Thomas Hardy was an immensely shy person, who surrounded his house, Max Gate, Dorchester, with a dense curtain of trees, shunned publicity and investigative reporters, and when visitors arrived unexpectedly, slipped quietly out of the back door of his house in order to avoid them. So that no one should penetrate this mask of shyness, Hardy kept a rigid control over what aspects of his life were to be divulged and what were not. His first wife, Emma, behaved in a similar way, at least as far as her and her husband’s letters to one another were concerned: she burnt all that she could lay her hands upon.1 As for Hardy, following Emma’s death he burnt, page by page, a book-length manuscript of hers entitled What I Think of My Husband, together with most, but not all, of her diaries.2 When Hardy’s second wife, Florence, wrote a so-called ‘biography’ of him, he retained control by dictating to her virtually the whole of the manuscript. When Hardy himself died in 1928, Florence destroyed a great deal more of his and Emma’s personal papers.3 This begs the question, did Hardy have something to hide, a secret of some kind; and if so, is it possible, eight decades after his death, to discover what this secret was?
At first, this appears to be an impossible task, bearing in mind the vast quantity of ‘evidence’ which was deliberately destroyed by Hardy and his wives and others4 during their lifetimes. Also, when Florence died in 1937, her executor, Irene Cooper Willis, destroyed ‘a mass of the first Mrs Hardy’s incoming correspondence that had sat undisturbed in her former attic retreat at Max Gate ever since her own death twenty-five years earlier’.5 However, for a diligent researcher with an open mind, who is alive to the various clues to the conundrum which Hardy left behind, the task, as will shortly be seen, is not an impossible one.
For much of his adult life, Hardy laboured under a terrible burden of grief, the details of which he kept very much to himself. He required an outlet for this grief, a means of expressing his inner torment, and this outlet came through his writings. Hardy once told his friend, Edward Clodd, in respect of his novels, that ‘every superstition, custom, &c., described therein may be depended on as true records of the same – & not inventions of mine’.6 What he did not tell Clodd, and what only a very few of his contemporaries managed to discern, was the phenomenal extent to which his own personal life was reflected both in his novels and in his poems. However, even in this he was hamstrung, in that he could not afford to be explicit – at least while Emma was alive – for fear of offending her.
The purpose of this book is to pierce the veil of secrecy which Hardy deliberately drew over his life; to decipher the coded messages which his writings contain; to find out why his life was so filled with anguish, an anguish which led to the creation, by him, of some of the finest novels and poems in the English language. Only then is it possible to discover the real Hardy; the man that lies behind the mask.
The journey is a fascinating one. It leads to Hardy’s former haunts, including his family home at Higher Bockhampton (he disliked it being called a cottage, preferring it to be called a house); to St Juliot in Cornwall, where he met and courted Emma, and to Dorchester County Museum, where many important artefacts associated with him – including the contents of his study – are to be found. It also leads, surprisingly, to various mental hospitals, known in those days as ‘lunatic asylums’, located in such places as London, Oxford and Cornwall.