In 1883 he and Emma moved into a rented house in Dorchester, and he bought a lease on a building site just outside the town, making it clear that he planned to settle permanently. He was even ready to take up his responsibilities as a prosperous citizen and soon accepted a nomination to sit on the bench as a Justice of the Peace. The place had not grown or changed very much in the twenty years since he left it, although there was a new museum, a new brewery and a few more churches. Strolling players still came to perform in the market field, and the proprietor and leading actor playing Othello, whose voice could be heard as far as the town pump, had to reproach people for laughing in the murder scene. ‘Is this the nineteenth century?’ he asked his ignorant audience, reducing them to silence, although they clapped the placing of the pillow over Desdemona’s face.1 Circuses came to Fordington Field, itinerant girl musicians played in the high street, and old men rang in the new year in the belfry of St Peter’s as they had always done. Hardy began to meditate a novel in which Dorchester itself would figure as prominently as the characters. Within a year he would start searching the files of the Dorset County Chronicle for stories from the 1820s that he might make use of. He became absorbed in the history and fabric of the town, its pattern of streets based on the camp set up by the Romans and now ‘shut in by a square wall of trees, like a plot of garden ground by a box-edging’. Viewed from the hills above, it was still small enough to appear ‘clean-cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green table-cloth’. He noticed that most of its citizens left their front doors open so that you could look right through their houses to the flower gardens at the back. The shops were full of agricultural implements, and the people remained rough, humorous and down to earth.
In August he had the gloomy task of attending on an old friend, Hooper Tolbort, one-time pupil of Horace Moule and William Barnes, who had done so brilliantly in the Indian Civil Service examinations in the 1850s. He was now ill with tuberculosis and back in England, bringing with him a half-written study of ‘The Portuguese in India’ which he asked Hardy to have published, should he prove unable to see it through himself. It was a sad business. Hardy said he would, Tolbort died in August, and on examining the manuscript Hardy found it was unpublishable. He wrote an obituary for the Dorset County Chronicle, and brooded on the waste of hope and promise: ‘Tolbort lived and studied as if everything in the world were so very much worth while. But what a bright mind has gone out at one-and-forty!’2 Praising his friend’s commitment, intelligence and enthusiasm, he saw that ‘everything in the world’, far from being worth while for him, had been rendered useless by his early death.
His own planned progress continued smoothly. In June he had signed a lease with the Duchy of Cornwall for a plot of land of an acre and a half on which to build, committing himself to spending at least £1,000 on the house (and in 1886 he paid £450 for the freehold).3 A visit to the house and walled garden today, with encircling main roads, traffic, suburban housing and thickets of trees, gives almost no impression at all of how it was then, a bare plot with open land and wide views all around, a mile outside Dorchester in a still unenclosed part of Fordington Field, ‘with rolling, massive downs, crowned with little tree coronets before and behind’.4 He had made time to draw up his own plans, and his father and brother were to be the builders, although old Mr Hardy’s participation cannot have been great, given his age and poor health; but Bockhampton was near enough for him to drive over to give his advice. Work started on the site almost at once, and at the end of the year Hardy himself planted an infant forest around the site, mostly beech trees and Austrian pines, to provide shelter from the wind as they grew. He had never planted trees before, as far as we know, but either he knew instinctively how to set about it or he sought expert advice. Two years later, when he described Giles Winterborne and Marty South at work in The Woodlanders, he was able to draw on his own experience:
Winterborne’s fingers were endowed with a gentle conjuror’s touch in spreading the roots of each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress, under which the delicate fibres all laid themselves out in their proper directions for growth…
‘How they sigh directly we put ’em upright, though while they are lying down they don’t sigh at all,’ said Marty.
‘Do they?’ said Giles. ‘I’ve never noticed it.’
She erected one of the young pines into its hole, and held up her finger; the soft musical breathing instantly set in, which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled – probably long after the two planters should be felled themselves.
