Hardy described himself as being still a child at sixteen. The one extant photograph from 1856 shows a slim youngster intent on making himself look as much like a man as he can: longish dark hair, a faint suggestion about the upper lip that he is trying to grow a moustache, a wide, artistic cravat and broad collar to his shirt, and over this a single-breasted cotton coat, simple but neatly cut. There is something of an unfledged dandy about him. He is after all the son of a handsome father, and he is making an effort to present himself well. You can see why Hicks decided it was a good idea to take him into the office, and why he got on with the other young men there. They were agreeable and relaxed, and enjoyed themselves together. One was Henry Bastow, who had studied the classics at his London school and was soon reading Latin and Greek with Hardy for pleasure, arguing points of grammar and vocabulary. Bastow became his first real friend. When they read in the office, Tom made a habit of running into the Revd William Barnes’s school, which happened to be next door, to ask his opinion, and in this way also began a friendship with the poet.1 Another pupil was Herbert Fippard, a man of the world, already in his twenties and a touch condescending, since he had lived in London and knew the famous dance halls, the Argyle Rooms and the Cremorne Gardens, and the girls to be met there. He impressed Hardy by gliding round the office with an imaginary partner in his arms, whistling a quadrille. Dancing in London was seen to be a different thing from the dancing of the Dorset villages, for which he was still providing much music with his father, playing for parties and weddings, as they did on Christmas Day 1856 when Sarah Keats, the Bockhampton carrier’s daughter, a girl he had known all his life, was married.
His life was dividing into three quite separate strands. There was the office, where he was entering the professional world, which no member of his family had attempted to join until now. There was, mostly inside his head, the world of books and scholarship, so intensely experienced that he sometimes talked to himself in Latin on his daily walks; and it held the hope, still vague, of another life altogether, which might be peacefully devoted to books, the reading and even the writing of words. Then there was home and family, and everything that went with them: Bockhampton, Puddletown and the countryside around. Here he was familiar with shepherds, carriers and ploughmen; his uncles were bricklayers, his aunts and cousins dressmakers and carpenters. Just about all of them, including his parents, his grandmother and most of the girls he knew, spoke a different, rustic version of the language he used at the office and was familiar with from his reading.2 He knew what his father meant when he said, ‘She zid a lot of others be gone afore’, but he was not sure that Bastow or Fippard would understand him. His mother, for all her love of reading, was not confident enough to write a letter, and she asked Tom to write for her to her sister Martha Sharpe in Canada. He could not help seeing that his most deeply rooted attachments were to people who were hardly taken seriously in the world he aspired to enter. At best they were seen as quaint and picturesque, at worst as simpletons or clowns. True, his parents were a cut above the shepherds and labourers, and were urging him on and proud of his progress; it did not make it any less awkward for him as he advanced away from them in speech and habits.
Just now his home was dominated by women and children, his mother, in her forties, again preoccupied with the process of giving birth. Another sister, Katharine, known as Kate or Katie, appeared in September. Seven people living in the few small rooms meant there was little privacy or quiet, and as the winter came on it was clear that his grandmother Mary Hardy had not long to live. She was eighty-four, and in January 1857 she died. She had been a central and beloved figure in his home life, a teller of stories of the past and of the cottage over which she had presided for nearly sixty years. His novel Two on a Tower has what seem to be scraps of a portrait of her in her last years. In one scene the hero’s grandmother, who, like old Mrs Hardy, has come from another county and recalls it as she sits by the fire, tells her grandson how she had been dreaming of ‘my old country again, as usual. The place was as natural as when I left it, – e’en just three score years ago! All the folks and my old aunt were there… yet I suppose if I were really to set out and go there, hardly a soul would be left alive to say to me, dog how art!’ That ‘dog how art’ is so odd it sounds like a bit of Granny Hardy’s speech, stored up by a grandson peculiarly attentive to words. He adds a charming story of the old woman scraping off and eating the outside of the pudding she has made for her grandson while she waits for him to come home. He is disgusted by her greed and the scraped-down pudding, refuses it and goes upstairs, then relents, comes down and eats it up in a show of magnanimity. The story is as odd as the speech, and suggests another memory of Granny Hardy, especially as their only purpose in the novel is to underline the grandson’s divided situation: he has been to the grammar school and aspires to an academic or professional life, yet his home is a village cottage, shared with an old woman with a funny way of talking and behaving. Hardy knew everything there was to know about these things.3
While he mourned his grandmother at home, he liked to think of his other world outside as his student life. He and Bastow took to meeting in Kingston Maurward fields to pursue their classical studies in the open air when the weather allowed, like college chums. Bastow had a strongly religious side too, as a Baptist preparing for adult baptism. Like other converts, he wanted to pass on his beliefs to his friends and get them to join his team, and he set out to win Tom over to the doctrine of adult baptism. Tom first consulted his own team – Mr Shirley, the Church of England vicar of Bockhampton – and found him baffled and unable to advise. Then Bastow introduced him to the local Baptist minister, a Scot as poor as he was learned, with three sons, two of them graduates of Aberdeen University, the youngest already ill with tuberculosis. The sick boy was the one Tom liked best, but all were clever and congenial, and they enjoyed fierce, cheerful bouts arguing over the merits of adult baptism, with much urgent and aggressive citing of biblical texts. In the end Hardy was not convinced, although it took some time, and he absorbed the intricate arguments based on Bible texts so well that he was able to present them years later.4
When not reading or arguing with Bastow, he gave his attention to copying plans and tracing drawings at the office. He was a meticulous draughtsman. Hicks was pleased with him and took him along when he went to examine old churches. This was the period of indiscriminate church restoration which made architecture into a booming profession and was carried out with much misplaced enthusiasm. Hardy, who greatly regretted it later, was soon making surveys. He also took up sketching and painting for pure pleasure, going out alone in the open air in his free time. He made studies of animals and landscapes as well as of houses and churches. One day when he was drawing in the fields the eldest son of the vicar of Fordington looked over his shoulder, offering some advice, and they began to talk. Although Hardy knew the name of Moule and had heard his sermons, this was the first time he had got into conversation with one of his sons. Henry Joseph Moule was in his thirties, a Cambridge graduate, currently earning his living in Scotland as a land agent, although his talents and interests were artistic and antiquarian.5 He must have been holidaying at home when he spoke to Hardy, and through him Hardy soon met his younger brothers, among them Charles and Horace, both at college in Cambridge but enjoying long vacations at home, and Handley, still a schoolboy. Here was a brave new world, and the start of an intense and enchanted friendship.
The Moules were a formidable family. The father was a strenuous, practical, proselytizing, multi-talented man. He had reintroduced Christian worship into near-pagan Fordington after his arrival there in 1828. He was kept busy by the huge expansion in the population of his parish, as the poorest class of people drifted from the land to the town. Moule helped them all as best he could, if not always in ways that best pleased them. For instance, he got the Dorchester races abolished on the grounds that horse racing encouraged vice; it had also been very popular.6 Later he became a hero when cholera broke out in his parish in 1854, and he risked his own life working with the sick, and also pursued those he thought most responsible.7 Convinced that housing conditions bore most of the blame for the spread of the disease, he wrote to the landlord to ask for improvements. Fordington lay in the Duchy of Cornwall, and the committee responsible for its administration was headed by Prince Albert, consort to the Queen. Moule wrote him a personal letter, blaming the officials who managed the estate, urging him to action and saying he intended to make this into a public matter: ‘I shall publish what I write.’
