From Bath he went home to Bockhampton and settled down to write Far from the Madding Crowd. It is the warmest and sunniest of his novels. He tells us that some of it was written out of doors, on scraps of slate or stone, pieces of wood and even dead leaves, which is hard to imagine – how much can you write on a dead leaf? – but also absurdly appropriate to the rural setting of the book, and the storm scene was actually written during a night of thunder and lightning.1
It is a near-perfect mid-Victorian romance – Hardy intended it to be a contemporary story – with a heroine who challenges Victorian assumptions about young women through her natural energy. Bathsheba Everdene is autonomous, active, prepared to choose her own men and possessed of a strong erotic will of her own, characteristics usually allocated to bad women in nineteenth-century fiction. Several contemporary critics took against her: Henry James thought Hardy’s depiction of her ‘vague and coarse’, and Andrew Lang found himself unmoved by her ‘character and mischances’ and thought she was not a ‘firmly designed character’.2 Perhaps they missed the originality of some of the ideas Hardy makes her express, among them ‘it is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs’ – an idea hardly heard about again until the late twentieth century – and disapproved of her ‘I hate to be thought men’s property.’3
Although everyone in the parish where Bathsheba settles thinks she speaks like a lady, she is not a lady but the daughter of a country tailor, several times bankrupted and now dead. She has had some education but was considered ‘too wild to be a governess’.4 She is quite capable of running the farm she inherits from an uncle, and she is brave and bold, in contrast with her meek, passive, crushed rival in love, Fanny Robin. Bathsheba rides a horse with pleasure, not wearing a riding habit or using a side saddle like Elfride but astride ‘in the manner… hardly expected of the woman’, and is able to perform the acrobatic feat of dropping ‘backwards flat upon the pony’s back, her head over its tail, her feet against its shoulders and her eyes to the sky’ as she rides beneath some low branches.5 She also has the courage to open the coffin in which the dead Fanny has been laid, prising it open herself, because she wants to know whether there is a baby inside beside her rival.
Bathsheba is intelligent, playful and vain. At the start of the book both Hardy and his hero, Gabriel Oak, adopt a gently patronizing masculine stance towards her, but it is soon blown away. She feels herself entitled by her beauty, her position and her character to assert her own will in most matters. ‘ ’Tis the toss of the head, the sweep of the shoulder, and the dare of the woman in general’ is how one of her labourers sums her up, adding, ‘she said a man’s Damn to Liddy when the pantry shelf fell down with all the jam-pots upon it.’6 When she finds her bailiff stealing, ‘She flewed at him like a cat – never such a tom-boy as she is.’7 At the corn market, she argues, holds to her own prices and persistently beats down the prices of other farmers, winning their respect.8 Love makes her lose her command and good sense, and she is chastened by her own mistakes but not defeated. Hardy does not condescend to her, as he does to Fancy and to Elfride, but instead seems to feel with her, giving her an irresistible intensity. Bathsheba starts as a girl and becomes a woman; she suffers and blooms at the same time. Some of the glow of his love for Emma is there in the writing, and you may wonder if he is offering her a picture of what he most admired in a woman: strength, high spirits, passion, and the power to recover from setbacks and mistakes. Bathsheba, with her dark eyes and hair, and her red jacket, careless of convention and in charge of her own life, is plainly not Emma, but at the same time she shares some of her enthusiasms, notably horse riding – something Hardy himself had never mastered.
If the setting was meant to be contemporary, the criticism it provoked was justified: that it painted much too pleasant a picture of farming conditions in Dorset in the 1870s. Hardy presents rural events and tragedies – the sheep driven over the edge, the ricks on fire, the dishonest bailiff – and shows a hiring fair where Oak fails to find work; but, as Andrew Lang remarked in his review, ‘The country folk in the story have not heard of strikes, or of Mr Arch; they have, to all appearance, plenty to eat, and warm clothes to wear.’9 When Joseph Arch, who travelled round England organizing agricultural workers into unions, visited Dorset in 1873, he found ‘the condition of the labourers in that county as bad as it very well could be’.10 The early 1870s were a low point for agricultural workers all over England. Arch attended the Dorchester Candlemas Fair in February 1873, and Hardy heard him speak, either then or on a similar occasion. Arch spoke again to an assembly of nearly 1,000 men and women on Fordington Green, against the system of hiring labourers by the year.11 In his own account of his experiences, Arch wrote that
labourers were no better than toads under a harrow… We labourers had no lack of lords and master. There were the parson and his wife at the rectory. There was the squire, with his hand of iron overshadowing us all. There was no velvet glove on that hard hand, as many a poor man found to his hurt. He brought it down on my father because he would not sign for a small loaf and a dear one… At the sight of the squire the people trembled.12
Arch was recalling his own family’s experiences in Warwickshire, but the power of squire and parson over the poor was much the same in all rural areas.