‘It seems to me,’ the girl continued, ‘as if they sigh because they are very sorry to begin life in earnest – just as we be.’
Giles plants skilfully, but it is only Marty who notices the sighing of the newly set trees. Hardy must have heard it when he planted his. He became their protector and would never have them lopped back or cut down, even when they grew into dense thickets. He spoke of ‘wounding’ them, and refused to curtail the ‘soft musical breathing’ he had initiated and given to Marty to appreciate.5 His trees were silenced only after his death, when his widow had most of them cut down.
During the preliminary work of digging a well, three feet below the surface, three skeletons were found in separate graves, cut into the solid chalk, each an oval about four feet long and two and a half feet wide. The bodies had been laid on their right sides, with their knees drawn up to their chests and their arms extended so that their hands rested on their ankles. ‘Each body was fitted with… perfect accuracy into the oval hole, the crown of the head touching the maiden chalk at one end and the toes at the other,’ wrote Hardy, as tightly fitted as chicks inside the egg shell.6 Two had metal circlets with clasps fixed around their heads, and one was a woman, from whom Hardy himself removed ‘a little bronze-gilt fibula that had fastened the fillet across her brow’ with his own hands.7 All were buried with urns of a design that suggested Roman work of the third or fourth century. Near them was a deeper hole with the horn, teeth and bones of a bull. Hardy assumed that this was an out-of-town, single-household resting place. Later the workmen making the drive to the house found they had decapitated five more skeletons. The link with the ancient past interested him, but he did not tell Emma about the skeletons at the time, thinking she might be frightened, and it occurred to him that they might be an evil omen.8
The site was on the Wareham road, near a disused toll gate whose last keeper had been Henry Mack, and the place was known as ‘Mack’s Gate’. Hardy changed it to Max Gate, a name that has always seemed unsuitable, with a suggestion of sophistication and urbanity. Even he had doubts about it and once jokingly made it ‘Porta Maxima’ in a letter to Gosse. Bockhampton has the ring of an ancient English place name; ‘Max Gate’ has nothing of what Hardy described as ‘the quaintnesses of a primitive rustic life’.9 But so he named it. Within months of moving into the finished house he was doubtful that it had been right to build it at all: ‘Whether building this house at Max Gate was a wise expenditure of energy is one doubt, which, if resolved in the negative, is depressing enough. And there are others,’ he wrote in his notebook.10
In September 1883 Oscar Wilde, who was raising money by lecturing before he got married, spoke in the Town Hall in Dorchester on one of his standard subjects, ‘The House Beautiful’. He led his audiences round an imaginary house, telling them what was good and what to avoid, for example no wallpaper in the entrance hall but wainscoting, and tiles rather than carpet. Only secondary colours on walls and ceilings. Windows must be small to avoid glare. No gas chandeliers but sidelights instead. Furniture should be Queen Anne, and stoves should be Dutch porcelain. He then turned his attention to the people in the house and advised the women to give up corsets and wear simple Grecian drapery, and the men to return to knee breeches.11 As long as you could afford Queen Anne furniture and had the figure for simple Grecian drapery, there was nothing outrageous about his advice. He had given the talk with great success all over America, and he went on from Dorchester to Bournemouth and Exeter with it. Hardy was invited to meet the lecturer after the talk, but no local reporter was taking notes, and it may be these two remarkable men failed to exchange any words. Later Hardy gave his opinion that Wilde’s wit relied on a formula by which he took a well-known saying and distorted it to make it shocking, ‘Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today’ becoming ‘Always put off till tomorrow what you can do today’. This was clever of Hardy but not quite fair – Wilde is funnier than that.12 And, as far as the House Beautiful went, he does not appear to have considered any Wildean adjustments to his arrangements for Max Gate, where the hall floor was of polished wood, some windows were made small and others large, and where there were never any gas chandeliers for the good reason that there was no gas supply. ‘I never have cared for possessions,’ he once said. ‘What is in this house has come together by chance. The things I have bought, I bought as I needed them, and for the use I needed them for.’13
Was Hardy a good architect? The question is unfair, since he built so little and got out of the profession. He had won a prize for the design of a country mansion when he was at Blomfield’s, and he drew efficient-seeming plans for cottages and villas in his notebook, but Max Gate was his first house, designed and built in a proud and thrifty gesture after he had abandoned architecture. Few have admired it, and no one could call it beautiful. It was not a country mansion but a small house of two reception rooms, two bedrooms and a study. The outside is starkly proportioned and weighty for such a modest place; the inside is uninspired but comfortable, with a kitchen and service rooms at the back and bedrooms for servants in the attics. Hardy specified a flush lavatory, for which the water had to be pumped up daily, but there was no bathroom and no running water: maids carried jugs to the bedrooms, as was normal in the 1880s, when half the female population must have spent hours carrying water up and down stairs. Seeing Max Gate today, you have to subtract the additions made since. In the 1890s Hardy built for his brother and sisters another house at West Stafford, about two miles away, recognizable by a similarly ungainly exterior.