The answers he got from gentlemen on the Duchy of Cornwall’s committee denied responsibility. Moule’s anger grew. He asked the Prince himself to look at a map showing the layout of the pitiful housing where the cholera raged. He asserted that ‘no inconsiderable portion [of blame for the cholera epidemic] lies at the door of those who, for the last sixty or seventy years, have managed this estate of HRH Duke of Cornwall.’ Moule’s courage was only partly rewarded. He and his family survived, and he kept the cholera confined to Fordington and out of Dorchester proper, but his letters to the Prince changed nothing. He published the correspondence, his publishers being Bradbury & Evans. Evans was Mrs Moule’s brother, and Bradbury & Evans were Charles Dickens’s publishers, which might seem promising, but the end of the epidemic also brought an end to any interest in the behaviour of the Duchy officials.8
This was only one of Mr Moule’s efforts to change and improve the world. He built a second church, raising the money himself, and set up Sunday schools. He enlarged the vicarage as his family grew. Constantly active and alert, he uncovered an ancient burial ground in the parish while getting a new road cut, finding bodies with Roman coins in their mouths, inscribed with the names of the god Apollo and emperors Constantine and Posthumus, and celebrated these discoveries in verse. He published his poems, his sermons and his views on education. He wrote letters to The Times about the potato. He invented a sanitary system using earth closets and published extensively on its advantages. He chaired regular meetings of Dorset evangelical churchmen in his house. He gave much and expected much of his parishioners. He fathered eight sons – one died in infancy – and required the seven survivors to live unswervingly by the highest standards, intellectual and moral. One of his poems warns an infant waking in his mother’s arms not to turn to ‘impurity’ or ‘the joy will quit thy breast, / And thou through all eternity, / Wilt never, never rest.’ Another predicts ‘The End of the Worldling’ under ‘the dire unmitigated rod’. You sense that these are not idle warnings.
An awe-inspiring father, then, of the same generation as Dr Arnold of Rugby School, and possessed of the same educational and moral confidence. In the words of his youngest son, Handley, he was the ‘object of such reverence as perhaps to check a little, on both sides, the easy demonstration of affection’.9 His wife was remarkable too, the well-educated daughter of a London Unitarian family with literary tastes. She had converted to Anglicanism for her marriage and was as fervent as her husband. Her brother Frederick Evans became a printer and publisher in partnership with William Bradbury, and in 1846 they published Mr Moule’s Scraps of Sacred Verse, the same year in which they began to issue Dombey and Son. Mrs Moule gave her husband wholehearted support in the parish and in the home education of their sons. The results were astounding when you consider that Charles would become President of Corpus Christi in Cambridge, Handley Bishop of Durham, Henry director of the Dorset County Museum; that three more brothers went into the Church, two as China missionaries, one to be elevated to Bishop of Mid China; and all but one wrote and published books in their spare time – about religion, about China, about Dorset antiquities, about Ancient Rome, about their parents and their upbringing.
The Hardys’ cottage would have fitted several times into the Fordington vicarage, and the aspirations of the Moule parents for their sons were far beyond anything imaginable by the Hardy parents. The long, low house full of books and young men was always buzzing with activity, with its great dining room that doubled as a classroom. Dinner was at 2.30 and tea, the last meal of the day, at 6.30. Father presided from his study, mother had her own ‘Little Parlour’. The garden adjoined a big field where games were played, cricket especially, and the views extended over the water meadows of the Frome and the Purbeck Hills in the distance. In summer the boys went fishing and bathing in the gravelly pools of the Frome, or sometimes they all piled into an old stagecoach and set off for the coast at Lulworth, or swam in the green waters off the long beach at Weymouth. Handley set up a telescope and studied the stars.10
Handley was a year younger than Hardy – exactly the same age as his sister Mary – but it was Horace, eight years older, who became Tom’s special friend. Horace was the charmer, handsome and gifted. He was a tender-hearted son to his mother, writing to her almost every year on the anniversary of the death of the baby brother who had died before he was two.11 At the age of twelve he was already playing the organ in his father’s church. He was a natural scholar, a born teacher and knew how to organize things. When he and Hardy met, in 1856, he was just setting up a literary club at home, the ‘Fordington Times Society’, with himself as President. Among its members were his parents, all their pupils, the resident curates and three of his Evans cousins. They held weekly meetings during the school term time, at which original papers, short plays and poems were read. Sometimes there was a debate – ‘Is coach or railway travel better?’ – or a visitor was invited. One was William Barnes, who sent them a poem, ‘Grief or Gladness’, and who was complimented by Henry for his use of ‘Words of Wessex’ in his work. Horace produced an appreciation of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and wrote his own poetry too.12 A pupil called Bridges offered a comedy in two acts, ‘The Cow and the Choir’, in which a Revd Briggs appeared, determined to abolish the choir in his church, with its squeaking violins, and replace it with his daughter’s up-to-date harmonium. Everyone contributed in his own way, and you ask yourself if Hardy sometimes heard about what went on.13
Horace taught Handley Roman history by making a plan of Rome with pebbles on the lawn. He read him Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome and translated Hesiod with him as they walked through the cornfields. He wrote a crammers’ guide, The Roman Republic: Designed for the Use of Examination Candidates, published by Bradbury & Evans in 1860. But, whereas all his brothers made their way steadily, something went awry for Horace. He was an outstanding student both at Oxford, to which he won an open scholarship, and at Cambridge, where he carried off the Hulsean Prize for an essay on Christian oratory; and yet he contrived to come away without a degree from either university. Officially he was still at Cambridge during the period of the Fordington Times Society and his early friendship with Hardy, yet he seems to have been at home even when he should have been away at college.
