Hardy produced a rough first draft of his ‘striking socialistic novel’ in five months, averaging three pages a day – he was a speedy writer from the first – and finishing on 16 January 1868. Over the next five months he revised and wrote out a fair copy.1 He could have no idea of his future prospects, and he knew the novel was a gamble, but he was determined to get it done.
Even if he had disappointed his mother, there was comfort in being at home again with her familiar cooking and care, the resumed routine of the walk in and out of Dorchester, and the rediscovery of the natural world. He had not heard a nightingale for six years, and when they congregated yards from the cottage windows in the spring he set about transcribing their song.2 John Hicks was his usual amiable self, glad to have him back and undemanding; Hardy could just about make a living as a part-time assistant in his office without needing to push himself. But not everything was easy. He believed the locals laughed at him for his failure to achieve anything in London, all too likely in a community where everyone knew everyone else’s business and any pretensions to be different were viewed with suspicion; and here he was back on his parents’ hands with nothing to show for his five years away. Tradition has it that at Bockhampton he had his own little room in which he slept and worked, but you wonder how this was possible with six people squashed into a three-bedroom cottage. Henry, a tall young man of sixteen, was learning the building trade with their father; Kate, ten years old, was now at day school in Dorchester; and Mary, teaching at Minterne in north-west Dorset, was still too far away to live at home in term time, but during the school holidays she joined the family. So perhaps Tom had to share a room with his brother.
For advice about his novel he went to Horace Moule, who may have read the first manuscript when he was home from Marlborough for the Christmas holidays and encouraged Hardy to make the fair copy. A note of recommendation from Moule went with this second version when it was posted off to the highly respectable publishing house of Macmillan in the summer holidays, on 25 July 1868. Since Horace was quite capable of giving Tom unwelcome advice, he must have thought it good enough to submit.3 Hardy also put in a letter of his own explaining that his intention was to attack the manners of the upper classes by seeing them through the eyes of an outsider. He then fell into the state of apprehension and despondency usual to writers as they wait for a verdict on their work. He read Mill, Carlyle and Wordsworth to steady himself. Moule, suffering his own recurring miseries, was on the point of giving up his teaching post at Marlborough, his future cloudy too.
The publishing history of Hardy’s first novel turned into a nightmare: not because there was a lack of interest in it, but because his hopes were alternately raised and dashed, month after month. The first response was an encouraging rejection, if such a thing can be, in the shape of a letter from Alexander Macmillan, dated 10 August: ‘If this is your first book I think you ought to go on. May I ask if it is? and – you are not a lady so perhaps you will forgive the question – are you young?’ Macmillan wrote of ‘real power and insight’ and praised the scenes of country life among working men, but he said the upper-class Londoners were presented with too much hostility, suggesting that, whereas Thackeray attacked the upper classes fairly, ‘you “mean mischief. ” ’
The utter heartlessness of all the conversation you give in drawing-rooms and ballrooms about the working-classes has some grounds of truth I fear, and might justly be scourged as you aim at doing… Will’s speech to the working men is full of wisdom… Much of the writing seems to me admirable. The scene in Rotten Row is full of power and insight… You see I am writing to you as a writer who seems to me, at least potentially, of considerable mark, of power and purpose.4
He said he was seeking further advice on whether and how the book might be modified, and he also sent Hardy his reader’s report:
A very curious and original performance… much of the writing is strong and fresh. But there crops up in parts a certain rawness of absurdity that is very displeasing and makes it read like some clever lad’s dream… There is real feeling in the writing… If the man is young, there is stuff and promise in him: but he must study form and composition, in such writers as Balzac and Thackeray, who would I think come as natural masters to him.
Macmillan did not at this point name his reader, John Morley, although he could hardly have chosen one more likely to find something congenial in Hardy’s work. Morley was a journalist only two years older than Hardy, liberal in his politics, a freethinker who had fallen out with his father while at Oxford and so started his professional life in London without a penny. He worked for the Saturday Review, had defied convention by marrying a woman with two illegitimate children, taken up Positivism and become a friend of Mill. It is impossible to judge how apt his comments on Hardy’s work were, since the manuscript no longer exists, but it is obvious that, for all his reservations, he took it seriously.