No one else ever commissioned Hardy to design a country house, but he kept up his interest in architecture, mostly through William Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which he joined in 1881 and which tried to prevent architects from spoiling churches with the sort of work he had been employed in as a young man. He regretted what he had done and worked with the Society energetically, trying and failing to keep Puddletown Church (among others) from being ‘improved’, and speaking eloquently of how buildings hold together ‘memories, history, fellowship, fraternities’.14
In the spring of 1884, after his three-year pause, he started on his new novel. The Mayor of Casterbridge is an extraordinary book and another new departure for him, not a love story but a tragedy built around a single man. As in The Return of the Native he created an almost closed setting, giving a dramatic intensity to the action. The scene was the town of Dorchester – renamed but recognizable – and the action was set back to the 1840s. The Mayor himself, Michael Henchard, was supposed to be about as old as the century, older than Hardy’s parents and no kin of the people of Mellstock but a stranger to the district. It is the first of his books to be named for one person, the subtitle variously ‘The Story of a Man of Character’ or ‘The Life and Death of a Man of Character’, both good.
The book is squarely centred on this one man, strong, ignorant, energetic, driven by a sense of what he might achieve, which he fulfils once he sets his mind on doing so. Never for a moment do we doubt that becoming mayor of a small country town is a huge achievement, so well does Hardy establish the world he has chosen to write about. Henchard is undermined by guilt for his actions as a young man, and he craves affection, but has a temper that drives it away. So the basis for a classic tragedy is set up, the hero not a king or even an educated man but an unschooled, roughly spoken working man: ‘bad at science’ and ‘bad at figures – rule o’thumb sort of man’, is how he describes himself.15 Henchard comes from nowhere, first seen as an itinerant hay-trusser walking through the countryside looking for work, owning nothing but what he can carry. He was married at eighteen and regrets it at twenty-one, and the only family he ever mentions is a brother, long since dead. By moving him into the small community of Casterbridge, Hardy allows him to appear as a great figure within it, powerful, respected and also resented. He is again alluding to Shakespeare: Henchard’s behaviour in ridding himself of his family and ill-treating his mild daughter, and his strength that turns into self-destructiveness, partly mirror the behaviour of Lear. He has the ambition and the strength to be a hero, and the failings to become a tragic one. He is without subtlety, but he is built on a large scale, morally and physically – Hardy tells us he is 6′ 1½″ in his shoes – and he has an intuitive sense of what life should be. When he knows he has gone wrong, he seeks to put things right, clumsily but honourably; and when he knows he has gone irretrievably wrong, he decides that the right course is to end his life, asking that his memory should be blotted out with his life. When his daughter Elizabeth-Jane reads his instructions that he should not be commemorated, she accepts them ‘from her independent knowledge that the man who wrote them meant what he said. She knew the directions to be a piece of the same stuff that his whole life was made of, and hence were not to be tampered with to give herself a mournful pleasure.’16
Deeply imagined and meditated work, dramatic and poetic, the narrative is shaped on a grand scale and paced with extraordinary moments. Henchard at the weir hole, intending to drown himself and seeing himself in the water, remains a terrifying incident even when you know the explanation. The words spoken over the departed Susan Henchard by Mother Cuxsom, momentarily setting aside her class belligerence in acknowledgement of the power of death, contrive to be one of the most perfect elegiac statements ever made: ‘Well, poor soul; she’s helpless to hinder… anything now… And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and things a’didn’t wish seen, anybody will see; and her little wishes and ways will all be as nothing!’
