Hardy arrived in London in April 1862 and remained for five years, until July 1867. He went home every Christmas, and had a visit from his father in the first year, and another from his sister Mary; three of his Sparks cousins were working in London. Otherwise he was on his own. He set out to become a Londoner, and he felt that he succeeded. He walked till he knew ‘every street and alley west of St Paul’s like a born Londoner’, and he always insisted on his familiarity with London life.1 His own account of these years makes him sound like the most determined and conscientious of cultural tourists. He took in exhibitions, galleries, churches, libraries, museums, dance halls, theatres and opera houses. He haunted second-hand bookstalls in Holywell Street, east of Bun-hill Fields.2 He went several times to hear Dickens read – he must have heard David Copperfield, which taught him a good deal about London – and to hear John Stuart Mill speak on the hustings, and to the House of Commons to listen to Lord Palmerston. When Palmerston died, he got tickets for the funeral in Westminster Abbey, very conscious of the fact that the great man had entered the house only a year after the deaths of Foxand Pitt, and while Sheridan still lived.
He went out to see the illuminations for the wedding of the Prince of Wales, and had his waistcoat buttons torn off and his ribs ‘bent in’ as he struggled to get out of the crush. He enrolled for French classes at King’s College. He took himself to a phrenologist in the Strand to have his bumps surveyed and came away no wiser. He travelled on the earliest underground railway line at the first opportunity. He offered himself as an extra in a professional stage production, being interested in trying to write a play himself, and appeared on stage at the Haymarket. He stood in Rotten Row to watch the rich being driven round in their open carriages during the Season. He noticed the tired clerks walking in Oxford Street, and the shop women, and the girls who hired themselves out in the dance halls. By his own account he saw ‘the first load of rubbish shot for the making of the Embankment and the first train go over Hungerford Bridge’.3
His plan was to make his mark in London and to work his way to success, and he was ready to give every bit of his energy to achieving his ambitions. The difficulty that arose was that he was not sure quite what sort of success he aspired to. The most striking thing about these five packed years is that when he left London he had the germ of his first novel in him, 440 pages drawn from ‘the life of an isolated student cast upon the billows of London with no protection but his brains’ and meant as a ‘dramatic satire of the squirearchy and nobility, London society, the vulgarity of the middle class, modern Christianity, church restoration, and political and domestic morals in general, the author’s views, in fact, being obviously those of a young man with a passion for reforming the world… the tendency of the writing being socialistic, not to say revolutionary’.4
How did the young architectural assistant turn into the socialistic novelist and satirist? He set off for London knowing almost nothing of life in the capital beyond the fact that his mother had worked there and liked it so much that she wanted to leave the country and earn her living there. She failed, as we know, but he surely went with her approval. He seems all the same to have set off with small preparation; but they both knew that he was breaking the ties that might have kept him, as assistant to a Dorchester architect, in working contact with his builder father and demonstrating his ambition to become a different sort of person. He was going to London to find out what he might do or discover there. That being said, he understood that his training in Hicks’s office was the only solid qualification he had to offer, and equipped himself with two letters of recommendation to London architects who might be willing to start him off in a job, one from his father, and a return ticket.
This seems to have been the sum of his practical preparations. The train journey was the same as the one he had made with his mother eleven years before, and he is unlikely to have wasted his money on anything better than a bench in the unheated third class. He had a few pounds saved up, but neither work nor lodgings fixed. He knew Horace Moule’s other Dorset protégé, Hooper Tolbort, who was already there, preparing for the Indian Civil Service examination, and his Sparks cousins. James had been learning carpentry and the building trade from a London uncle for some time, Nat had joined him, and Martha was in service as a lady’s maid.5 None was in a position to give him much support, since working men put in long hours and a steady six-day week, and female servants were not encouraged to invite male guests to call on them at the area door.
The train still took the best part of four hours to get to Waterloo. When, later, he described the arrival in London of a poor country traveller, he wrote of the walk across Westminster Bridge, preferred to Waterloo Bridge, for which a toll of a halfpenny was charged; and how everyone held handkerchiefs to their mouths to strain off the river mist from their lungs.6 The river and the air above it were bad for you. It was only four years since the stink rising from the Thames had been so foul that Parliament had been forced to abandon its sittings. Sewage works were now in hand, but they took time, and there would be another cholera epidemic in 1866.