Hardy wrote back to Macmillan, waited some time for a response and wrote again in September: ‘I almost feel that I don’t care what happens to the book, so long as something happens.’5 He added that he had been ‘hunting up matter for another tale, which would consist entirely of rural scenes and humble life; but I have not courage enough to go on with it till something comes of the first.’ A postscript asked for suggestions about what sort of story or other literary work Macmillan thought he might take on. The manuscript of The Poor Man and the Lady was then returned. He revised it and sent it back in November. In December he went to see Macmillan in London, only to be told that, while he was not prepared to publish it, he would give Hardy an introduction to Frederick Chapman of Chapman & Hall, the publishers of Carlyle. Hardy spent a few days in town and met Chapman at his office in Sackville Street, noting afterwards ‘I fear the interview was an unfortunate one.’ He does not say why, or tell us where he stayed or whether he saw any friends or family, only that he went home, returned to work and filled up the difficult waiting time reading voraciously: Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Thackeray and Macaulay, the worldly letters of Horace Walpole and Virgil’s epic poem about the foundation of Rome, the Aeneid. Absorbed in them, he kept his fear of failure down.
In January 1869 he took himself to London yet again, this time intending to stay for a few weeks. Stoic and sceptical as he was, he still found consolation, or magic, in religious texts, and he marked the date, 17 January, in his prayerbook, beside the psalm that begins ‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord, and hear me: for I am poor, and in misery.’ It reveals how bad his anxiety was. Macmillan saw him again and this time suggested he might try to find work as a reviewer. After this, Hardy had his first meeting with Morley, who offered to introduce him to the editor of the Saturday Review. Although this kind of literary life was not what he wanted, it was at least a sign of their confidence in him, and even of friendly feelings. They liked him, saw his promise and wanted to do something to help him.
Chapman summoned him, and said he would publish the novel if Hardy was prepared to put up a £20 guarantee against loss. Hardy agreed, having saved a good deal of his salary from his London years. This time he travelled back to Dorset confident that his book was being prepared for press. Just as well, because before setting off he heard of the sudden death of John Hicks. It was sad news, because he had been a friend as well as an employer; it also looked as though he had lost his job in Dorchester.
At home, he waited for his proofs. They did not arrive. Hardy wrote to Chapman, who replied with an invitation to come and meet ‘the gentleman who read your manuscript’. Hardy returned to London, the fifth trip in five months, in March. The gentleman was George Meredith, a handsome man of forty in a frock coat, with wavy hair, moustache and brown beard. At first Hardy did not realize he was the novelist, but he listened to his advice, which was that he would do better not to publish this book: it would certainly bring down attacks from reviewers and damage his future chances as a novelist. He might rewrite it, softening the bitterness of his satire on the rich, or better still put it aside and write another novel ‘with a purely artistic purpose’ and more of a plot. Even when Hardy realized who his reader was, he did not know that he was another freethinker, also from a modest background – Meredith’s father was a tailor, which he found embarrassing – and that ten years before he had been fiercely attacked for his first big novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, judged so shocking that the powerful circulating library Mudie’s cancelled its order of 300 copies. Meredith lectured him, clearly, kindly and at length, and Hardy took his manuscript away.
Still, he could not bear to give up altogether the idea of finding a willing publisher, and in April he submitted it to Smith, Elder, who had published Thackeray. They took only two weeks to turn it down, and he asked them to post it to Dorchester Station rather than to his home address: there was no need for the family to follow all his humiliations. He had one more try in June, sending it to Tinsley Brothers, a much less prestigious firm. They appear to have communicated to Moule, who must have been in London then, that they would publish it if Hardy would guarantee them financially against loss. Hardy answered that their terms were ‘rather beyond me just now’.