The descriptions of Casterbridge/Dorchester combine what Auden called Hardy’s ‘hawk’s vision’ and a countryman’s wit:
Bees and butterflies in the corn-fields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew straight down the High Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing strange latitudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people’s doorways into their passages, with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.
Or
The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley-mow and pitch a stone into the office-window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned the sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by; and at executions the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately before the drop, out of which the cows had been temporarily driven to give the spectators room.17
The Mayor of Casterbridge is a great book in detail and conception, flawed by having too much plot, too many incidents packed in too fast, so that you long for a pause in the action. At two thirds of the length it could have been still better than it is. Hardy himself complained that he had been driven by the demands of serialization to over-elaborate, and, although his inventiveness is impressive, he was right about there being too many twists and turns.18 Sometimes the chapters gallop through revelation and counter-revelation at a pace hard to keep up with or believe in. The central device – of a man who has made good out of a bad start and, just when it seems he can redeem himself, is drawn down into another spiral of mistrust, jealousy and misunderstanding – is quite enough, and the central trio, Henchard, his supposed daughter and his assistant Farfrae, strongly and subtly balanced, are always living presences. Around them the other characters gesture and play their parts picturesquely and impressively but without their depths. Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane turn through hope, conflict, hatred, forgiveness, love and despair, never quite predictably, as we watch his strength draining and hers developing. When she looks at Farfrae, she notices ‘how nicely his hair was cut, and the sort of velvet-pile or down that was on the skin at the back of his neck, and how his cheek was so truly curved as to be part of a globe, and how clearly drawn were the lids and lashes which hid his bent eyes’.19 Hardy is showing her appraising a man, finding him desirable and imagining how it would feel to touch his skin and hair – not what a nineteenth-century girl was supposed to imagine, but he was not going to deny her sexual feeling.
When Henchard torments her halfway through the book, she is described as a ‘dumb, deep-feeling, great-eyed creature’, reduced by unkindness almost to a suffering animal; Hardy also knew the ways in which men are cruel to women, and women submit.20 Towards the end Henchard reflects that out of his wronging of the social law had come ‘that flower of Nature, Elizabeth. Part of his wish to wash his hands of life arose from his perceptions of its contrarious inconsistencies – of Nature’s jaunty readiness to support bad social principles.’21 He is thinking of her illegitimacy, although you might expect him to take some comfort from ‘Nature’s jaunty readiness’, this man who moves like a great tree in the wind, who gazes ‘stormfully’ (a word Hardy coined for him) and emits ‘a blaze of satisfaction’ when he carries a point; who is described as leonine and with tigerish affections. But Henchard has been defeated, and Nature has become his enemy.
Hardy’s portrait of Henchard – depressive, black-tempered, self-destructive and also lovable, as a child is lovable – is one of his strongest achievements. He told a friend that the only tragedy that made him weep while writing it was The Mayor of Casterbridge.22 Henchard’s will forbidding mourning or memorials is a sort of soliloquy addressed to everyone who might read it, a way of cheering himself before he dies, negating the bad things he has done, choosing his own end, dramatizing himself against his environment; and ‘it is the moment at which we identify with him most completely.’23 Although Horace Moule was an entirely different case, it is still possible there were thoughts of him – drinker, charmer and suicide – coming into play in Hardy’s mind. In everyone there is some guilt, some fear that events from the past may turn out to have unforeseen consequences, and it may be that the gossip Hardy had heard of Moule’s bad behaviour to a poor Dorchester girl who went to Australia, pregnant with his child, was in his mind.