The family protected him, lovingly no doubt, but you could not be a member of the Moule family without feeling you must do your best at all times and believing in the power of God to help you. Horace asked himself too many questions to be secure in that belief. And he had other problems: he lived on an emotional switchback. There were times when he shone and dazzled, others when he descended into an inexplicable blackness. To deal with the bad times he began to take opium, and to drink. Hardy was not aware of Horace’s problems in the early years of their friendship and saw him simply as an admired and overwhelmingly attractive friend – the best he could ever hope to have. They quickly became close, going for long rambles in the fields, talking and talking as new friends do, Horace taking the role of teacher and patron, eager to give guidance and encouragement and to discuss books and ideas, whether the Greek dramatists or modern developments in science and how they bore on religion. No one had ever talked with Tom like this before, and Horace gave him time, attention and affection. He did not mind his immaturity and woeful lack of polish, but enjoyed having a disciple as much as Tom enjoyed learning from him. This was the second passion of Hardy’s life. Mrs Martin had given him an éducation sentimentale; Horace Moule enrolled him with what seemed like princely grace into the fellowship of those who live by the written word, whether as readers or writers, and into an intellectual world wider than Tom had yet encountered. Here was a scholar who read Greek as fluently as English and who had attended two universities, a gentleman, easy and graceful, who knew about the world. He knew where to stay when he was in London; who was writing the most significant new books; the correct way of referring to a titled person; and how to lecture to working men, as he did in November 1858, speaking about Oxford to the Dorchester Working Men’s Mutual Improvement Society. Were any of Hardy’s cousins in the audience? Probably not.
Horace introduced Hardy to the newest and cleverest of the weekly magazines, the Saturday Review, London based naturally, in which social issues were discussed and religion treated with small respect. He even began to write for it occasionally himself. He bought himself books on geology and science that alarmed his father, because they cast doubt on accepted religious ideas, and handed them on to Hardy. Horace’s upbringing had been more robustly Christian than Tom’s, but, making his way in metropolitan literary journalism, he could not miss the spread of scepticism, and he was too quick and intelligent to ignore it. Just one example he must have been aware of: two German philosophers, David Strauss in his Life of Jesus and Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity, had presented the Christian religion as a purely human invention with no divine element. Both were translated into English, in 1846 and 1854 respectively, and made their mark. The translator went on in 1857 to start publishing novels of rural and clerical life under the name George Eliot. In the Moule household the ideas of Strauss and Feuerbach would be anathema if they were ever mentioned. This in itself made a problem for Horace, who wanted to talk about ideas.
Tom’s situation was different and easier. Christianity was something he had taken for granted as part of the fabric of his daily life, and Christian theory was not discussed in the family. He read the Bible, he knew all the church services and most of the psalms by heart; indeed, the year was a sequence of church festivals quite as much as it was a sequence of the natural seasons for him. And he remained a fully practising Christian into the 1860s, but his mind was on the move, and with Horace he began to see that there were questions to be asked and lines of thought to be followed that eroded the old faith. As their friendship ripened, they read the notorious Essays and Reviews of 1860, religious pieces that offended the orthodox by their attacks on doctrine and by their textual criticism of the Bible. Hardy also claimed to have been an early admirer of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, though it is not clear exactly when he read it, or how much it influenced his thinking at that time. He could well have found his own way along the path towards free thought, but Horace was an encouraging companion on the journey and, with his access to books, guided his steps at many points. By 1865 he was introducing him to the work of Auguste Comte, whose Positivist philosophy replaces the worship of God with that of humanity.