London was a filthy city. There were too many people, too many horses, too much smoke and coal dust, not enough light. There was dirt in the river, in the streets, in the air, dirt that got into your clothes. A foggy day turned white linen brown in a few hours. Tom described one in February when it was ‘almost pitch dark in the middle of the day, and everything visible appeared of the colour of brown paper or pea-soup.’7 He noticed that the trees were sooty and how ‘swarthy columns of smoke’ rose from the massed kitchen chimneys every morning, spreading out to form a haze that darkened the sun and gave the air its city smell.8 ‘To me London gardens always seem faded & dirty,’ he wrote later.9 Even a privileged traveller such as the young Henry James, arriving in London like Hardy in the 1860s, with a credit note for £1,000 in his wallet, was oppressed by London at first. Opulent, yes, but vast, hideous, vicious, neither cheerful nor charming, he wrote home; he saw a ‘huge general blackness’ and streets of low black houses like ‘so many rows of coal scuttles’.10
James was quickly installed in Mayfair in a comfortable set of rooms for gentlemen, and he had introductions to the right people. Within days he was dining with Leslie Stephen, Ruskin, William Morris, meeting Frederic Harrison, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Charles Dickens’s daughter Mamey, and feeling that London was not so bad after all; then he set off for Oxford with more introductions. What Hardy faced was the poor man’s tramp looking for lodgings. London was a city of lodgers and lodging houses, mostly mean places where slops and ashes were carried up and down narrow stairs all day and hovering landladies’ daughters were best avoided; being a lodger provided a dismal rite de passage and a good story for nineteenth-century novelists from Trollope to Wells. Hardy has a rueful account of calling at one lodging house where the cousin of a Dorset acquaintance turned him away and added a stern warning of the difficulties he was likely to face. ‘Wait till you have walked the streets a few weeks, and your elbows begin to shine, and the hems of your trousers get frayed, as if nibbled by rats! Only practical men are wanted here.’11 Somehow he found a temporary bed.
The next morning he was out with his letters of recommendation. The first, to Benjamin Ferrey, an architect his father had worked for in Dorset, met with kind words and a promise of help – but then nothing. The disappointment was more than made up for by a piece of astounding luck. A pupil of Ferrey and friend of Hicks, John Norton, with no work to offer, took pity on Hardy and suggested he should come in and do some drawings in his office for token payment, allowing him to look around for something better. Within a week Arthur Blomfield, one of the most successful architects in London, asked Norton if he knew anyone who could do Gothic ecclesiastical drawing, and, on 5 May, Hardy started work for Blomfield at a salary of £110 a year.12 This was something to write home about, although the sad fact is that not a single letter exists to tell us what he communicated to his parents or how often he wrote to them.
A second piece of luck was that another trainee architect in Blomfield’s office suggested they share lodgings, since he had found some which would do for two. His name was Philip Shaw; he was a gentleman and had his own silver to prove it: Hardy noticed the landlady rattling it about, resentfully he thought. Since Hardy had no possessions at all beyond a bag of clothes and books, the lodgings suited him well enough. They were in Kilburn, at 3 Clarence Place, a small terrace of houses where Quex Road meets the Edgware Road; in those days, there were still fields and farms all about, and the driver of the local omnibus asked, as he set off, ‘Any more passengers for London?’ Shaw had intellectual tastes and sometimes read aloud to his fellow lodger in the evening. Hardy remembered him choosing Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and it may have been this reading that first encouraged him to go to the National Gallery and look at paintings. Soon he was making daily visits and keeping a notebook on schools of painting. Shaw was a good fellow, ready to lend Hardy his dress coat when the occasion demanded – Hardy was invited to an architectural conversazione – and he even thought of inviting him to Bockhampton, intending to show him off. He wrote to his sister Mary, saying that Shaw would be ‘considered a great gun’ in the parish and explaining to her how to pronounce ‘kon-ver-sat-zi-on-e’.13
His letters to Mary are few and not expansive, but they do give a glimpse of a young man eager to learn and to get on, and to pass on his discoveries. ‘Do not send back the Sat. Revs [Saturday Reviews] but take care of them and put them in your box, so that I may have them when I want them.’ Thackeray ‘is considered to be the greatest novelist of the day’. Barchester Towers ‘is considered the best of Trollope’s.’ Here are the first indications that he was thinking critically about novel writing. ‘I tried the Underground Railway one day – Everything is excellently arranged.’ The Metropolitan Line opened in January 1863, running from Paddington to Farringdon Street, the trains divided into three classes, third class at 3 d., half the price of first. It was an instant and overwhelming success, and by the middle of the next decade was carrying 48 million passengers a year.14
Hardy often described his five years in London as his student years, and with good reason. Some of his activities have already been listed, but, not content with his busy cultural programme, he kept up his own music, buying a second-hand violin and playing in the evenings, tunes from the Italian operas, accompanied on the piano by his fellow lodger. He also taught himself shorthand. He bought himself books: a pronouncing dictionary, a rhyming dictionary, a guide to English literature and many volumes of poetry. He wrote poetry of his own with increasing vigour and confidence. Most of it he destroyed; much of what has survived is curious rather than achieved, but some is good by any standards, and all proof of a passionate commitment to words.