Another tenuous link with local life is in the naming of Abel Whittle. The manuscript shows him fiddling with Henchard’s name, trying out Giles and James before he settled on Michael, and with Farfrae’s, but he had most trouble with the name of the foolish workman humiliated by Henchard for being late, who appears variously as Smallbone, Small, Wringbone and John Wringbone in the manuscript before he is finally named Abel Whittle. When Whittle first appears he is shown as a near-pauper and a near-idiot, but at the end he becomes a saintly fool who goes to help the dying Henchard. The fact is there was a real Abel Whittle who had been a prosperous farmer at Maiden Newton where Jemima Hardy worked at the vicarage as a girl. His name appears in the census for 1851 and for 1861, when he was sixty-four, a farmer with 1,000 acres, living in Church Street close to the vicarage, with wife, three adult children and several servants; before that he was at nearby Up Cerne. Jemima would have known about him from her friends and could well have known him herself. She may have given Hardy the name, and she may have had reasons of her own for suggesting it to Hardy, or he may simply have found it himself and liked the sound of it. Even the faintest hint that he talked about his work with his mother is intriguing, since he is silent on the subject.24
If Hardy himself experienced rage like Henchard’s, he turned it inwards. He said he suffered from depression, telling a friend in a letter of 1887, ‘As to despondency I have known the very depths of it – you would be quite shocked if I were to tell you how many weeks and months in byegone years I have gone to bed wishing never to see daylight again.’25 He went on to say that ‘this blackest state of mind’ was something he suffered from rarely now, but that there were times when it returned. In November 1885, between finishing The Mayor of Casterbridge and seeing it published, he noted that he was ‘in a fit of depression, as if enveloped in a leaden cloud’. Then he wrote, ‘a tragedy exhibits a state of things in the life of an individual which unavoidably causes some natural aim or desire of his to end in catastrophe when carried out.’ This was putting prosily what his book had demonstrated dramatically. Was he now thinking of Henchard or of himself? A few weeks later, ‘This evening, the end of the old year 1885 finds me sadder than many previous New Year’s Eves have done.’26 This was just before the book began to be serialized in January 1886, and four months before it was published. A reader at Smith, Elder complained that the ‘lack of gentry among the characters made it uninteresting’. They printed only 750 copies and remaindered the book in under a year.
He must have planned the book in his head before he put pen to paper, writing it at a gallop in not much more than a year, and that a year full of interruptions as he supervised the building and furnishing of Max Gate and took up his position as a JP in the spring, sitting on the bench for the first time in the autumn. He was also away in London for part of June and July. In 1883 he and Emma made their first venture into taking part in the London Season, and from this point on it became an annual habit. It is one of the unforeseen and even shocking oddities of Hardy’s life that for the next twenty-five years, almost without a break, as the weather grew warm each spring, he chose to make the long train journey to Waterloo – still nearly four hours – and to exchange the beauty of the countryside, the birdsong and sweet air he celebrated in his writing, for a sooty atmosphere and unpredictable quarters in town in order to join in the upper-class rituals of the Season.