So he accepted final defeat in the matter of publishing The Poor Man and the Lady in September 1869, after trying for fourteen months.6 It was an agonizing experience, but his determination was such that he made up his mind to learn from it. He would take all the advice he got and write a different sort of novel, using the country life he knew, dreaming up a thrilling plot – whatever they recommended. Hardy’s readiness to follow the dictates of publishers may seem too humble, but it was a practical response. Only by getting himself published, by whatever means, could he test out whether he might go on to make a career as a writer. Later in life he insisted that he was primarily a poet and that his novels were merely his craft, taken up as a means to a livelihood, but this is not the whole truth. He did want to become a serious novelist, and his best novels are great works of imagination, each with its own seam of poetry sewn into the narrative. Even his minor novels are wonderful oddities, amusing, disquieting, distinctive. The point was that he had to get started as best he could, and for years he had to sell what he wrote to earn his bread, which forced him to work too fast. He went on taking advice from publishers, accepted cuts and changes imposed by editors who serialized his novels, snipped, filleted and padded them, sometimes damagingly, into the shapes required by the serial market, and tried to keep to the subject preferred by the circulating libraries and thought suitable for family reading – which was, roughly, romance without sex. This is what he meant when he talked of craft, not art. He was not a Flaubert or a Henry James, who had the luxury of taking time and polishing. He sometimes apologized to friends for the shortcomings of his books, saying he knew he had failed to render what his imagination had first suggested to him. But in 1869 the one thing he knew was that he must get something written that Macmillan, or Chapman & Hall, or Tinsley Brothers, would actually set up in proof, publish and put into the bookshops; and to bring that about he was prepared to write whatever they asked for.
Another effect of his encounter with Meredith, with his perfect air of a man of letters, may have been that Hardy decided to improve his own appearance. He could not produce anything to rival Meredith’s poetic locks, but by the end of 1869 he had grown a respectable beard of his own, in colour a yellowish brown.7 A hairy face was required of writers in the mid nineteenth century, and in appearance at any rate he could now take his place alongside Dickens, Tennyson, Trollope, Arnold and Browning.
While The Poor Man and the Lady was still being considered in London, he was offered work by a Weymouth architect, George Crickmay. He had bought Hicks’s practice and needed an assistant who understood something about church restoration. Hardy decided to take this on for a few months at least and to move into lodgings in Weymouth. Living under the scrutiny of even the most sympathetic family makes waiting to hear from publishers doubly painful, and he says his spirits lifted once he had made the decision. He stood on the Esplanade facing the sunlit sea, the town band doing its best with some Strauss waltzes close by, and after all the strain was suddenly glad that he would not have to make any decisions about his own affairs for the next three months.
Weymouth was booming and expanding, but it had kept some of the glamour bestowed on it by George III’s visits, and still had its handsome houses along the sea front looking out over the dazzling, unspoilable bay. He found himself lodgings in a small street near the harbour, at 3 Wooperton Street, and resumed his bachelor life. In the evening he liked to take out a rowing boat as dusk fell and lights began to shine out along the sea wall, ‘seeming to send long tap-roots of fire quivering down deep into the sea’.8 He was a good swimmer and took early-morning dips, floating on his back to enjoy the lift and fall of the waves and the warmth of the sun.
When a new assistant arrived in Crickmay’s office, he turned out to be another dancing enthusiast, and he talked Hardy into enrolling for dancing lessons, where they met Weymouth girls. Hardy found them heavier on the arm than London ones, but dancing led to summer flirtations. He was as hungry for women as any other man of his age, but he fell in and out of love helplessly and often, and distrusted his own impulses. On a boat trip to Lulworth with his sister Mary in the summer of 1868, he had noticed a pretty woman and written a note about her afterwards: ‘Saw her for the last time standing on deck as the boat moved off. White feather in hat, brown dress, Dorset dialect, Classic features, short upper lip. A woman I wd have married offhand, with probably disastrous results.’ He carried on a half-hearted romance with another local girl, Cassie Pole, lady’s maid to one of the daughters of the current owners of Kingston Maurward House and daughter of the butler at another house near by.9 He must have appreciated the irony of making the hero of his novel fall in love with the squire’s daughter while in his own life he was making do with ladies’ maids.
