InfoBritain

 

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy's Cottage

In 1859 Samuel Smiles published his best selling book Self Help, about men born to a low station in life working their way up to greatness. This vision did not coincide with nineteenth century reality, where it was in fact very difficult to to rise through society without money or connections. However, nineteen year old Thomas Hardy, son of a mason who ran a small building business, was setting out on just such a road to improvement. 1859 was also the year that Hardy read Darwin's The Origin of Species, a book that made a deep impression on him. Hardy was at Darwin's funeral in April 1882. Darwin's influence might allow us to say that Thomas Hardy was the first modern novelist. Hardy illustrates the confusion that often surrounds Darwin. Darwin is sometimes seen as formulating a philosophy of ruthlessness. For Hardy the idea that all life has a common origin was a source of compassion. It was no longer possible to judge certain forms of life as having less worth than others, and he was an early opponent of cruelty to animals. In a similar way he did not dismiss certain sections of human society as having less worth than others, a widespread attitude in stratified Victorian society. The whole of Tess of the D'Urbervilles - the story of a milk maid whose humble family was once one of the country's greatest dynasties - is concerned with this theme. When aristocratic Angel Clare falls in love with Tess, it strikes him that: "the impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king." (P198)

In 1860 Hardy moved from his childhood home at Higher Bockingham near Dorchester in Dorset, to London. Here he took a job in an architect's office, and wrote in his spare time. With his novel Desperate Remedies he began to create Wessex, the imaginary world based on Dorset and its surrounding counties, with Casterbridge, based on Dorchester, as its capital. Returning to Dorset Hardy continued his relentless programme of self improvement. His1872 novel Under the Greenwood Tree was a success, and Hardy's writing career gathered pace. By the time he was publishing episodes of Far From The Madding Crowd in 1874 he was wealthy enough to marry his girl friend Emma.

With Far From The Madding Crowd Hardy named Wessex for the first time, and ever since people have visited Dorchester and explored the locations he used in creating Casterbridge. After living in Norfolk, and then again in London, Hardy moved back to Dorset in 1881, and in March 1885 he finished the building of his own house in Dorchester. It was at this time that he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, and his greatest book Tess of the D'Urbervilles. From 1888 Hardy was attempting to write more realistically. This led to problems with editors who feared the public reaction to such frankness. Tess of the D'Urbervilles had to suffer numerous cuts before it was accepted for publication. Hardy's problems came to a head in 1894 when he published Jude the Obscure. This was the story of a bright young man, who is denied an education and commits suicide as a result. The novel caused outrage, mainly because of its portrayal of marriage. A theatre production based on Tess Of The D'Urbervilles was cancelled. Even Hardy's wife Emma was cross with him. The hostile reviews upset Hardy so much that he never wrote another novel. For the rest of his life he concentrated on poetry, his best known collection being Wessex Poems.

His wife Emma died in 1912 and was buried in Stinsford Churchyard. Hardy then married his secretary Florence Dugdale. Hardy died in 1928 at his house of Max Gate in Dorchester. His body was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. His heart is supposed to be buried beside Emma in Stinsford - although there is a possibility that a cat ate his heart before it was incarcerated, and was replaced with a pig's heart by the housekeeper!

Hardy was writing at the threshold of the modern age. The old certainties were passing. And yet in spite of his passionate interest in history he wasn't simply a writer who looked back to better age which had passed, or forward to a better, more enlightened age to come. Hardy had a wonderful eye for the strange circularity of progress. In Tess Of The D'Urbervilles "Nature's holy plan" may not be as clear as it once was, and yet as Tess sets out to try and find her drunk parents, the past represents confusion as well as lost certainties:

"Tess... started on her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day." (P25)

Rather than the past representing certainties which had been lost, the past of the crooked street is a vague, directionless place: it is the future which is ordered and clear. In the end past and future seem to meet each other, in the timeless imaginary yet real world of Wessex.

Dorset from the monument to Vice Admiral Hardy of HMS Victory, a distant relative of Thomas Hardy

And where is Wessex? While it is a place based on the southern counties of England, Wessex cannot be limited by such a definition. Once again the border between things is unclear. At the end of Tess the country people are moving between places of work, some travelling hopefully to places that other people are leaving in search of hope: "Marian and Izz Huett had journeyed onward with the chattels of the ploughman in the direction of their land of Canaan - the Egypt of some other family which had left it only that morning." (P465) You can't get places much more different than Egypt and Canaan, and yet in Wessex they seem to be the same place. And while Wessex people are finding Canaan and Egypt existing together, the despairing Tess is outside the vault of her old and extinct family asking herself: "why am I on the wrong side of this door?" Most would feel she is already on the right side of the door. The border between life and death itself seems to dissolve, and perhaps the end of Tess isn't as bleak as it appears. Perhaps her place on the dark side of the door can allow her to open it to a better fate. I like to think so.