The discovery of Comte still lay ahead. In 1860 the Christian side of the argument was bolstered for Tom by his other friend Bastow, who gave him a parting present of a Bible when he finished his term with Hicks, and kept up a correspondence for some time, urging ‘dear old Tom’ to piety.14 There was also a brief religious revival in Dorchester in the same year, when Mr Moule put his energies into a mighty Christian putsch and for some heady months filled the churches with revitalized congregations. Hardy appears to have been receptive to this and took to annotating his Bible, marking what has been interpreted as a moment of spiritual significance on ‘Wednesday night April 17th / 61, ¼ to 11’.15 He had nothing to say about his youthful spiritual enthusiasm when he wrote his memoirs in old age, but in 1861 he bought himself another Bible, a prayerbook and a volume of John Keble’s popular religious poetry, The Christian Year, clear indications of piety.
Keble is the first English poet whose work he records buying for himself. He had read Horace, Ovid and Virgil in the original, and some of the Iliad. Scott’s ballads and narrative poems were favourites, and his interest in English poetry grew as he had access to more. In the Moule household Cowper, Milton, Longfellow and Tennyson were read, and the fact that poetry was written in the family was important too. Some time between 1857 and 1860 Hardy wrote the earliest of his poems to survive. It is about place, time and change, which were destined to become steady Hardy themes. Not many poets have made such a good start.16 He writes about what he knows and goes straight for his subject, the cottage at Bockhampton:
It faces west, and round the back and sides
High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs,
And sweep against the roof…
The simplicity is Wordsworthian, and there is already the characteristic Hardy layering of time. The oak tree outside is ‘from a seed / Dropped by some bird a hundred years ago’. The poet speaks both as observer and as the child putting a question to his grandmother about her memories, making three distinct blocks of time. She gives her answer, quite formally, ending with a lovely evocative phrase, ‘So wild it was when first we settled here.’ It is a confident poem, and it makes you like the poet. There is one oddity, in his giving it the dignity of a Latin title, ‘Domicilium’ (meaning ‘Home’). Latin would have been meaningless to Granny Hardy. It is here as an offering from one side of his divided self to the other.
We don’t know what Horace said about ‘Domicilium’. It should have been praise, but he was not always encouraging. Tom was not Horace’s only protágá, and he gave extremely effective advice to another, a Dorchester boy from a shopkeeping family whom he encouraged to sit for the Oxford Local examinations and later for the Indian Civil Service: Hooper Tolbort came first in the whole of England in both and was embarked on what promised to be a glorious career. Hardy knew Tolbort well, was pleased for him and hoped for the same magical encouragement from Horace. The dream that he might get to a university had become strong in him, but when he asked Horace for his opinion on the matter, he did not get the answer he wanted. The disappointment, painful and with an edge of humiliation, can be felt even in the account Hardy wrote in old age. Horace advised him to stick at architecture, since his father expected him to start earning by the age of twenty-one. He also advised him to give up his Greek, a clear indication that he did not consider his scholarship good enough. Hardy still thought it might be, but he took the advice. ‘He felt bound to listen to reason and prudence’ is how he puts it.17 He did not let this spoil their friendship. It was much more important to him than his pride.
Horace had now given up Cambridge himself and was acting as tutor to two boys, preparing them for university entrance, staying in a house in the cathedral close at Salisbury. Tom, reaching his twentieth birthday, had proved his worth to Mr Hicks, who began paying him 15 s. a week – a modest amount, but the change from total dependency to being able to rattle a few coins of your own in your pocket is a tremendous one. He always insisted that he was a late developer, but this was a step forward into adult life, allowing him to make his own decisions. He was able to get himself a room in Dorchester, going home at weekends yet free to spend his weekday evenings as he liked, unobserved by his family. His interest in girls had not gone away. He is said to have flirted with his pretty older cousin Martha Sparks, and even to have proposed marriage to a Dorchester shopgirl, Mary Waight, but Martha left for London, and Mary turned him down.18
Another young woman, hovering like a pale shadow behind him, was his sister Mary, so close to him in age and so little mentioned in his own accounts of his life. As small children they necessarily shared a room in the small cottage and ran about together in the garden, and he spoke of her once as his ‘earliest playmate – a kind little sister, sharing with him, gladly, all she had, proud of him beyond words’. There was no doubt of his importance in her life, while his affection was more occasional, fading when he was busy with other people, with his work, with his dreams and ambitions.19 After her death he remarked that she had come into the world and left it without leaving a ripple, and it is abundantly clear that she was self-effacing and too modest to make claims on him.20 Still, in April 1860 he escorted her to Salisbury, where she was to have a higher education at a teacher training college. It was a surprising turn of events for the daughter of modest country people.