Or with cousins. There are stories that suggest he was involved at different times with three of his aunt Maria Sparks’s daughters. They need to be taken with caution, because they rest mostly on what their brother Nat Sparks’s son (another Nat) alleged years later. Not surprisingly, Hardy himself had nothing to say about any of it, but there may well be some truth in Nat’s account, which claimed that Hardy was attracted first to Rebecca, the eldest, on whom he was accused of crudely launching himself at a party as a boy; then to Martha, whom he was said to have wanted to marry; and finally to the youngest, Tryphena.10 Cousins could be a heaven-sent answer to the need for emotional experiment and sexual adventure in Victorian England. They were accessible, flirtable with, almost sisters, part of the family, and, indeed, in many families marriages took place between cousins. So it is likely that Tom thoroughly enjoyed the company of all his girl cousins, flirted with them and made as much love to them as he could get away with when he had the chance. Tryphena, who had been a child when he went to London, was sixteen when he returned. She was clever and pretty, like her sister Martha, and it seems that a warm cousinly affection developed as they got to know one another better. She was now working as a pupil teacher in the Puddletown school. The Sparkses had learnt from the Hardys and resolved that she should aim higher than her sisters and apply to a teacher training college when she reached the right age. Tryphena got into trouble for neglecting her duties at the school in January 1868 and was formally reproved, but she continued with her plans.
The death of her mother in the autumn of 1868 was a blow to all the family, Maria Sparks and Jemima Hardy being close sisters, and Maria a good and careful mother to her daughters, now left to run their own lives, their father being very old and reduced to poverty. Tom was at his aunt’s funeral. He gave Tryphena some French lessons, passing on what he had learnt at King’s College. She knew about London from Martha, and no doubt he talked of his London experiences, and when she came to apply for her training in 1869 she chose the Nonconformist Stockwell Training College in south London. She was awarded a scholarship and studied there for two years. But there is no evidence she and Hardy met in London, and the friendship or flirtation between them cannot have lasted long.11
At the end of her training Tryphena was offered a post as headmistress of an elementary school in Plymouth. London did not turn out so well for Martha. Within months of her mother’s death she became pregnant. It was a classic Victorian servant’s story, the father of her child being another servant, the butler in the same household. She was dismissed at once, and her lover, William Duffield, was also sent packing. At least he did the right thing by Martha and married her, and they tried to make a go of running a coffee shop in Kensington Park Road. The baby proved to be twins, a boy and a girl, the little girl dying during her first year. Martha had another daughter two years later, and then no more children. The coffee shop was not a success. They struggled on until 1876, when they made up their minds to leave England, not for Canada, as Martha’s aunt had done, but further away still, for Queensland, Australia.12 The fourth Sparks sister, Emma, whom Hardy had visited in Somerset in 1861, also by then living in poverty with her carpenter husband and more children than they could afford, left for Australia too. They were driven by the fear of sinking into still worse misery and destitution than they already suffered. The workhouse loomed brutally in the imagination of the poor, as it was meant to, and Australia seemed a better bet. Hardy must have known of the difficulties and then the emigration of these once dearly loved cousins and been unable to intervene. It was another grim thing to keep at the back of his mind while he pursued his own ambitions through doubts, setbacks and discouragement.
In the autumn of 1869 he started on another novel. He followed Meredith’s advice about plot and structured it around a melodramatic and intricate story that included wife murder, a lady of high position with a secret illegitimate child, the result of a rape, and a crop of preposterous coincidences. His title, a good one, told the reader roughly what to expect: Desperate Remedies. What had he in mind? The example of Wilkie Collins’s recent hit The Moonstone, perhaps, and Dickens’s use of mystery plots, as in Our Mutual Friend.13 George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical, which also came out when he was in London, in 1866, was another novel that made use of mysteries involving birth, parentage and inheritance. Some of Hardy’s book reads as though he had said to himself, if this is what the publishers and the public want, I’ll give it to them. On top of the lurid plot points he threw in everything that came to hand, the experience of struggling architects, life in Weymouth lodgings, a boat trip to Lulworth, the two big houses on the Kingston Maurward Estate, the trials of a lady’s maid, the harsh treatment meted out to tenants by country landowners, a glimpse of the London poor and another of apple picking in the West Country, quotations from English and Latin poets, some picturesquely spoken rustics and a midnight disposal of a body, supposedly secret, actually witnessed by three separate observers. If the story sometimes seems in danger of flying apart, he just manages to tie it up prettily at the end with the sudden deaths of the two most delinquent characters.
