Now lodging with Emma in Upper Tooting, London, Hardy immersed himself once more in the life and culture of the capital. He was elected to the Rabelais Club (which held literary dinners every two months), and also to the exclusive Savile Club for gentlemen. Time was spent at the Grosvenor Gallery studying and admiring sculptures and paintings. He also witnessed the final performance of actor Henry Irving, in a scene from Shakespeare’s Richard II at the Lyceum Theatre. Hardy’s love of the theatre may have had its origins in the strolling players whom he saw in and around Dorchester when he was a boy.
Needless to say, Hardy kept in touch with his native Dorset, where, in August and September of 1878, he renewed his acquaintance with poet William Barnes, and with Charles W. Moule, brother of the late Horace.
In August 1879 Hardy and Emma visited Hardy’s parents at Bockhampton. They also stayed for a time in Weymouth, where Hardy’s mother visited them and accompanied them on a drive to Portland.
Hardy was now moving in the upper echelons of London society, where among the people he met were Sir Percy Shelley, son of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; poet, educationalist and writer Matthew Arnold; poet Robert Browning; Poet Laureate Lord Tennyson (who said that of Hardy’s novels he liked A Pair of Blue Eyes best); novelist and cartoonist George du Maurier; and painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. He also attended the Epsom races for Derby Day.
Ever since his boyhood, when he had discovered a magazine on the subject at his home in Bockhampton, Hardy had been fascinated by the Napoleonic Wars. He would also have been aware that his grandfather, Thomas I, as a volunteer militiaman, had travelled with his regiment to Weymouth to prepare for the threatened invasion by Emperor Napoleon I of France.
Four years previously, in June 1875 (the 18th of that month being Waterloo Day, commemorating the Duke of Wellington’s victory in 1815 over Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo), Hardy and Emma had visited Chelsea Hospital and heard real-life accounts of the battle – from men who had fought in it. On another excursion to the Continent with Emma, in 1876, he had visited Waterloo and explored the battlefield. And, of course, nearer to home, he would often have seen the local ‘redcoats’ – based at their barracks in Dorchester – exercising their horses on the downs.
Hardy availed himself of any opportunity to immerse himself in matters Napoleonic, as when he attended the funeral of the exiled Prince Louis Napoleon (only son of Emperor Napoleon III), who had been killed, paradoxically, while fighting for Britain in the Zulu War. The prince’s body was duly brought back to England for burial at Chislehurst in Kent. It therefore seemed inevitable that Hardy would write a novel set during this period of history, and with this in mind he visited the British Museum and also read C. H. Gifford’s History of the Napoleonic Wars in order to acquaint himself with the full facts. Relevant information was also to be found in parish records and from inscriptions on local tombstones.
The Trumpet Major is set in those anxious times when an invasion of England by the forces of Napoleon seemed imminent. The story is about two brothers: John Loveday (the Trumpet Major) and Robert, a sailor. Sons of the miller, the brothers are rivals for the hand of village beauty Anne Garland. Anne vacillates as to which one she really loves, and finally, it is the less deserving Robert whom she chooses. Meanwhile, John, reliable and self-sacrificing, sails under Admiral Lord Nelson and Captain Hardy (Thomas Hardy’s alleged ancestor) in the warship Victory, only to meet his death in Spain in the Peninsular War.
Included in the story is the visit of King George III to Weymouth amidst a fanfare provided by the ‘quire’ of fiddlers, violoncellists, trombonists and drummers. There is also mention of the local Dorchester ‘strong beer’ – a subject always close to Hardy’s heart which he describes thus: ‘It was of the most beautiful colour that the eye of an artist in beer could desire; full in body, yet brisk as a volcano: piquant, yet without a twang; luminous as an autumn sunset; free from streakiness of taste; but finally, rather heady.’1
On 11 February 1880 Hardy wrote to the Revd Handley Moule – at that time Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (who was another of the brothers of his late friend Horace) – concerning the recent death of his father, the Revd Henry Moule, vicar of Fordington. Hardy, for many years, had regarded himself as a parishioner of Henry Moule (even though, technically speaking, this was not the case), and had referred admiringly to the ‘energies’ which the vicar had brought ‘to bear upon the village’. Here, Hardy would have especially remembered the Revd Moule’s heroic efforts on behalf of the local population during the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854.
Hardy stated that of all his novels, The Trumpet Major was the one ‘founded more largely on testimony, oral and written, than any other’. It was published by Smith, Elder & Co. on 26 October 1880.