This is not the world as described in Far from the Madding Crowd. How much does it matter? Not much more than Shakespeare’s Arden representing no real part of France. Although Hardy has been read as a realist, he was not producing documentaries but writing fiction, and in this instance romantic fiction. He himself wrote, in his preface to the edition of 1912, that it was ‘partly real, partly dream-country’. His characters and scenes are conjured out of his imagination. There is poverty, cold, hunger, the workhouse and early death in its pages, but not for the labourers, only for Fanny, who has dropped out of the community. There are setbacks, notably for Gabriel Oak, who thinks seriously of emigrating, as so many were doing, Hardy’s cousins among them; but he is able to overcome his problems through patience, diligence and love. There is no harsh squire, and what is heard of the vicar from his parishioner Jan Coggan is more favourable than you might expect from Hardy. Coggan is explaining why he will not desert church for chapel: ‘when every one of my potatoes were frosted our Parson Thirdly were the man who gave me a sack for seed, though he hardly had one for his own use, and no money to buy ’em. If it hadn’t been for him I shouldn’t have had a tatie to put in my garden. D’ye think I’d turn after that?’13
In his determination to succeed, Hardy set out to write a novel of rural life that would please Leslie Stephen and the readers of the Cornhill. A grim picture of destitution and rage against oppression would not have done so. The Poor Man and the Lady had failed to find a publisher, so a novel devoted to the plight of the Dorset labourers and to the landowners and parsons who oppressed them was not likely to fare any better. Hardy made his chorus of villagers content with their lot, and their lot on the whole easy. He also made them comical, but at the same time he was anxious that they should not be seen entirely as figures of fun and asked his publishers to make sure the illustrator understood that the ‘rustics, although quaint, may be made to appear intelligent, & not boorish at all’.14 He knew he was treading a fine line, risking disloyalty to his own people by presenting a version of them intended to amuse educated readers. His uncles and cousins might remain blissfully ignorant, but his mother was another matter. The question of loyalty would be taken up in his next novel, The Hand of Ethelberta.
Some of the most striking passages in Far from the Madding Crowd are again the meticulous observations of the natural world. One describes standing on a hillside in midwinter, with a clear sky above, when the different colours of the stars are perceptible and the ‘kingly brilliance of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueuxshone with a fiery red. To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this – the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement… whatever its origin, the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding.’15 This can be written only from personal experience, and allows us to think of Hardy taking a wintry night walk from Bockhampton, riding the world and sensing its roll eastward.
In another passage he writes of the splendour of buildings like the ancient barn used for sheep shearing:
The dusky, filmed, chestnut roof, braced and tied in by huge collars, curves and diagonals, was far nobler in design because more wealthy in material than nine-tenths of those in our modern churches… One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, its kindred in age and style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time… the mind dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity throughout, a feeling almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the permanence of the idea which had heaped it up… So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the shearers were in harmony with the barn.16
Hardy takes the barn as his text to give us his credo concerning functionalism, architecture and the value of continuity. His words were true and powerful when he wrote them, but sadly they have become historical and melancholy for us, now that barn and labourers have both lost their function.
