Thomas Hardy

I

Introduction

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), English writer known for his fiction as well as his poetry. In 14 novels, numerous short stories, and several volumes of poetry, Hardy examined the joys and predicaments of ordinary people who experience the usual problems of frustrated love, thwarted ambition, and unrealized hopes. Although these men and women could have lived anywhere in the world at any time, Hardy’s fiction generally concentrated on country and village life in his particular corner of southwest England.

II

Hardy’s Life

Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton in the English county of Dorset, on June 2, 1840, the oldest of the four children (two boys and two girls) of Thomas and Jemima Hardy. Another Thomas Hardy of Dorset, a distinguished naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars, was a distant relative. According to legend, British naval hero Horatio Nelson died in that Hardy’s arms at the Battle of Trafalgar. Hardy included his illustrious kinsman in his novel The Trumpet Major (1880) and in the three-volume poem The Dynasts, both of which concern the Napoleonic Wars.

Hardy’s schooling included some study of language and literature with a Dorset clergyman and teacher. When Hardy reached 16, his father, a stonemason, apprenticed him to a local architect who specialized in restoring old churches. This first career, as an architect, lasted for about ten years. During this time Hardy was writing poetry with little success.

In 1870 while making sketches for the restoration of a church in Cornwall, Hardy met his future wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford. They were married in 1874 and lived near London until 1876, when they settled in Dorset. By then Hardy had published his first novels and felt able to support himself through his writing. In 1886 the Hardys settled down at Max Gate, a large house in the town of Dorchester designed by Hardy himself and built by his father and brother.

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Although much of the evidence has been destroyed, it seems that Thomas and Emma, after an initial period of happiness, had a marriage marred by bitterness and resentment. It is possible that Hardy had brief affairs with other women, especially after 1890. A recurring theme in his writings is the sadness of romantic love, which matrimony changes from bliss into misery.

For 30 years after 1866, Hardy worked at his second career, as a novelist. In this career he enjoyed a measure of success and popularity and was noted for his portrayal of the rural scene. Like most long fiction of the second half of the 19th century, his novels were first published in serial form in periodicals, with three or four chapters appearing every week or every month. His last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was attacked and ridiculed to such an extent that Hardy gave up fiction and returned to his first literary passion, poetry. Thus, his third career, as a poet, began.

Hardy’s first marriage lasted until Emma’s death in 1912. Two years later he married his second wife, Florence Emily Dugdale, who was almost 40 years younger than Hardy. She is credited with two volumes of biography published after Hardy’s death, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840-1891 (1928) and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy: 1892-1928 (1930). However, most scholars recognize that Hardy himself wrote all of the first volume and most of the second volume. Hardy died in Dorchester, on January 11, 1928.

III

Hardy’s Works

In both prose and poetry, Hardy is associated with his home region in southwest England, for which he revived the old name of Wessex, referring to the kingdom of the West Saxons. Now, as in Hardy’s day, the region is known for agriculture, especially dairying and orchards, and for stone. The region is historically important for its prehistoric megaliths at Stonehenge, Avebury, and other sites, and for remains of Roman colonization dating back more than 2,000 years. These geographic and historical conditions play an important part in Hardy’s writing.

A

Hardy’s Fiction

Almost all of Hardy’s novels and short stories provide fictional accounts, written in the past tense and the third person, of the fate of men and women in a harsh and indifferent universe. These men and women are favored by nature with such endowments as character, beauty, intelligence, and talent, but they receive little social support for their hopes and ambitions either from other people or from institutions such as the church. Most of his novels end in tragedy of some sort. More often than not a series of unfortunate events and their own character flaws, rather than the plotting of a villain, bring about the downfall of good characters.

All of Hardy’s novels are pervaded by a belief in a deterministic universe, in which all events have a cause and little is left to free will or chance. In Hardy’s bleak world view the fate of the individual is occasionally altered by chance, but when human will attempts to challenge the necessary forces of fate it invariably loses. He tended to view his characters with irony and sadness. Hardy argued that his belief in determinism was a comfort as much as a curse. “Pessimism,” he said, “is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain.”

Through intense, vivid descriptions of the heath, the fields, the seasons, and the weather, Wessex attains a physical presence in Hardy’s novels and acts as a mirror of the psychological conditions and the misfortunes experienced by the characters. In The Woodlanders (1887), for example, Hardy writes, “The bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead born child.” At the beginning of The Return of the Native, Egdon Heath is described and personified in great detail:

Almost all of Hardy’s novels have their advocates, but five are usually placed in the first rank: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Each of these mature novels presents a realistic sequence of events concerning loves, ambitions, and conflicts. In many, the human story is set among historic or prehistoric monuments. These include the Roman relics around Dorchester in The Mayor of Casterbridge, the architecture of Salisbury Cathedral and Oxford University in Jude the Obscure, and the looming but comforting presence of Stonehenge at the end of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

In bold strokes, with humor and pathos, Hardy told gripping stories about interesting people. Not surprisingly, many of his novels have been made into distinguished motion-picture or television presentations. There have been creditable adaptations of Jude the Obscure and The Return of the Native. Critics and viewers gave more enthusiastic praise to director John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), with Julie Christie and Alan Bates, and to Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979), starring Nastassja Kinski.

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