In the early years they stayed in modest hotels or lodgings in Bloomsbury, partly to be close to the British Museum, where Hardy used the reading room. As time went by they tried a great many lodgings, rented flats and occasionally houses, rarely returning to the previous year’s perch but experimenting boldly, sampling life in various parts of town: Bayswater, South Kensington, Holland Park, St John’s Wood, Marylebone, Manchester Square, Maida Vale and Victoria. As Hardy prospered, there were summers when they took their own servants with them, just as Hardy’s mother’s employers had taken her with them to London for the Season. Jemima herself may well, directly or indirectly, have put the idea that one should go up for the Season into her son’s head. It was what you did when you were rich, as she knew, and she must have been impressed and pleased to see her Tom marked out as one of the rich. It was not something Emma’s family had ever been in a position to contemplate doing, but she was pleased too, happy to sample the pleasures and amusements of the great world with him. The bonus for her was that she got him away from his mother’s influence at the same time. It was still a surprising way to choose to spend the best months of the year. They made occasional visits to town in winter and spring also, but the Season dominated their year. He considered himself ‘half a Londoner’.27
Hardy did some reading, and even a little writing, during his London Seasons. He went to the Savile, which moved to new premises on Piccadilly in 1882. He saw the summer show at the Royal Academy, and took in theatres and concerts. He attended ‘At Homes’, ‘crushes’, luncheons and dinners, even balls. In London he met the Dorset landowners who had not noticed his existence in Dorchester and found that in London he was a well-known figure. He kept an eye on politics. In 1886 he took himself into the House of Commons, admired the benevolence on Gladstone’s face and saw ‘the dandy party enter in evening-dress, eye-glasses, diamond rings etc. They were a great contrast to Joseph Arch and the Irish members in their plain, simple, ill-fitting clothes. The House is a motley assembly nowadays.’28 As his own fame grew, the society hostesses who took him up as a celebrity introduced him to politicians, Liberal and Conservative – Lord Salisbury, Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain, Asquith among them. When tea on the terrace of the House of Commons became fashionable, he was there taking his tea.
It was understandable that he should be pleased to lunch with a man of letters such as Lord Houghton, friend of Swinburne and editor of Keats, but he also ate and drank with men and women he could not have found congenial. Sometimes he wrote sardonic notes about them, how men just going into the Cabinet talked with no greater insight than you would expect from a group of Oxford Street shopkeepers, or how the political conversation at another dinner was ‘when the next election would be – of the probable Prime Minister – of ins and outs – of Lord This and the Duke of That – everything except the people for whose existence alone these politicians exist’.29 Looking at the expensively dressed ladies at an evening party, he famously asked himself, ‘If put into rough wrappers in a turnip-field, where would their beauty be?’30 He also found himself face to face with many landowners who spent the winter doing what he most detested, shooting game birds for pleasure.31
Yet Hardy was delighted to receive invitations from the aristocracy. These were the people who ran the country. They had the power and the money, and if they offered a glimpse into their privileged world, it was hard to resist. He saw too that entry into high society impressed Emma and made her happy. To her it was the proof of his success, the answer to her family’s disapproval and condescension. When Lady Portsmouth invited the Hardys to stay in the country, Emma wrote to her uncle, now Archdeacon Gifford, to boast about this social conquest.32 And Hardy was every bit as gratified as Emma. The snobbery of titles is still strong in the twenty-first century, and in the nineteenth it reigned supreme. Hardy might mock ‘Lord This and the Duke of That’, but he enjoyed being taken notice of by them, and he liked other people to know that he was taken notice of by them. He was also susceptible to the charm and flattery of their ladies, and they liked him, not only because he was a well-known author, but because he did not challenge or make demands; small, gentle and respectful, he was no danger to their daughters.
