1840 Thomas Hardy, the chronicler of Wessex, was born on this day, the son of a stonemason, Thomas Hardy Sr., in a thatched artisan’s cottage (commemorated in Hardy’s teenage poem, ‘Domicilium’) some three miles from Dorchester (‘Casterbridge’ in the later novels). He was the first child, born five months after his parents’ wedding – ‘prematurely’, as the polite fiction was.
He may well have been legitimately premature. On its birth the puny infant was observed to be still-born. The body was put aside for Christian disposal. It was the quick-witted midwife, Lizzie Downton (clearly not a nurse of the Sairey Gamp school), who detected a noise from the child and rescued it from premature burial.
Hardy was struck by the ‘irony’ of his birth, death, rebirth. Premature, still-born babies feature in his fiction (notably Tess’s offspring ‘Sorrow’) and in one of the most bitter of his poems, ‘In the Cemetery’:
‘You see those mothers squabbling there?’
Remarks the man of the cemetery.
‘One says in tears, “’Tis mine lies here!”
Another, “Nay, mine, you Pharisee!”
Another, “How dare you move my flowers
And put your own on this grave of ours!”
But all their children were laid therein
At different times, like sprats in a tin.
‘And then the main drain had to cross,
And we moved the lot some nights ago,
And packed them away in the general foss
With hundreds more. But their folks don’t know,
And as well cry over a new-laid drain
As anything else, to ease your pain!’
Hardy is commemorated by a tablet in Westminster Abbey (where his bodily ashes were interred) and in his local churchyard at Stinsford (where his heart is interred).
There is, alas, no memorial to the midwife Lizzie Downton – one of the great forgotten donors to Victorian literature.