During his first months in London the International Exhibition was an attraction, so powerful that he gave it as one of his reasons for moving to London. He had after all missed the 1851 Great Exhibition, and it was planned as an attempt to revive the glories of its predecessor. It opened just after he arrived, near Hyde Park Gate in South Kensington, covering twenty-four acres with its glass-domed buildings, and remained open for six months. There were photography galleries and machinery galleries; William Morris showed his wallpapers and tapestries; a statue of Shakespeare presided. Hardy often went after his day’s work, going on to the Kensington Museum reading room, where he had access to a free library. He managed to escort his cousin Martha to the exhibition at least once, and went with Moule when he turned up in London in August. Moule stayed at his bachelor hotel, the Old Hummums in Covent Garden, and gave Hardy dinner there after taking him to a Jesuit service in Farm Street; whether this was simply open-minded or whether he was actively curious about Catholicism, it also looks like a gesture of defiance of his father. He was in town partly to see Tolbort, who had just achieved his examination triumph in the Indian Civil Service examinations, and also because he was currently planning to study law and was, in fact, admitted to the Middle Temple later in the year. This turned out to be another false start. A few months later he wrote to Hardy from Dorchester saying, ‘I am quite right again’, indicating that he was recovering from being not ‘right’ at all and knowing that Hardy would understand what he meant.15 Hardy may or may not have seen him in Dorset at Christmas. When Horace went down into his black places, he was out of anyone’s reach; when he came up, he was still the same charming and energetic person – the best friend.
Blomfield’s offices were just off Trafalgar Square, at 9 St Martin’s Place. Either architects were particularly agreeable employers or Hardy was twice lucky, because here he was again spending his working hours in a relaxed and cheerful atmosphere among colleagues disposed to be friendly, on a superficial level at any rate. There were six articled pupils and two or three assistants, no formal instruction and not usually very much work to be done. His new boss was as musical as Hardy himself, and encouraged the young men to sing glees and part songs with him; and since Hardy could sight read, he made a useful addition to the office choir. Blomfield himself had a powerful bass voice, and Hardy described him as ‘a lithe, brisk man’. At thirty-three he was in the prime of life, a quintessential figure of the establishment, the fourth son of the Bishop of London, born at Fulham Palace, educated at Rugby School and at Cambridge, good at sport, especially on the river, good-natured and good-looking. He was kindly too, and within months of Hardy joining the office Blomfield put his name forward to become a member of the Architectural Association, of which he was the current President; and he was responsible for the invitation to the conversazione. There were many occasions on which he took his young assistant out with him professionally, and they got on well enough to form a friendship later in their lives; on the other hand there is no record of Hardy being invited to Blomfield’s house to meet his young wife.
Blomfield may not have known that Hardy’s cousins were carpenters and a lady’s maid, but he did know Hardy was the son of a country builder. Blomfield, son of one bishop and brother of another, moved in exalted circles. Hardy’s contemporary Eliza Lynn Linton, making her way as a writer in London, found doors opened to her because her grandfather was a bishop and her uncle a dean. ‘What humiliating snobs we are!’ she lamented, divided between shame and gratitude for the advantages they conferred on her.16 Hardy was on the wrong side of this sort of snobbery, and within a year of working for Blomfield he had understood how things lay. Although he won two Architectural Association prizes, one for the design of a country mansion, the other for an essay on the use of coloured bricks in modern architecture, he thought the judges condescending in their attitude to him. He also found architectural drawing where he was merely copying and not originating designs ‘monotonous and mechanical’, and he decided quite early in his time with Blomfield that he had no hope of succeeding as an architect because it meant ‘pushing his way into influential sets which would help him to start a practice of his own.’17
He had come armed with one grand address that might have helped him into an ‘influential set’, that of his old love, Julia Martin, and before he had been in London for long he nerved himself to go to Bruton Street in Mayfair where the Martins were living. The door was opened by the butler he remembered from Kingston Maurward, looking much the same. The lady did not. She was now in her fifties, and whatever dreams Hardy had cherished of a revival of any kind of tender intimacy ended on the spot. He thought Mrs Martin was also disconcerted by his more or less adult appearance – a young man was a very different creature from a small boy, and there was no question of taking this Tommy on her lap – and their conversation was awkward. Graciously, she invited him to call again, but once was enough for him, and he did not return to Bruton Street. Yet neither put the other quite out of mind.