One society hostess became a real friend. In 1886 he met Mrs Jeune, five years younger than him, nice-looking, very rich in her own right and given to good works as well as to hospitality. She came from the Highland aristocracy and was related to the Duke of Wellington, and royalty had been present at her wedding to her first husband, a son of Lord Stanley of Alderley, who died young, leaving her with two infant daughters. Her second husband was Francis Jeune, son of a bishop, himself a lawyer and Conservative MP who became a judge, was knighted and finally accorded a peerage. They lived at the very heart of the Establishment.33 During the Season she ran almost non-stop lunches, dinners and crushes in her Wimpole Street house, moving in 1891 to Harley Street. Edith Wharton described her as ‘a born “entertainer” according to the traditional London idea, which regarded… the act of fighting one’s way through a struggling crowd of celebrities as the finest expression of social intercourse… She took a frank and indefatigable interest in celebrities, and was determined to have them all at her house.’34 Wharton nevertheless found her charming, became her close friend and loved staying with her. So did Hardy, who called her ‘the irrepressible Mrs Jeune’, but found that for him she would make time to sit quietly. She encouraged him to talk about his writing, which she admired, as she admired his modesty, and they came to know one another very well. He was there so often that Lord Rowton, who built lodging houses for the homeless, jocularly described him as Mrs Jeune’s dosser.35 He was captivated by her warmth and also by her small daughters. They filled a need for him, as he did for them, since they had no memory of their father, and by now he must have given up any hope of having children of his own. He stayed often enough in Wimpole Street to become ‘Uncle Tom’ to Madeleine and Dorothy, romping up and down the stairs with them and, as they grew older, taking them to the theatre. Long after she was grown up, married to a Conservative politician and a mother herself, he went on writing to ‘My dear little Dorothy’, and she went on calling him ‘Uncle’ for the rest of her life. They not only gave him their affection, they showed him what family happiness could be. There was always a bedroom for him at the Jeunes’ if he was in town on his own. Emma was also invited, although she rarely stayed with them. A surprising family connection was made when her uncle Archdeacon Gifford married Francis Jeune’s sister. It was a pity that Madeleine and Dorothy disliked Aunt Emma as much as they liked Uncle Tom, but they were too well brought up not to do their best to hide what they felt.36
Another who nudged Hardy slowly into friendship was his fellow Savilian, Edmund Gosse. Gosse was the man who had appointed himself the fixer of the London literary world. He was nine years younger than Hardy and had grown up in a modest household in Devon with a scholarly father whose interest in science existed alongside a rigid religious faith which rejected Darwin’s account of evolution. The younger Gosse was as clever as his father and soon they were in intellectual conflict. There was no money for university, and at seventeen he was given a probationary job at the British Museum, where he found the work ‘tedious slavery’ but stuck at it. His ambition was to become a poet, and he had an easy way of making friends with the younger lights of the world he aspired to enter; soon he was close to Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti and Swinburne. He began to review books. He was a fine linguist, took a holiday in Norway, discovered Ibsen’s work and introduced it to the English, to great effect. He married in the same year as Hardy, and his new brother-in-law, the artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, lent him a house close to Regent’s Park in which to begin his married life, which was a cheerful one and blessed with children. At the same time he was offered a well-paid sinecure as permanent translator to the Board of Trade. He had earned his luck, but it was astoundingly good luck, and from now on Gosse published his own indifferent poetry and a great many quickly forgotten studies of writers. He entertained energetically at home and in clubs, flattered his friends and proposed them for honours, became librarian to the House of Lords and dedicated himself to living the literary life more seriously than anyone else has ever done. There was something absurd about him, but he was not all absurd, because in his fifties he produced a masterpiece, one of the most powerful autobiographical books ever written, an account of his childhood, Father and Son.
Gosse’s eagerness to be Hardy’s friend came out of a sincere admiration for his work, and he persevered so successfully that in June 1883, having known him for several years and visited him during his illness in Tooting, he persuaded him to stay with his family for a weekend. Inevitably it culminated in a literary party at the Savile in honour of Howells, the American novelist, editor and friend of Henry James. Hardy found Howells amusing and noted down his stories. Howells found Hardy shy.37 But the friendship was now well launched, and Gosse was rewarded with a reciprocal invitation for a weekend visit to Dorchester in July, as well as a promise that Hardy would take him to meet William Barnes.