Only occasionally are there weak pages where Hardy falls into a plod, for example giving Sergeant Troy a flat introductory chapter headed ‘The New Acquaintance Described’. An editor might have protested, but Leslie Stephen accepted the three pages of prosing, and their dullness is quickly redeemed by the next chapters showing Troy in action, first in conversation and then with his sword. Once read, the scene in the hollow among the ferns where he woos Bathsheba by outlining and enclosing her body with his dazzling sword play is never forgotten. Here Hardy the poet is at work, conjuring up a perfect metaphor for seduction, his imagination allowing him to be Troy as he slices off a curl and spits a caterpillar on Bathsheba’s bosom, and also to be Bathsheba, shedding a help-less stream of tears when Troy kisses her and leaves her. As J. M. Barrie wrote, making up for earlier critics’ dismissal, fifteen years after the book’s publication,
He does not draw a male flirt to show that the species are contemptible, but because there are male flirts; nor are the two terrible scenes, Fanny’s death and Bathsheba opening the coffin, introduced to warn womankind against the Troys… Never until Troy was shown at work had we learned from fiction how such a being may mesmerize a bewitching and clever woman into his arms. Many writers say their Troys do it, but Mr Hardy shows it being done.17
Hardy worked steadily through the summer. In September he planned to walk over the heath to the annual sheep fair at Wood-bury Hill to pick up some local colour for his book. The fair was an ancient one, held over a week every autumn above the small town of Bere Regis, and Hardy thought nothing of taking on the twenty-six miles there and back on foot in the heat on the Sunday. Three days later, on 24 September, he heard from the Moule family that Horace was dead. His body was to be brought back from Cambridge to Fordington for the funeral.
He had cut his own throat, unable to face the cycle of depression and drinking in which he was caught. Anyone who has witnessed severe depression at close quarters knows how the sufferer is driven to prefer death to life on the terms on which he has to live it. No further explanation seems necessary for Horace Moule’s final action. Feeling himself to be in crisis, he had summoned his brother Charles to Cambridge. It was still the long vacation, when the town was relatively empty. Charles came at once, and they sat talking in Horace’s rooms in Queens’ for three hours that evening. Then Horace, saying he felt ill, took himself to bed in the adjoining bedroom, while Charles remained in the outer sitting room, writing. He became aware of a noise, went into the bedroom and found his brother covered in blood. His first thought was that he must have burst a blood vessel. He ran to the porter’s lodge and asked them to send for a doctor. When he got back to his brother, Horace said, ‘Easy to die,’ and ‘Love to my mother.’ They were his last words, and they have a touch of sublimity. The doctor found that he had cut his own throat, and when a nurse came she discovered the open razor he had used. Charles was able to arrange an inquest the next day, and presumably through his evidence a verdict of ‘suicide whilst in a state of temporary insanity’ was returned. It meant Horace could be buried in a churchyard.
It is a terrible story. How much of it was made plain to Hardy at first is not known, but the bare fact of the death was bad enough. The funeral was fixed for 26 September, and the day before he went out and sat on a weir on the River Frome, looking up at Fordington churchyard, where the newly dug grave had been prepared, not in the central part but in a side area a good way from the church. The spot is a beautiful one, high above the green open countryside and the river below, where Hardy sat that day. Years later he wrote a poem, ‘Before My Friend Arrived’, describing how he had looked up at the ‘towered church on the rise’ and made a drawing of the mound of white chalk taken from the ground to make the grave. Today the grave is covered in primroses in spring, and the Moule parents lie alongside their brilliant and unhappy son. Mrs Moule lost her sight in the year he died and followed him to the grave four years later.
Never again would Hardy have a friend who held his heart so wholly, and his last lesson was that death might be irresistible. Another wound was made that would never quite heal. But Hardy did not allow grief to distract him from his work. On 30 September he was able to send Leslie Stephen several further chapters of Far from the Madding Crowd and an outline of more. Stephen was so pleased with what he read that he offered Hardy £400 for the serial rights, twice what Tinsley had paid for A Pair of Blue Eyes. In October he asked if he might start running it in the Cornhill earlier than planned, in January 1874. Hardy agreed to this, although he knew it meant the early chapters would be appearing months before he could possibly finish the book, and he would be writing to close deadlines again. He also knew now that he could do it. Tinsley was pressing for another serial. Meanwhile A Pair of Blue Eyes had been published in book form in America in July and began to run serially in New York from September. All this brought money, and money brought the prospect of marriage closer. Although Emma’s parents were now out of the picture since she had broken with them, there was still his mother to be reconciled to the idea. That autumn he helped his father with the cider-apple gathering from the huge old trees in the garden: ‘it was the last time he ever took part in a work whose sweet smells and oozings in the crisp autumn air can never be forgotten by those who have had a hand in it.’18 The two men were on good terms, and his father on his own would no doubt have accepted Hardy’s bride whoever she was, but Jemima was a strong-minded woman, and in this matter she had made up her mind. Miss Gifford was not the right wife for her son. She was not a Dorset girl, she was well born but penniless – poor gentry was the worst of all worlds – and she was too old. For the moment Miss Gifford was still tucked away in St Juliot.