In October of this first year his father came to see him, accompanied by a family friend, ‘Miss A.’, who was looking for a ‘situation’ in London. Hardy wrote to Mary that the visit ‘went off all right’, that he took them to the opera at Covent Garden – Lurline by the Irish composer William Wallace – and that Mr Hardy, showing a natural interest in building works, inspected the Thames Tunnel and climbed to the top of the Monument. It does not sound as though Tom took his father into the office. ‘Miss A.’ or ‘H.A.’ remains one of the unidentified young women in Hardy’s life, but, since he was asking Mary three years later ‘will it be awkward for you if H.A. & I come down for Xmas day & the next…?’, it sounds as though she did find a situation in London and was friendly enough with Hardy for them to travel together at Christmas. It also looks as though he was interested in more than one girl, because he had another involvement with a lady’s maid working in Westbourne Park Villas, Eliza Nicholls. She too had a Dorset connection, although he seems to have met her in London, and he began to see something of her in 1862. In a letter of November 1862 he asks Mary, ‘Do you ever write to Eliza?’, just before mentioning Miss A. He may have been hoping that his sister would not mention either girl to the other.
In May 1863 he left his Kilburn lodgings for Paddington, where he took a single second-floor room at the back of a house in Westbourne Park Villas, No. 16.18 Perhaps he had discovered that he was not a sharer. He may also have wanted to be more central and liked the idea of being close to Eliza. In fact, Eliza left London in the year he moved, but she is said to have considered herself engaged to Hardy until 1867, when the engagement was broken off after he flirted with her sister – or so it was alleged by her niece many years later.19 Like the Mary Waight story, the entanglement with Eliza Nicholls is not much more than a family tradition.20 If we accept that there may be some truth in the stories, they suggest he was a susceptible young man who found himself dealing with more than he could handle. A note from April 1865 indicates general gloom about women and his chances of finding the right one: ‘There is not that regular gradation among womankind that there is among men. You may meet with 999 exactly alike, and then the thousandth – not a little better, but far above them. Practically therefore it is useless for a man to seek after this thousandth to make her his.’21 Two months later, on his twenty-fifth birthday, he wrote, ‘Not very cheerful. Feel as if I had lived a long time and done very little… Wondered what woman, if any, I should be thinking about in five years’ time.’ This suggests he was not in a settled relationship with any woman, even though in 1865 he was perhaps engaged to Eliza and also preparing to spend Christmas with Miss A. He wrote some sonnets, ‘She, to Him’, in the voice of a woman addressing a man who has let her down, dated 1866. They are notable as an early attempt to present a woman’s view of things, and they indicate that this is a writer at work rather than a lover, and that he is more interested in finding the right words for the injured speaker than in any feelings of his own.22
Hardy took himself to the dance halls whose names he remembered from the worldly Fippard’s talk: Willis’s Rooms, also known as Almack’s, in King Street; St James’s, with its painted and gilded walls and blue-cushioned sofas; the Argyle off Regent Street; and, further afield, Cremorne Gardens, now buried beneath the Lots Road Power Station. He had played enough for others to dance to have dancing in his blood, and at these places there was no difficulty in finding a partner, and many of the girls were prepared to sell more than their dance-floor skills. The blatancy and scale of the sexual arrangements in London were impressive. Dorchester had its poor little houses of ill fame, tucked away in the back streets of Fordington, but in London you could hardly miss the prostitutes. Hardy’s relative poverty and fastidiousness may or may not have made him resistant to the possibilities on offer, but he did take some turns on the dance floor, and was interested enough in the girls to listen to them talking. ‘The Ruined Maid’ is one of the best of the poems he wrote in London and may have originated in what he observed at the dance halls. It is not a subtle poem – it does not need to be – but makes its point by its directness, and gives a slap in the face to middle-class Christian morality. At the office, his colleagues joked about famous courtesans who served the rich, Cora Pearl and ‘Skittles’; Hardy’s poem shows a young countrywoman explaining her new-found prosperity to a friend who chances to run into her in London:
– ‘At home in the barton you said “thee” and “thou”,
And “thik oon”, and “theäs oon”, and “t’other”; but now
Your talking quite fits ’ee for high compa-ny!’ –
‘Some polish is gained with one’s ruin,’ said she…
– ‘I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!’ –
‘My dear – a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined,’ said she.23
The rhythm bounces along, and the irony makes its point. The language is effective too, or rather the two languages, since this ruined maid is bilingual, like Hardy himself. ‘At home in the barton’ – a barton is a cow yard – suggests that she may have been a milkmaid, an occupation he would give to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, who also had two languages.