Gosse came when the Hardys had just made their move from Wimborne and were installed in Shire Hall Place, the rambling old house in the highest part of the town, where they were to live while the purchase of a building site was negotiated and their own house built. Hardy must have felt satisfaction in returning to Dorchester after so many years away, visibly successful, with a reputation as a writer, a wife and enough money to run a comfortable household and take himself to London or abroad whenever he chose, and the invitation to Gosse shows he felt at ease with his situation. Henry Moule was asked over to meet Gosse, and the three men went out for a stroll round the town together. Gosse was struck by the ‘colour and animation’ of Dorchester on a Saturday evening: ‘it looked in the dusk like a bright foreign town,’ he wrote to his wife, who had stayed at home with their children.38 The liveliness of the streets came from farmers and labourers in town to do their shopping at the Saturday fair, and the brilliantly uniformed infantry and cavalry soldiers from the barracks.39 On Sunday, Hardy escorted Gosse to hear the 82-year-old Barnes preach with undiminished energy to his flock at Winterborne Came, and accepted his invitation to take high tea with him afterwards.
Gosse’s letter to his wife Nellie included a careful comment on Emma: ‘she means to be very kind,’ he wrote. Hardy was too observant not to notice that his friend was sometimes rather at a loss in his attempts at conversation with his wife. To find that Emma’s zest for life, so much prized by him during their wooing, was not so attractive to others, and that her charm fell flat, was upsetting. Of course she was middle aged now. She no longer wore her glorious hair over her shoulders in curls, her strong features were settling into heaviness, and her talk sometimes strayed from the point and followed its own track in a way that had once seemed delightful but now sometimes disconcerting. Feeling unappreciated brings out the worst in everyone, and when people failed to warm to Emma she became more difficult. She had lost her hope of children, hardly saw her own family and was suspicious of his. A letter this year from her friend in Sturminster, Mrs Dashwood, also reminded her of her failed literary ambitions: ‘I hope your stories will emerge one after the other and pleasantly astonish the literary world, they have been concocting in your brain long enough and should now see the light… When will you and Mr Hardy spend a day with us? You have not visited this gay city for a long time, and ought to renew your acquaintance once with it.’40 Emma could say nothing of any publication prospects, alas, and there was no visit to the gay city of Sturminster. Gosse’s friendship with Hardy was strong enough to include Emma, but he never warmed to her in her own right.
The following summer, in August 1884, Hardy made a trip to the Channel Islands with his brother Henry, and without Emma. In October he was in London to dine with the Lord Mayor, and early in 1885 he went to stay with Lord and Lady Portsmouth in their ‘very handsome’ house in Devon, where he was fussed over by the ladies of the family. As well as this he worked at copying stories from local newspaper files of the 1820s and 1830s, using some of his findings in the current book: for instance, three stories about wife-selling and an account of wrestling. Emma took on a good deal of the copying for him.41 Their tenth wedding anniversary had been reached in September. In the previous year Hardy had written a poem called ‘He Abjures Love’, which he is unlikely to have shown her.42 No wife would be overjoyed to read:
Even if the last lines set it in perspective:
– I speak as one who plumbs
Life’s dim profound,
One who at length can sound
Clear views and certain.
But – after love what comes?
A scene that lours,
A few sad vacant hours,
And then, the Curtain.
Hardy’s poems are as likely to be dramatic statements of mood as expressions of fixed feeling, and moods are changeable. This terse farewell to love was by no means his last word on the subject, and there was a good deal more of it to come in his life. Another poem printed in the same group is ‘The Conformers’, which is also about the end of romance, this time for a couple, now settling down in ‘a villa chastely gray’. In it they will ‘house, and sleep, and dine… / friends will ask me of your health, / and you about my own’; and, their ‘dreaming done’, they will be remembered as ‘A worthy pair, who helped advance / Sound parish views’.43 For all the scorn in the poem, Hardy had become a JP, Emma was a regular churchgoer – often joined by him – and they were giving up their peripatetic life and building their own villa – plum-red rather than grey but solid enough to qualify as the home of a worthy pair of conformers, as Hardy saw, and was protesting about to himself.