His heroine, Cytherea, is pretty, graceful and submissive. She is given a striking moment at the start of the book when, attending a public Shakespeare reading, she looks through the windows of the town hall at the spire of the local church which her architect father is restoring, and, as she watches, sees him lose his footing on the scaffolding and drop to his death. It should be a terrible experience for her, but it has no point except to mark the beginning of her and her brother’s adventures as orphans who must earn their livings. By the end of the book she has been through further ordeals, remaining pretty and graceful throughout, but without ever managing to become interesting. She is wooed by a young architect and by a murderous villain, her heart flutters and her tears flow; she thinks she may end her days in the workhouse and agrees to marry to escape poverty, the reason that leads ‘many thousands of women’ into marriage every year, Hardy tells us. The charm of Desperate Remedies – and it has its charms, particularly in the early chapters – lies not in the plot but in Hardy’s incidental comments and descriptions. He describes the dullness of provincial towns where the citizens are given to watching newcomers, ‘silently criticising their dress – questioning the genuineness of their teeth and hair – estimating their private means’. He tells us that the county hospital ‘is only another name for slaughter-house’. A man in love looks at the girl he wants to walk home ‘as a waiter looks at the change he brings back’, whereas a young single woman tells how much she enjoys living alone: ‘If you knew the pleasure of locking up your own door, with the sensation that you reigned supreme inside it, you would say it was worth the risk of being called odd.’
One night, Cytherea, lying awake, hears ‘a very soft gurgle or rattle’ followed by the low whining of a dog, taken up by other dogs that start to howl. It is the dying breath of the old master of the house, alone in his bedroom, and Hardy says she had heard it before, when her mother died. He is so confident and precise in his description that you wonder if he had heard it himself at the death of his grandmother.
There is also a famous scene in which Cytherea, working as a lady’s maid, has her bed invaded by her employer Miss Aldclyffe, an ageing unmarried lady. Miss Aldclyffe presses Cytherea to her heart, kisses her lips with ‘a warm motherly salute’, asks for her love and questions her jealously about her relations with men. Cytherea is not particularly worried by her physical proximity – beds were often shared – so much as embarrassed by Miss Aldclyffe’s bullying insistence on being given the name of the young man she is in love with. Lesbianism was little mentioned in Victorian England, but the episode may well have been based on something told Hardy by one of the lady’s maids he knew. At the same time the frisson in this scene is social as much as sexual, distaste for a demonstration of the arrogant behaviour of the upper classes in intruding and prying even into the private feelings and experiences of their servants.14 No modern reader can be unaware of the sexual element, but the line between physically demonstrative displays of innocent affection and conscious eroticism was not easily drawn in the mid nineteenth century. Even men sometimes had difficulty with it, as Henry James found. Hardy is not describing a rape or an erotic conquest here, although he is showing how Miss Aldclyffe, starved of affection and charmed by Cytherea (as everyone is), wants to make her into her ‘pet’, something between a companion and a daughter who will devote herself exclusively to her. She describes herself as ‘your mamma’, and she knows that Cytherea is the daughter of the man she once loved. Her behaviour in the bedroom is imperious, ill mannered and coercive, both physically and emotionally, but not seductive. She continues to bully Cytherea into doing what she wants, including marrying against her own inclinations, but there is no repetition of the bedroom scene. John Morley, who read the book for Macmillan, was horrified by the early episode of the rape of the young Miss Aldclyffe (a ‘disgusting and absurd outrage’), which Hardy removed. The scene ‘between Miss Aldclyffe and her new maid in bed’ he called merely ‘highly extravagant’. It is powerful and unpleasant, but there is nothing lewd or titillating about it.
To speed up completion of this book Hardy left Weymouth in February 1870 and returned to Bockhampton and his mother’s care. A message came from Crickmay inviting him to travel to Cornwall to look at a church in need of restoration in a remote spot on the north coast. Hardy delayed his departure until March in order to be able to post off his nearly finished manuscript to Macmillan before he went, on 5 March. Then, in the starlit small hours of 7 March, he got up to walk to Dorchester Station and set off on what proved to be the most momentous journey of his life.