In November 1880, on a visit to Cambridge, Hardy attended the 5 p.m. service at Kings College Chapel. It was in Cambridge that he fell ill. On his return to London a surgeon was summoned to determine why Hardy was experiencing acute abdominal pain. The diagnosis was internal bleeding. By now, Hardy had already written the early chapters of his next novel, A Laodicean, to be serialised in Harper’s Magazine with illustrations by George du Maurier. He was now, on account of his illness, ‘forced to lie in bed with his feet higher than his head for several months’.2 For this reason, the only way he could complete his manuscript was by dictating it to Emma, who nursed him through this episode. The process of dictation was completed on 1 May 1881, by which time Hardy was able to leave his sickbed and venture outdoors once again.
Due to Hardy’s illness, he and Emma had been obliged to ask for an extension to the lease of their house in Upper Tooting. Having previously been torn between London and Dorset, they now decided to return to the country. In future, they would visit the capital for a few months only each year. A return to Dorset, they hoped, would not only be beneficial to Hardy’s health, but would also provide inspiration for him in his future writing. Accordingly, they relocated to Wimborne, to a house named ‘Llanherne’.
In retrospect, it seems likely that Hardy had suffered a prolonged attack of biliary colic, a condition in which a small concretion (‘stone’) becomes temporarily lodged in the duct which drains bile from the liver into the gut. This would account for his jaundice, as observed by Edmund Gosse, who visited him at the time.3 (Renal colic, also caused by a stone, is another possibility. However, this might well have manifested itself by haematuria (blood in the urine) or by Hardy actually passing the stone, of which there is no mention.)
In July 1881 Hardy and Emma, in company with Hardy’s younger sister Katharine, visited the ancient British stronghold of Badbury Rings, and also Kingston Lacy (seat of the Bankes family). Hardy pointed out Charborough on the journey (the home of Mrs Drax), in the grounds of which stood a tall tower – which subsequently reappeared in one of Hardy’s novels, as will be seen.4 In August the couple travelled extensively in Scotland where they visited castles and lochs, and Hardy sketched. On their return they attended a ball given by Lady Wimborne at Canford Manor.
Hardy undoubtedly derived the title of his next novel, A Laodicean, from the Biblical book of Revelation, where the phrase ‘lukewarm in religion, like the Christians of Laodicea’ is to be found.5 These words apply equally well to the heroine of the story, Paula Power.
Paula’s father purchases Castle de Stancy from the ancient de Stancy family, but he permits one of the members of that family, Charlotte, who is now penniless, to continue to live there as a friend for Paula. The hero is George Somerset, an architect, music lover and poet. Other characters include Captain William de Stancy, Charlotte’s brother, who hopes to marry Paula and thereby reclaim the ancestral home;William Dare, de Stancy’s illegitimate son; and James Havill, also an architect, who competes with Somerset in drawing up plans for the restoration of the castle.
Paula adores the ‘romantic and historical’, considers the castle to be wonderful, and even wishes that she was one of the ancient de Stancy family who had built it all those years ago. But whereas de Stancy can offer Paula a pedigree and a title to go with it, Somerset, who is also a suitor of Paula, reminds her that there is another nobility, one of ‘talent and enterprise’, and he cites such creative geniuses from the past as Archimedes, Newcomen, Watt, Telford and Stephenson. In fact, Paula’s father is himself an engineer and builder of railways. Finally, it is Somerset who wins the day, and he and Paula become man and wife.
A favourite device which Hardy used in his novels was that of two men each vying for the hand of the same woman. This was a legacy from the time when he was courting Emma; for when he first met her at St Juliot, another rival for her hand6 (who was known to be a farmer) was already on the scene. As Somerset pleads his case with Paula, so one may imagine Hardy pleading his case with Emma and asking her to ignore his humble origins and judge him on his merits.
What was the identity of this rival to Hardy for Emma’s hand? A clue is given by Hardy in his poem The Young Churchwarden (part of his Moments of Vision collection), which reads as follows:
When he lit the candles there,
And the light fell on his hand,
And it trembled as he scanned
Her and me, his vanquished air
Hinted that his dream was done,
And I saw he had begun
To understand.
When Love’s viol was unstrung,
Sore I wished the hand that shook
Had been mine that shared her book
While that evening hymn was sung,
His the victor’s, as he lit
Candles where he had bidden us sit
With vanquished look.