Hardy fell more deeply in love with poetry than with any of the girls he met in London and gave more of his attention to it. He studied Palgrave’s anthology The Golden Treasury, an inspired gift from Moule; this newly published collection of lyrical poetry, from the Elizabethans to the Romantics, set up Shakespeare, Milton, Gray and Wordsworth as the great models. He imitated Shakespeare in two of the ‘She, to Him’ sonnets. Palgrave also crammed his book with the sweet, elaborate verse forms of the Elizabethan and Stuart poets that delighted Hardy, although he did not begin to imitate them until later. He included the two greatest odes of Keats – ‘To Autumn’ and ‘To a Nightingale’ – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and a good deal of the unpolitical Shelley. This was when Hardy first read Shelley’s ‘Lament’ with its tremendous first line, ‘O World! O Life! O Time!’ It became one of his most admired lyrics, with its message of joy taking flight, of grief taking the place of delight and its tolling ‘No more – O never more!’ As an anthology should, it led him to read more of these poets. He also bought himself Swinburne’s newly published Poems and Ballads and was so excited by them that even when he had to go out he could not resist reading as he walked along the street.
He kept many notebooks, in one of which he jotted down words and phrases that pleased him, some listed from dictionaries, e.g., ‘gadder to emborder sworder (solr) to plush to tiddle, to slidder, a dallier tid (nice) a noier (an-) to pucker holder tucker dandler fondler philter live in clover’. Also ‘to call for, call in, call up (past days) call off, call together (the difft happy hours)… carry high, carry me away, carry back to, carry me down to future years, carry forth (her eyes carried f. the tale of her heart), carry on, carry out’. There were quotations from poets he was reading, like his friend William Barnes with his ‘the leanen apple tree’, ‘her shade a-whiv’ren black’. You can watch Hardy accumulating words, entranced by their shapes, their sounds and richness, stacking them up like a bee storing pollen. The shorthand he was learning was put to use in the notebook to cloak any mention of improper parts of the body like the breast, or of sexual desire or activity, and also for the word ‘imitate’, which he set beside some of the quotations. Poor Hardy, suffering pangs of guilt for even thinking of imitating great writers. He needed someone to tell him it is what writers have always done, teaching themselves by imitating what they most admire.
He sometimes delivered impromptu talks of his own on poets and poetry to his fellow architectural students. He also began to submit his poems to magazines. Everything he sent was rejected. He felt his solitary situation. For him there was none of the support that sustained other young aspirant writers and artists, nurtured by educated families, public school and university, so that they had an established body of knowledge, a critical audience and a network of friends before they were in their twenties. Tennyson, William Morris, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Leslie Stephen all had such support. Rossetti missed the university but had educated parents and rapidly made friends with Morris and his group.24 Hardy had neither the background nor the temperament that would allow him to become part of a group. Moule was the only friend whose advice he could call on, and he had distracting problems of his own. The single piece of work Hardy succeeded in getting published was a short comic essay printed in Chambers’s Journal in 1865, ‘How I Built Myself a House’, written in the first place to amuse his colleagues. It is entertaining, but humorous journalism was not going to be his path to fame.
If he had come to London to escape from a divided life, he soon saw that he had failed. The divisions were if anything sharper than ever. His office colleagues were from middle-class families with backgrounds utterly unlike his. His women friends were servants in households in which the divisions of class were absolute. His Sparks cousins were workmen, and, what’s more, James, the elder, seems to have been a radical, possibly even a republican. When Hardy wrote a fictional portrait of him, he made him speak with a true revolutionary ring of the ‘useless lumber of our nation that’ll be the first to burn if there comes a flare’.25 Talk of burning, a fire and a flare sounds more like a Continental revolutionary than an English carpenter. Whether James and Nat belonged to the Carpenters’ Union or not, they would have known that its leader, Robert Applegarth, was prominent within the Reform League, founded in 1865 to press for an extension of the vote to working men. It happened that the offices of the Reform League were on the ground floor of 8 Adelphi Terrace, which was also the house to which Blomfield moved his offices in 1863. The reformers were much despised by Blomfield’s ‘Tory and Churchy young men’ – this is Hardy’s description of his colleagues. They amused themselves by letting down ‘ironical bits of paper on the heads of members’, and once nearly came to ‘loggerheads’ with the resident Secretary of the League. Although this semi-jocular reference is all Hardy had to say about London politics in the 1860s in his memoirs, it must be remembered that he wrote them long after he had resolved to abstain from political comment. At the time he must have had at the very least mixed feelings about the question of reform, and his years in London coincided with a period of dramatic political struggle, fiercely fought. There were demonstrations and near-riots, and the Reform League supported John Stuart Mill when he stood for Westminster in the 1865 election.