Her parents had observed that she, like Tom, was an intelligent child and paid for her to go to a private school run by two ladies in Dorchester. She acquired the accomplishments expected of a well-brought-up early-Victorian girl, learning to paint and to play the piano – no violin for her. She wrote correctly and read widely, Wordsworth her favourite poet. She could sew, and absorbed domestic skills as she was bound to, growing up in a household without servants. All this would have been enough to launch her into the marriage market, the proper culmination of girlhood. But she was not brought up to think of her life in those terms. Jemima had no marital ambitions for her children, as we have seen, but was actively opposed to the idea of their marrying. The reason for her objection was never explained and seems to have been a theoretical one against the institution itself. Whatever she thought of her own marriage, she accepted or endured its limitations, but her daughter was to have a different sort of life. Hence the unexpected spectacle of the Hardy parents applying for a place at the Church of England teacher training college in Salisbury for their daughter. They asked Mr Shirley to recommend her, and they paid for her board and tuition: £4 a quarter, £12 a year. She was there for nearly three years, becoming a Queen’s Scholar in her second year, which meant her parents did not have to go on paying.21
The Salisbury Teacher Training College, founded in 1841, was installed in a notably beautiful old house, known as the King’s House, in the cathedral close. In other respects it left a good deal to be desired. The young women were taught history, geography, arithmetic, grammar, drawing and music, with the emphasis on religious instruction – ‘8¾ hours a week’, with an extra hour for Church history. A student of the 1850s left an account of her experiences there: ‘I can only compare my first sensations on taking up my abode there to a shock produced by a sudden plunge into a cold bath… The rules were strict, the fare Spartan in its simplicity, and the amount of household work required to be done by the Students seemed to new-comers simply appalling… As for the education of that time, attainments were not high.’22 The object of the training was not to open the minds of the students or to encourage them to think for themselves but to turn out efficient Christian teachers with basic skills, no more. Much of their time was spent doing the domestic work they were required to contribute at the King’s House – in effect, they were household servants as well as students. The good was that those who passed through the system and gained a certificate were rewarded by the knowledge that they would be able to find regular work and support themselves.
Hardy was interested enough to think back on Mary’s experience when he decided to write about a women’s training college in Jude the Obscure thirty years later. He made Jude urge his cousin to go to the college, because it would give her a qualification as ‘first-class certificated mistress’, enabling her to earn a reasonable income and even allowing her a certain freedom of choice about where she worked – more than he felt he had as a stonemason. There was no doubt similar reasoning behind Mary’s going, whether she or her parents initiated the plan; the most likely originator, Jemima, had determined that her daughter should never go into service.
Hardy also listed the backgrounds of the students at the college: they were ‘the daughters of mechanics, curates, surgeons, shopkeepers, farmers, dairymen, soldiers, sailors, and villagers’.23 The social level is clear: curates not clergymen, surgeons not physicians, soldiers not officers. Mary’s best friend at the college was an orphan, Annie Lanham, brought up by a relative, a miller at Affpuddle, near Bockhampton. Annie had no real home to go back to and earned her own living for years, until she married Mary’s cousin Nathaniel Sparks. Hardy wrote of the students as being ‘clipped and pruned by severe discipline’, and on top of that they were half starved. He makes Jude’s cousin Sue tell him, when he offers her a present, that she is ‘dreadfully hungry. They were kept on very short allowances in the College, and a dinner, tea and supper all in one was the present she most desired in the world.’24
Hungry and inadequately taught as they were, these young women were pioneers. They probably didn’t know they were, any more than Hardy knew how curious it was that a college should have been set up for the daughters of the poor at a date when almost nothing was on offer in the way of higher education for girls of the higher classes. Queen’s and Bedford College had been established in London in 1848 and 1849 for female students, but one of their male founders felt obliged to declare publicly that the intention was not ‘to educate ladies for the kind of tasks which belong to our profession’.25 Florence Nightingale’s School of Nursing was not founded until 1861. Oxford and Cambridge were still closed to women. John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women was not yet written, and middle-class families had not begun to imagine that they might educate their daughters for careers.26 Women might set up schools on the principle of Mrs Micawber, without any preparation beyond putting up a brass plate, and young women might become governesses, but a governess was a wretched creature with no standing in the world. If she had been born a lady and down on her luck, her luck was unlikely to change again for the better. Whereas a teacher from a training college could get a certificate and a career without being a lady. Jemima Hardy wanted her daughters to make more of their lives than she or her sisters or her nieces were able to. The year before Mary went to college was the year her aunt Martha Sharpe died giving birth to her tenth child in Canada. Her aunt Maria Sparks brought up six children and of her daughters, the eldest, Rebecca, was still at home working as a dressmaker; Emma had gone into service until she married, in 1860, a poor carpenter from Somerset with no prospects, and started a family; Tryphena was still a child; Martha, the most enterprising, had taken herself to London and gone into service as a lady’s maid. Mary would be nobody’s servant, and she would have a qualification.