In December, Hardy went to London to meet Leslie Stephen for the first time. Having misunderstood an invitation to lunch, he called at his house in South Kensington – 8 Southwell Gardens – at a different time of day.
He welcomed me with one hand, holding back the barking ‘Troy’ [a collie] with the other. The dog’s name I, of course, had never heard till then, and I said, ‘That is the name of my wicked soldier-hero.’ He answered caustically: ‘I don’t think my Troy will feel hurt at the coincidence, if yours doesn’t.’ I rejoined, ‘There is also another coincidence. Another Leslie Stephen lives near here, I find.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he’s the spurious one.’19
Hardy decided to like him when he explained that he had played as a child with his nurse in the fields near his present house, all now being built over. ‘I felt then that I liked him, which at first I had doubted. The feeling never changed.’20 Stephen was the same age as Horace Moule, with a similar if more achieved educational background, and in one way he stepped easily into Moule’s role as mentor and critic, and with real power of literary patronage; but, although he returned Hardy’s liking, he did not have Moule’s charm.
Leslie Stephen’s fame today rests largely on being the editor of the original Dictionary of National Biography and the father of Virginia Woolf, but in 1873 he had not yet embarked on the first project or attached himself to the mother of his renowned daughter. In fact, he was married to Thackeray’s daughter Minny, and her sister Anny shared their house. Hardy remembers meeting both sisters at lunch the day after his first call on Stephen, and how they sat over the fire, the ladies wrapped in shawls against the cold, and talked about Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, the Bible and Voltaire. The Stephens gave a dinner for Hardy later, described in a letter by Minny Stephen to her sister, who was away on the Isle of Wight. Minny said, ‘the evening was a wild chaos. I tried to drown my cares in drink but it only affected my feet and not my head. Mr Hardy is a very damp young man and dampness I abominate.’21 No doubt Hardy was nervous and trying too hard, faced with a daughter of the great Thackeray. Her remark was snobbish: a gentleman is not damp.
Stephen was as dry as a gentleman should be. He was very tall, his mouth and chin were concealed within a fuzz of whiskery hair, and above this was a long, prominent nose and shrewd, small eyes. His world was as different from Hardy’s as it could be. Everything Hardy had to struggle for, mostly in vain, had been given to him: education, leisure, congenial friends and colleagues, the confidence that comes from knowing your family belongs among the intellectual elite of England. It was natural for them to send their sons to Eton and Cambridge, and at Cambridge Stephen had become a Fellow of his college, charged with the intellectual and moral guidance of the young gentlemen coming up from their public schools. He was an enthusiastic rowing coach, famous for his thirty-mile walks, and he relished the bachelor rituals of college life. He had taken holy orders, as was expected, and it had needed courage for him to acknowledge that he could no longer believe in the Christian doctrine he was supposed to uphold, and to leave his comfortable college and launch himself at the age of thirty into the choppy waters of literary journalism. Still, he knew almost everybody who mattered in London, had a small private income, was able to live in Kensington with his mother and continued to enjoy regular visits to his college, even drawing his stipend until his marriage in 1867. His chief passion was mountaineering in the Alps, and he was able to indulge it pretty often.