Mill was an intellectual hero to Hardy by his own account, and he went to hear him speak at Covent Garden during the campaign. This is his careful description of the occasion, written forty years afterwards:
The appearance of the author of the treatise On Liberty (which we students of that date knew almost by heart) was so different from the look of persons who usually address crowds in the open air that it held the attention of people for whom such a gathering in itself had little interest… He stood bareheaded, and his vast pale brow, so thin-skinned as to show the blue veins, sloped back like a stretching upland, and conveyed to the observer a curious sense of perilous exposure… the cameo clearness of his face chanced to be in relief against the blue shadow of a church which, on its transcendental side, his doctrines antagonized.26
Hardy had of course no vote himself, any more than his father.27 Mill was returned in the election and gave his support in Parliament to Gladstone’s Reform Bill, which was defeated in the following year, to considerable anger among reformers and working men. A cholera epidemic, a bad harvest and a rise in the price of bread led to riots in the East End. Applegarth and his union and Reform League friends offered to restore order, if they were listened to on the subject of electoral reform. The government fell, and the Conservatives came in, headed by Lord Derby as Prime Minister, which seemed unpromising.
On 2 July the Reform League held a rally in Trafalgar Square that drew 80,000 men. A second rally was planned in Hyde Park for 23 July. To prevent it, the Prime Minister had the park gates locked, but the crowds were so great that park railings bent and may either have burst under the pressure or been deliberately broken. This was surely the day that prompted Hardy to write the words ‘Hyde Park – morning’ around the title of Shelley’s revolutionary poem The Revolt of Islam in his own recently acquired copy.28 Here is an indication of quite another Hardy than the mild, polite assistant to Blomfield: instead, a young man reading about revolution and going out to look sympathetically at a great body of workers protesting against injustice. There was some stone-throwing, but when troops were called most of the men dispersed. That evening, however, some went into Chester Square and threw more stones through the windows of the Police Commissioner, watched by Matthew Arnold and his wife from their adjacent balcony. Arnold went to the House of Commons to find out what was being done about this outrage and came home furious at what he perceived as the weakness of the police.29
Reform meetings continued. In December there were two more, the first held in the grounds of Beaufort House, Kensington, at which the speakers acknowledged the help of Gladstone and Mill. The following evening there was another at St James’s Hall, to which many MPs came. In May (1867) the League called another rally. This one was formally prohibited by the government. No notice was taken by organizers or men, and 100,000 of them gathered defiantly, to be met by 10,000 police and troops. Despite this there was no violence and the crowds again went home quietly, but the Prime Minister admitted that the government had ‘suffered some slight humiliation in the public mind’. The Home Secretary resigned, and the reformers felt they had won the moral victory. After this even the Conservatives and Lord Derby felt that a degree of reform was a safer option than a continuation of demonstrations and possible riots nationwide, and a second Reform Act, adroitly steered by Disraeli, was presented and passed. London’s electorate was increased by 41 per cent. Male householders and lodgers in rooms worth ten pounds a year got the vote. Hardy should have qualified, the first man in his family to do so, but by August, when the Act went through, he had left London.
Hardy’s comprehensive silence on the subject of politics in his memoir also meant he said nothing of the American Civil War, or of the visit of Garibaldi to London in April 1864, when he was given the freedom of the city and an enthusiastic welcome. No one in London could have missed that, any more than the demonstrations of the 1860s, just as no one who took the trouble to go to hear Mill speak could have been unaware of the struggle for the extension of the vote. Hardy tells us that his first novel was written in a spirit of derision towards the ‘Tory and Churchy’ people he had been working among at Blomfield’s. He himself was no Tory, coming from a Liberal family and with a father who took an interest in politics. Could he be described as ‘Churchy’?