And originally attached to this poem (and subsequently crossed out) was a note which read: ‘At an Evening Service/August 14. 1870.’ So where was Hardy on this occasion? The answer appears in a note which he wrote in his copy of the Prayer Book, next to the 73rd Psalm, which reads: ‘Lesnewth, Evening Prayer, Aug. 14, 1870’ – a reference to the village of Lesnewth, situated ¾ mile from St Juliot and its church of St Michael & All Angels.7
Henry Jose was the son of William Jose and his wife Ann, who farmed 64 acres of land at Trebiffin, situated ¾ mile south of St Juliot, across the Valency Valley in the parish of Lesnewth.8 Five years younger than Emma, Henry, in August 1870, was aged 25. A clue that Henry was the person in question was provided by his great-nephew, Walter Henry Jose, whose father had once told him that ‘Uncle Henry had a great fancy for Emma Gifford’.9 Another clue is given by Emma herself when, referring to ‘the Cornish working orders’, whom in general she disliked, she affirmed that:
Only one stands out amongst them with worth of character and deep devotion, though rather dumb of expression, a man gentle of nature, musical, christlike in guilelessness, handsome of face and figure, David-like farming his own land: he never married and told after I had left [the area] of his disappointment, and attraction on first seeing me.10
And what clinches the matter is that Henry (in addition to being a farmer like his father) was indeed, at the time in question, a churchwarden at Lesnewth’s church of St Michael & All Angels.11 Finally, as Emma stated, Jose remained unmarried; he died in March 1928 aged 83.
Hardy’s poem, therefore, refers unquestionably to himself, Emma and Henry Jose. But instead of being joyful that he had emerged victorious in the battle for the hand of Emma, the poem is one of deep regret. For by the time it was written (which was some time after the occasion to which it refers), the love between its author (Hardy) and the subject of his love (Emma) had become ‘unstrung’. Furthermore, as the second verse of the poem indicates, Hardy is now regretting that he, and not the ‘young churchwarden’ (Jose), had been the ‘victor’ in the battle for Emma’s affections. So what was the story behind this sad fact? All would be revealed in due course.
Henry Jose’s younger brother Digory also did not marry. (His elder sister Jane Pearse Jose, however, married Richard Prout of Peventon.) Had Hardy not been assigned to St Juliot by architect Crickmay in the March of 1870, then it is possible that Emma would have married Jose, despite his more lowly position in society, and that Hardy would have married someone else. How different his life might then have been.
Other poems of Hardy’s are less easy to decipher. Sometimes he deliberately alters the time when a particular event happens; at other times, he transposes the male and female roles, or disguises the location in which the scene is set. Nevertheless, in virtually everything he ever wrote, subsequent to his first meeting with Emma, there are allusions not only to his love for her, but also to their problematical relationship.
Hardy divulged that his novel, A Laodicean, contained ‘more of the facts of his own life than anything else he had ever written’.12 This, as will be seen, became an increasing tendency with him in the succeeding novels and poems which he produced.
The novel also shows that far from being entrenched in the past, Hardy was quite willing to recognise and embrace the advances of science, as long as the effect was not to enslave the people, drive them off the land or destroy the landscape. Threshing and ploughing machines driven by steam traction engines were therefore not welcome. In A Laodicean, that ‘old chestnut’, the subject of infant baptism, is revived; church minister Mr Woodwell being the reincarnation of Frederick Perkins of Dorchester – the real-life Baptist minister and father of the two youths with whom Hardy used to have deep discussions on the subject in his younger days.
The novel appeared in Harper’s Magazine between December 1880 and December 1881, and was published in December 1881 by Sampson Low of London.
On 26 April 1882, during a stay in London, Hardy attended the funeral of Charles Darwin whose book The Origin of Species he had embraced and long admired, and which had posed serious philosophical questions for him when he had first read it many years previously.
In September 1882 Hardy and Emma set out on a journey which took them to three counties. As they travelled from Axminster in Devon to Lyme Regis in Dorset, Hardy noticed how: ‘The horse (pulling the coach) swayed [and] leant against the pole … his head hung like his tail. The straps and brass rings of the harness seemed barbarously harsh on his shrinking skin.’ Throughout his life, a concern for animals was one of Hardy’s trademarks. Emma would apparently have intervened had it not been for the ‘anger of the other passengers, who wanted to get on [to their destination]’.13 In early October the pair set out once more, this time for France, where they explored Paris and visited that city’s Louvre Museum and its Luxembourg Museum of Art.
The Revd Holder, rector of St Juliot and husband of Emma’s sister Helen, died in November 1882, aged 79. He had always been on friendly terms with Hardy, whom he was in the habit of regaling with amusing stories. Holder had also permitted Hardy to read the lesson at church services when he himself had been ‘not in vigour’.14 He was buried (presumably) in the churchyard at St Juliot in the same grave as his first wife Ann.15 Hardy himself designed his memorial plaque.