He had been settled in London for ten years when Hardy met him and editing the Cornhill for the last two, at a salary of £500 a year. The proprietor, George Smith, was a friend. It was a magazine intended for middle-class, middle-brow families, and it avoided politics, religion and anything that might offend. ‘Thou shalt not shock a young lady’ was the first commandment the editor had to enforce.22 Stephen commissioned good writers and wrote articles himself, but he did not make a success of it, and the circulation fell steadily under his editorship. Hardy knew nothing of this, of course, only that Thackeray had edited the Cornhill and that it had a great reputation. He found that Stephen was a conscientious editor, but that he took his obligation to forestall any possibility of giving offence to lady readers to heart. In March he wrote anxiously to Hardy, ‘Troy’s seduction of the young woman will require to be treated in a gingerly fashion, when, as I suppose must be the case, he comes to be exposed to his wife? I mean that the thing must be stated but that the words must be careful – excuse this wretched shred of concession to popular stupidity; but I am a slave.’23 In April he followed this up with ‘I have some doubts whether the baby is necessary at all… perhaps if the omission were made it might be restored on republication… should somehow be glad to omit the baby.’24 Fanny’s baby, and the climactic scene in which Bathsheba discovers it in the coffin, was duly cropped for the Cornhill. Different views have been taken of how much Stephen minded making a change which damaged the book as badly as this one, but he was under pressure from Grundian complaints, and he can be given the benefit of the doubt. It remained exasperating for Hardy, who restored the passage for book publication and pointed out to Stephen that The Times singled out for praise the passage that had been cut. Stephen replied impatiently, ‘I spoke as an editor, not as a man. You have no more consciousness of these things than a child.’25 Hardy may have reflected privately that Stephen had written in 1873, ‘The one duty which at the present moment seems to be of paramount importance, is the duty of perfect intellectual sincerity’ and ‘Let us think freely and speak plainly, and we shall have the highest satisfaction that man can enjoy.’26 On the other hand, Hardy understood that he was still an apprentice writer and wrote to Stephen in the course of discussing cuts, ‘for the present circumstances lead me to wish merely to be considered a good hand at a serial.’27
After Hardy’s meetings with Stephen and his family in December 1873 he went to Cornwall for a Christmas visit. He had kept the title of Far from the Madding Crowd secret from Emma, in order to surprise her, he explained, and it was only as he was leaving in January that she saw the first instalment in the Cornhill. It was presented anonymously, as all its serials were, but it was evidence of his literary success, and the auguries for their being able to marry were now good. At the same time he had retreated from discussing or sharing his work with her. She may have enjoyed the surprise of the title, but she must also have noticed that this time she had been excluded from the process of choosing it. Hardy’s view of how helpful she could be with his work was not quite the same as hers. Later in the year she wrote to him with a touch of sadness, ‘My work, unlike your work of writing, does not occupy my true mind much… Your novel seems sometimes like a child, all your own and none of me.’28
He had been working supremely hard in order to succeed so that he and Emma could be married. Now, as a result of this intense dedication to his work, the world was opening out for him, and he began to have the chance to meet people he found interesting. Emma, who had so dazzled him, may have begun to seem less extraordinary. On his return to Bockhampton, he was invited to dine with a neighbouring family, that of the Revd Reginald Smith, rector of West Stafford, and his wife, Geneviève. At their house he had once been offered a glass of milk as a schoolboy. Now they were aware of his literary success. Their son Bosworth was teaching at Harrow, and their two daughters, Evangeline and Blanche, were both bookish. This was a notable social occasion for Hardy, the first formal invitation he had received from any member of the Dorset gentry. He went on his own, and the butler who served at table that evening was the father of Cassie Pole, with whom he had flirted in London. If it was a disconcerting situation for butler and guest – the butler is said to have resented it – it passed without anyone else being aware of it, and the next day Hardy sent a copy of A Pair of Blue Eyes to Mrs Smith, with a note of thanks for her hospitality, saying it had a ‘peculiar charm’ for him as a writer, the more so since he had been ‘denied by circumstances until very lately the society of educated womankind, which teaches men what cannot be acquired from books, and is indeed the only antidote to that bearishness which one gets into who lives much alone’.29
He had London invitations too. In April the Stephens introduced him to George Smith, publisher and proprietor of the Cornhill, and in May to Helen Paterson, the young artist who was illustrating Far from the Madding Crowd; also to Mrs Procter, a lively and remarkable old woman who had known everybody, her stepfather having been a friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.30 Hardy greatly enjoyed her company. He also developed a tendresse for Helen Paterson on the one hand and Anny Thackeray on the other. Meanwhile he was preparing to be married to Emma.