In the mid sixties he was reading and annotating French radical philosophers and reformers, introduced to him by Moule: Fourier, who planned ideal cooperative communities without religion, and Comte, the first sociologist, the founder of Positivism, a humanist philosophy which held that man should rule his life on scientific, not metaphysical, principles, and that the worship of God should give way to that of humanity. Whatever Hardy made of all this – he was certainly interested – Mill’s arguments against religion in On Liberty, where he pointed to the failure of modern Christians to take their rules of behaviour from the New Testament, and protested against the Christian claim to know the whole truth, must have had a still stronger effect. Mill’s indictment was clearly reasoned and devastating, because it was applied to the contemporary practice of religion in England, suggesting it encouraged a ‘low, abject, servile type of character’ and showing it as morally damaging to the whole community. By whatever accumulation of reading and thinking it came about, by 1866 Hardy was no longer writing in his prayerbook or going to church regularly. Yet he found it hard to abandon religion altogether. For a while he had a fantasy of giving up architecture and devoting himself to writing poetry, supporting himself by becoming a country clergyman on the model of William Barnes. The problem was that it would make it necessary for him to obtain a university degree. As late as 1866 he wrote to Moule, who sent him a students’ guide to Cambridge; only then, after thinking it through carefully yet again, did he realize that he could not prepare to enter the Church ‘while holding the views which on examination he found himself to hold’.30 In other words, the arguments against religion had prevailed, and he was no more ‘Churchy’ than he was Tory. And with that decision, he also gave up any further thought of getting to a university.
Losing faith in Christianity was like shedding a protective skin: intellectually necessary but also a melancholy process. The melancholy was perfectly expressed in the 1860s by Matthew Arnold in his poem ‘Dover Beach’, with its description of the world without faith as having ‘neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain’. Hardy arrived at his own conclusion with many fits, starts and meanders, reluctant to let go of something that had absorbed so much of his imaginative life at the same time that he was eager to join the ranks of the enlightened. He felt the draining away of the old joyous certitudes as well as pride in the new clear thinking. This ambivalence made him into a poet who, in his later years, still sometimes celebrated belief alongside disbelief. He could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief, and especially the centrality and beauty of Christian ritual in country life, and what it had meant to earlier generations and still meant to some. So he could write about the wish that he might still be able to believe, as in his famous poem ‘The Oxen’; and about his memories of being a believer himself.31
If Horace Moule was experiencing similar doubts, which seems likely, he was fiercely defended against them by his family. In one way it was fortunate that his brothers, all as pious as their parents, were there to help him back from whatever dangerous journeys he took into unbelief, depression or alcoholism. In the summer of 1864 he went to Switzerland with two of his brothers, much loved companions but also guardians. He was often in brilliant spirits, as when he sent Hardy some good advice on writing: ‘the grand object of all in learning to write well is to gain or generate something to say.’32 Again, he commented on a piece of prose Hardy sent him early in 1864: ‘a bright thought strikes me,’ he wrote, going on to suggest that Hardy might try to become London correspondent for a country paper. ‘Your chatty description of the Law Courts and their denizens is just in the style that would go down.’ This may not have been what Hardy hoped to hear, but at least Moule was giving him his attention. He also asked politely about Mary, ‘your sister… and your plans for her’.33 By then Mary was teaching in a village school at Denchworth, near Oxford. Hardy visited her there once, but she was so miserably lonely that she begged her mother to let her have her six-year-old sister to live with her. Jemima agreed, and Kate was sent to be Mary’s companion.
On New Year’s Day 1865, when both Hardy and Moule were in Dorchester, he gave Hardy a copy of Marcus Aurelius, inscribed, ‘This is the chief thing: Be not perturbed: for all things are according to the nature of the universal.’ In the summer Moule spoke of his interest in Cardinal Newman, whom Hardy found attractive for his poetic writing but not for his views.34 At about the same time Moule also gave him Auguste Comte’s Positivism, as far from Newman’s thinking as it would be possible to go. With family encouragement and no doubt some special negotiation with the school authorities, Moule became an assistant master at Marlborough in 1865. His brothers Charles and Handley had both been teaching there, and both moved on to fellowships at Cambridge, but Horace remained at Marlborough with no prospect of advancement. He did not like the work. When he talked to Hardy about his unhappiness in 1866, Hardy’s sympathy wavered, and he thought momentarily of giving up the friendship.35 He may well have felt it was impossible for him, who had so little and whose life was going nowhere, to comfort Moule, who was sinking and failing despite having had so many talents and chances in life. Another of Moule’s offerings to Hardy was a translation of Goethe’s Faust, which suggests a grim parallel with his condition as he struggled with fiends he could not control. There was a story that he made a backstreet Dorchester girl pregnant, and that she was bundled off to Australia; and another of an engagement to a ‘splendid girl’, who broke it off.36 These crises seemed to pass, and Hardy’s friendship endured.