Hardy, who wasted no scrap of experience, also used the college in an early novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, written in 1871. He made Fancy Day a Queen’s Scholar at her ‘training-school’, and her father explains to a suitor his reasons for making her ‘work as a schoolmistress’: ‘that if any gentleman, who sees her to be his equal in polish, should want to marry her, and she want to marry him, he shan’t be her superior in pocket’.27 Mr Day is a gamekeeper, and on the whole a figure of comedy, but this is not just a comic explanation, because he has given thought to his daughter’s situation and done his best for her. Mr Day is more of a feminist than one would expect, and so it appears were Mr and Mrs Hardy. This is why in April 1860 their elder son escorted their eighteen-year-old daughter to college in Salisbury to qualify for a career. There he had his first look at a female ‘college’, a third-class version of his own dream of a university education.
Since Horace Moule happened to be in Salisbury at the same time with his two pupils, it would have been natural for Hardy to visit him. No visit was mentioned, then or later. There may have been good reason for Hardy to remain silent, because it is likely that Horace was in a poor state to receive him. Whatever Hardy saw or failed to see, one of his pupils kept a diary in which he wrote that his tutor was a ‘Dypsmaniac’ [sic] and had DTs when they were in Salisbury. He did his best to persuade him to stop drinking, successfully for a short time. After this the party left Salisbury and presently moved to Saint-Germain, outside Paris, for the summer, and here Horace went missing. His unfortunate pupils searched for him in Paris, in the morgue among other places, finally sending for help from the Moule family.28 Henry and Charles went over to France, and at this point Horace turned up in England again. What this meant to the rest of the Moule family can be imagined. Hardy was in Fordington Church on 5 August to hear Mr Moule preach from a text in the Book of Job, ‘All the days of my appointed time will I wait, until my change come.’ It was now clear to him how bad things could be for Horace; the princely friend was all too liable to fall into the gutter. While it must have changed the nature of their friendship, it did not bring it to an end or lessen Hardy’s affection and dependence on him.
A veil was drawn by the family – and by Hardy – over what went wrong for Horace. Drinking can be part of the upward swing into mania; the depression that follows is worse for the sufferer but may be easier for others to deal with. Horace continued to swing between periods of equilibrium – when he could write reviews, play the organ for the inauguration of a new church in Fordington, even preach a sermon against intemperance – and flare-ups of drinking and bad behaviour followed by moods of suicidal depression. The suggestion of homosexuality has been raised and found plausible by some, although there is no evidence to support it. Manic depression seems enough to explain Horace’s drinking bouts, his inability to keep jobs, his increasing dependence on the protection of his successful brothers, his guilty feelings towards his family and his spiralling moods, up and down. Doubts about his religious faith would make things more difficult with his parents and add to his guilt.
In April 1862 it was Hardy’s turn to behave unpredictably. Giving little notice to anyone, he made up his mind to leave Mr Hicks’s office. He said goodbye to Dorchester and Bockhampton, and announced that he was going to find work in London. He had been there only once in his life, as a child with his mother. Now he was shaking off mother, home, all the web of experiences and associations that had formed him but also cramped him in the country. It was a brave move.