The novel Two on a Tower deals ostensibly with the subject of astronomy, but beneath the surface lies a more powerful and compelling theme. This theme, which Hardy describes in the Preface, was ‘the outcome of a wish [of his] to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe’.
To achieve this, a knowledge of astronomy was necessary, and Hardy therefore sought permission from the astronomer royal to visit the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. In particular, he required an answer to the following question: was it possible to site a telescope with which to study the stars in an old tower, despite the fact that the tower in question had not been built for the purpose? In his mind was the great eighteenth-century tower which, as previously mentioned, stood in the grounds of Charborough Park near Wimborne, Dorset.
In the story, the aristocratic Lady Viviette Constantine, believing that her husband Sir Blount has died in Africa and that she is now a widow, falls in love with curate’s son and budding astronomer Swithin St Cleeve, who is considerably younger than herself. She provides him with astronomical instruments and sets him up in a tower on her estate, which he uses as an observatory.
Hardy now inserts the proverbial spanner in the works. Having married Swithin and become pregnant by him, her ladyship discovers that her late husband, Sir Blount, although now dead, was actually still alive at the time of her second marriage, and because of this fact, her marriage to Swithin is invalid. Anxious to avoid adversely affecting Swithin’s career as an architect, and in order not to jeopardise his inheritance from his uncle, Lady Constantine now marries the Bishop of Melchester. Meanwhile, Swithin goes abroad to pursue his studies.
By the time Swithin returns, the bishop has died. He realises that he no longer loves Lady Constantine, who is now ‘worn and faded’, but nonetheless proposes to her a second time. Overwhelmed with joy at her reunion with him, she dies in his arms.
Two on a Tower was published by Sampson Low in late October 1882.
In 1883 an article written by Hardy, entitled ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, was published in Longman’s Magazine. Such a person as the labourer, said he, was hitherto personified as having an image of:
uncouth manner and aspect, stolid understanding, and snail-like movement [who spoke with a] chaotic corruption of regular language, that few persons … consider it worth while to enquire what views, if any, of life, nature, or of society, are conveyed in these utterances. He hangs his head and looks sheepish when spoken to, and thinks Lunnon [London] is a place paved with gold. Misery and fever lurk in his cottage. He has few thoughts of joy, and little hope of rest.
For Hardy, a champion of his Dorset heritage whose sentiments lay always on the side of the poor and the oppressed, this was an over-simplification. He pointed out that the language of the Dorsetshire labourers was, in fact, an agglomeration of English as taught at the National Schools which they attended, and the ‘unwritten, dying, Wessex English that they had learnt from their parents’. Far from being uniformly joyless and dull, some were happy, many serene and a few depressed. Some were clever ‘even to genius, some stupid, some wanton, some austere’. Their political views were equally varied and it was therefore a mistake to roll them all together into one. It was also a mistake to think that the ‘grimiest families’ were the poorest.
Years later, in March 1902, in a letter to author Henry Rider Haggard, Hardy developed his theme still further. Up until about 1855, he said, the labourers’ condition was one of great hardship. For instance, he had heard when young of a ‘sheep-keeping boy’ (whose father’s wages were a mere 6s a week) who had died of hunger; at autopsy the boy’s stomach was found to contain nothing but undigested, raw turnip. Since then, matters had improved, noted Hardy. Now, it was not unusual to see a cottage with carpeting; with brass rods going up the staircase to keep the carpet in place. A piano might be found within and a bicycle by the doorway. At night, a paraffin lamp was available.
While these changes were welcome, others were not. The life-hold principle of tenancy, which had given the cottager security of tenure for three generations – a period of up to 100 years – had now been replaced by weekly, renewable agreements, leading to great insecurity. ‘The Damocles’ sword which hung perpetually over the poor, said Hardy, ‘is the fear of being turned out of their houses by the farmer or squire’. For example, if an honest man’s daughter were to have an illegitimate child, or if he or his wife took to drink, then this provided grounds for the family’s instant eviction. For this and other reasons there was now a massive migration into the towns, which were not ‘fraught with such trying consequences’ as was the case in the villages. And because the labourer was forced to relocate himself to wherever a job was available, the effect on his children was deleterious. Said Hardy, in ‘shifting from school to school … their education could not possibly progress with that regularity which is essential to their getting the best knowledge in the short time available to them’.16
As for the village, the loss of its labourers and their families meant that it declined ‘into eternal oblivion’. There was now no longer ‘continuity of information’, with the result that ‘Names, stories, and relics’ of a place were now speedily forgotten.17