And where was Emma? A mystery hangs over her whereabouts during 1874, which neither Hardy nor Emma ever chose to explain. The inscription he wrote for her memorial stone in St Juliot Church stated that she had lived at St Juliot until 1873. His last visit to Cornwall was made for Christmas 1873, and they were not married until September 1874. She wrote in her recollections that ‘I went as a country cousin to my brother in London’, but she gave no dates. Did she live with Walter for nine months? Did she go to friends? There was no reconciliation with her parents. Hardy was at Bockhampton for much of the early part of the year, with visits to London in April and in May. In late May he arranged a passport for himself and his wife ‘travelling on Continent’. This was four months before it was needed.
A poem called ‘The Change’, written in early 1913 among the other poems recalling the time of his courtship of Emma, describes her arrival unaccompanied at what appears to be a London railway station. It sounds like a winter scene, with its ‘murks of night’ and ‘lamps wanning her face’:
Mid murks of night I stood to await her,
And the twanging of iron wheels gave out the signal that she was come.
… She said with a travel-tired smile,
Half scared by scene so strange;
She said, outworn by mile on mile,
The blurred lamps wanning her face the while,
‘O Love, I am here; I am with you!’… Ah, that there should have come a change!
This suggests that Hardy met Emma in a place strange to her after a long railway journey made alone, very likely from Cornwall to London. Her sister and brother-in-law were unlikely to have agreed to her making such a journey alone to meet Hardy in London, which suggests further that there had been a falling out between Emma and the Holders. Had they been on good terms, it would have been natural for Emma to be married from their house. In fact, contact between the sisters seems to have been broken off for a time. Her journey must have been made between January and May 1874, but under what circumstances we can only guess. Hardy was absorbed in writing. He was much at home, where his mother’s influence was felt, but sometimes in London, where he was experiencing the charms of the world into which Leslie Stephen had introduced him and meeting women he found attractive. Hardy wobbled, as happens during a long engagement, and thought he might have liked to woo Miss Paterson. She was quite uninterested in him and about to be married herself, to another writer, William Allingham, but Emma would have noticed a change of tone in his letters. If her journey to London was impulsive and meant to remind him of their engagement, it succeeded when in May he took out the passport for himself and wife. He says nothing about any of this in his memoirs, and Emma’s own Recollections make her stay in London into a joke: ‘I went as a country cousin to my brother in London, and was duly astonished, which gave him even more pleasure than it did me. I was rather bewildered with the size and lengths and distances, and very much embarrassed at going in an omnibus, which seemed a very undignified method of getting about.’ Nothing about when, or how long her visit was, or how she occupied herself.
After Emma’s and Hardy’s deaths, his second wife put out various stories about Emma. One was that Emma’s family put pressure on him to marry Emma. Another had Emma visit Bockhampton alone to confront Hardy’s parents.31 Neither seems likely. A more probable scenario is that Emma began to worry that Hardy’s affections might be wandering and told her sister she would like to go to London. Helen said, on no account, it is not done. Emma answered, I am going whatever you think, and let Hardy know she was coming. Hardy met her at the station. Now what? He could not take her to his lodgings. She had to go to her brother Walter, fortunately established in London, and stay there. The drama of the arrival fixed itself in Hardy’s imagination and appeared in the poem.
Hardy applied for the passport for himself and wife to demonstrate his commitment, but he still had to go on writing Far from the Madding Crowd. He went back to Bockhampton to do so, remaining until July, when he returned to London. In August he brought the book to its conclusion with ‘the most private, secret, plainest wedding that it’s possible to have’,32 and at the beginning of September he wrote to Emma’s uncle, the Revd Edwin Hamilton Gifford, a man in his fifties, Cambridge educated and at this time a Canon of Worcester, asking if he would officiate at his and Emma’s wedding on 17 September. He also offered the Canon a bed at his own lodgings in Celbridge Place. Gifford declined the offer – he preferred Onslow Square, where he often stayed – but kindly declared, ‘I shall be very happy to tie the knot for you’, adding that he had left a little present of salt cellars and spoons for Emma, to be engraved at his expense.33 It may have been their only wedding present. Hardy meanwhile was finishing a short story commissioned by the New York Times, ‘Destiny and a Blue Cloak’, which he posted off on 12 September. On the same day Canon Gifford wrote again, confirming that he would be at Chippenham Road, where Emma’s brother lived, at 10.45 on the 17th and advising Hardy, who had evidently told him about his honeymoon plans, that Rouen was an expensive place.34