Blomfield gave him a grim architectural task in the autumn and winter of 1866. The building of the new Midland railway line into St Pancras meant that the graves around old St Pancras Church had to be moved. ‘Many hundreds of coffins, and bones in huge quantities’ were to be dealt with, as well as monuments to some of the famous dead. Mary Shelley had already removed the bodies of her mother and father, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, but their monument remained, with Godwin’s second wife still beneath. The public was alerted to the possibility of mishandling of the dead, and the Bishop charged Blomfield with responsibility for making sure everything was done decently. It meant constant supervision of the work, which was done at night behind a hoarding with flare lamps as the coffins were dug up. Hardy’s job was to keep an eye on things in the evening and sometimes into the night. Many coffins fell apart as they were brought out, and Hardy and Blomfield were both there when a collapsed coffin gave up one skeleton and two skulls. Old St Pancras churchyard had become a gloomy spot since the open fields once surrounding it had been built over, and it was now overlooked by a workhouse and hemmed in by cheaply thrown-up terraced housing. In these circumstances even the thought that Shelley had wooed his Mary at her mother’s grave there half a century earlier could not do much to cheer Hardy. He got through the job, but it was to be his last winter in London for several years.
The spring of 1867 was cold, with snow falling in mid March. There are no letters from Hardy for the year, only a cheerful half-sheet from Moule to him, announcing he was ‘passing through’ Marlborough and had heard that Hardy was planning to return to Dorset:
Dear Tom I am delighted to hear of your intended move in our direction. / I shan’t trouble very hard now to effect a meeting in Town, spite of Patti & Titiens [two celebrated sopranos performing at the opera in London]. However if you like to call at the New Humm about 6.30 (I won’t engage a bed there) you may very likely find me, dress coat and all – But don’t swear if you don’t find me Yrs ever affly.37
Now Moule was up and Hardy was down. Of the few poems he dates 1867, one is a bitter epigram on existence:
A senseless school, where we must give
Our lives that we may learn to live!
A dolt is he who memorizes
Lessons that leave no time for prizes.38
Another ends elegantly, expressing a truth he grasped but could not yet act on:
If I have seen one thing
It is the passing preciousness of dreams;
That aspects are within us; and who seems
Most kingly is the King.39
The best of his London poems is also from this year. It describes a scene of parting between a woman and the man who is recalling it. He lets us see that the woman is suffering, that he is emotionally spent and that the colourless wintry surroundings – pale sun, bare earth, grey fallen leaves, the ‘Neutral Tones’ of the title – reinforce and represent his refusal to share grief or even to allow it.40
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing…
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
With this poem Hardy establishes himself as a poet with a voice of his own, to be taken seriously. It was not published for another thirty years.41
In five years he had succeeded in becoming a Londoner. Or had he? During the cold spring of 1867 he began to feel ill. His colleagues told him he had lost the ruddy look of a countryman, and he suspected he was suffering from the London atmosphere, sitting in the office at a first-floor window above the stinking river, and reading and working in his room from six to midnight every evening. He was, in fact, embarking on something new, a plan for a novel, but for a time he felt so weak that he could hardly lift his pencil. In July, Blomfield urged him to take the summer off and return in October. So when Hardy had a letter from his old master, Hicks, who was looking for an assistant, he decided to offer himself, and in July he returned to Dorchester. He left most of his books and papers in his London lodging but took with him the plan of his novel.
It was not a glorious homecoming, and his mother did not disguise her disappointment that the son for whom she had such hopes was returning apparently with nothing to show for his years in London. But once he was at Bockhampton his strength began to return. He resumed his old daily walks, and within a few weeks he was well again. Working part time for Hicks left him the hours and the energy to get down to the novel. The manuscript grew and grew, becoming an attack on just about everything he had seen and heard during the past five years. He called it The Poor Man and the Lady, and gave it a social and political message, intending it as an onslaught on the callousness and hypocrisy of the middle and upper classes and their indifference to the poor, workers and servants and any who aspired to better themselves by getting an education. By October he had made up his mind to finish it at all costs, dashed to London to collect what he had left in Westbourne Park Villas and told Blomfield he would not be returning to Adelphi Terrace. The first draft of the novel was finished in January 1868, and he immediately began on a fair copy.
Only some innocuous fragments of the novel survive, and they are without the sarcasm, aggression and mischief that publishers’ readers found in it; there is nothing to tell us about Hardy’s politics or anger.42 As the next chapter will show, he was persuaded to set aside both the manuscript and any display of the political opinions that inspired it. But the anger remained. The wounds inflicted by life never quite healed over in Hardy. Humiliation, rejection, condescension, failure and loss of love remained so close to the skin that the scars bled again at the slightest occasion. This is why many of his poems return to the griefs of the past. It is also why the rage that appears in his last novel, Jude the Obscure, was fuelled in the 1890s by the anger he felt in the 1860s. In a sense, The Poor Man and the Lady was a dry-run for Jude.