the great. It was a successful life and seemed happy enough, but he had a strained relationship with his wife.

Hardy was increasingly displeased by the restrictions imposed on his novels by the magazines. In the book version of Tess he restored several chapters cut out of the serial, and the book was attacked as immoral. In "Jude the Obscure" (1895) he did the same; there was an immense outcry. It is poorly constructed and too bitter to be one of Hardy's best novels, but it may be his most famous, because its reception was a main cause of his turning from novels to poetry.

Then he began to publish The Dynasts, an immense drama of the Napoleonic Wars which depicts all the characters, even Napoleon, as puppets whose actions are determined by the Immanent Will. The drama is commented on by "phantasmal Intelligences," who explain the workings of the Will. The "epic-drama" evolved into 19 acts and 130 scenes; it was published in three parts in 1903, 1905, and 1908. Meant to be read, not acted, it is frequently called Hardy's masterwork.

Meanwhile Hardy continued to publish his shorter verse in Time's Laughingstocks (1909). His most famous single volume of poems, Satires of Circumstance, appeared in 1914. It revealed the extremes of Hardy's emotional range in the short, bitter poems referred to in the title and the longer poems about his first wife, who died in 1912.

Because in most cases Hardy published his poems years after he wrote them, the dates of composition can be determined only by his references to them in The Early Life of Thomas Hardy or The Later Years. Hardy died on January 11, 1928. His heart was buried in the churchyard at Stinsford, his ashes in Westminster Abbey.

Achievements

• 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). During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.
  
  Two of his novels, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" and "Far from the Madding Crowd", were listed in the top 50 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.
  
  A number of notable English composers, including Gerald Finzi, Benjamin Britten, and Gustav Holst, set poems by Hardy to music. Holst also wrote the orchestral tone poem Egdon Heath: A Homage to Thomas Hardy in 1927.
  
  In 1910, Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit and was also for the first time nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He would be nominated for the prize eleven years later.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Well-Beloved

    (Set on the Isle of Slingers, this novel follows the explo...)

    1897
  • The Hand of Ethelberta

    (Adventuress and opportunist, Ethelberta reinvents herself...)

    1876
  • Wessex Tales

    (Wessex Tales is a collection of six stories written in th...)

    1888
  • Life's Little Ironies

    (The phrase "life's little ironies" is now proverbial, but...)

    1894
  • A Laodicean

    (The daughter of a wealthy railway magnate, Paula Power in...)

    1881
  • Desperate Remedies

    (Cytherea has taken a position as lady's maid to the eccen...)

    1871
  • Wessex Poems And Other Verses
  • A Group of Noble Dames 1891

• novel

  • The Return of the Native

    (The native of Thomas Hardy's 1878 novel "The Return of th...)

    1878
  • Under the Greenwood Tree

    (The plot concerns the activities of a group of church mus...)

    1872
  • Jude the Obscure

    (Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, met with an even str...)

    1895
  • Far From the Madding Crowd

    (In his novel Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy first intr...)

    1874
  • Tess of the d'Urbervilles, a Pure Woman

    (Tess of the d'Urbervilles attracted criticism for its sym...)

    1891
  • A Pair of Blue Eyes

    (The book describes the love triangle of a young woman, El...)

    1873
  • The Woodlanders

    (Love, and the erratic heart, are at the centre of Hardy's...)

    1887
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge 1886
  • The Trumpet-Major 1880
  • Two on a Tower 1882

Religion

Hardy's family was Anglican, but not especially devout. He was baptised at the age of five weeks and attended church, where his father and uncle contributed to music.

As a young adult, he befriended Henry R. Bastow (a Plymouth Brethren man), who also worked as a pupil architect, and who was preparing for adult baptism in the Baptist Church. Hardy flirted with conversion, but decided against it. Bastow went to Australia and maintained a long correspondence with Hardy, but eventually Hardy tired of these exchanges and the correspondence ceased. This concluded Hardy's links with the Baptists.

However, Hardy's religious life seems to have mixed agnosticism, deism, and spiritism.

Politics

During his early career both as an architect in London, Hardy developed strong political views that tended towards socialism. The early novels show evidence of his suppressed political anger as Hardy lapses into outbursts of bitter social satire. The satire disappears after The Hand of Ethelberta when the novels complete a gradual movement towards tragedy. This meant that the discord between the early novels' general optimism and his political anger was eliminated.

Views

Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England.

Though Hardy's novels seldom end happily, he was not, he stated, a pessimist. He called himself a "meliorist," one who believed that man can live with some happiness if he understands his place in the universe and accepts it.

Quotations: "The Christian God - the external personality - has been replaced by the intelligence of the First Cause...the replacement of the old concept of God as all-powerful by a new concept of universal consciousness. The "tribal god, man-shaped, fiery-faced and tyrannous" is replaced by the 'unconscious will of the Universe' which progressively grows aware of itself and 'ultimately, it is to be hoped, sympathetic'."

"Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened."

"They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends."

"A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away."

"Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized."

"People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort."

"Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…"

"A man's silence is wonderful to listen to."

Membership

Hardy was a member of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Personality

Thomas Hardy was a kind and gentle man, terribly aware of the pain human beings suffer in their struggle for life.

Physical Characteristics: A small baby, thought at birth to be dead, Hardy became a small man only a little over 5 feet tall.

Quotes from others about the person

• Edward Wright: "One of the most dramatic of novelists - except on the rare occasions when he is melodramatic - Mr Hardy has endued with life and colour all that a student of antiquities, history, architecture, and folk-lore could discover relating to his native county; and with wonderful accuracy, lightness, and charm he has revealed the poetry with which the ways of the woodman and the farmer, the neatherd, the shepherd, and other rural figures, are still surrounded."

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Arthur Schopenhauer

• Politicians

  Charles George Milnes Gaskell

Connections

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 Gifford, whom he married in Kensington in the autumn of 1874. In 1885 Thomas and his wife moved into Max Gate, a house designed by Hardy and built by his brother. Although they later became estranged, Emma's subsequent death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him and after her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places connected with their courtship.

In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. However, he remained preoccupied with his first wife's death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry.

Father:

Thomas Hardy

Mother:

Jemima Hardy

Spouse:

Florence Dugdale

late spouse:

Emma Gifford

(24 November 1840 - 27 November 1912)

Friend:

Horace Moule

(1832–1873)

References

• Thomas Hardy The book does give an account of Hardy's life, from the very moment of birth when he was 'thrown aside as dead' till rescued by the midwife. But more than that it offers a wonderful miscellany of reminiscences, anecdotes, folk-tales, personal insights, diary entries and intriguing reflections on art in general and fiction and poetry in particular. It reveals a good deal about Hardy the man, and still more about Hardy the writer.
• Thomas Hardy: The World of his Novels J. B. Bullen explores the relationship between reality and the dream, identifying the places and the settings for Hardy’s writing, and showing how and why he shaped them to serve the needs of his characters and plots.
  2013
• Thomas Hardy In this acclaimed new biography, Claire Tomalin, one of today's preeminent literary biographers, investigates this beloved writer and reveals a figure as rich and complex as his tremendous legacy.
  2007
• Thomas Hardy's World: An Illuminating Biography In this richly detailed biography, Molly Lefebure provides a fascinating insight into the life and times of the man behind the works, charting both Hardy’s personal life and relationships (including his tempestuous marriage to his first wife, Emma Gifford) as well as the social and political factors that shaped the Victorian era. In this way, Lefebure demonstrates how both had an undoubtable and instrumental influence on Hardy’s work.