1. ‘Dolly’ Gale of Piddlehinton, a wheelwright’s daughter and one of twelve children, was born in 1897, left school in 1911, saw an advertisement for a job as a maid with the Hardys, wrote off and bicycled over to be interviewed. She immediately liked Mrs Hardy and found her ‘considerate and kindly’. She disliked him. She said she never saw or heard them speak to each other in the year she spent there. She worked for them for about a year, leaving after Mrs Hardy’s death. She married and moved to Canada, where she was known as Alice Harvey, and she gave her recollections to J. Stevens Cox, who interviewed her in Ontario and wrote up the interview in The Thomas Hardy Year Book (St Peter Port, 1973–4). It must be remembered with this, as with other interviews given decades after the events described, that few people have perfect recall.
2. The placing of the coffin in his bedroom is described by Dolly Gale, ibid.
3. TH to Edward Clodd, 13 Dec. 1912, Letters, IV, 239.
4. Life, Chapter 32. Hardy explains that he has adopted the description of being ‘in flower’ as a poet from Walpole’s description of Gray.
5. ‘At Castle Boterel’. On the MS he first wrote ‘Boscastle: Cornwall’.
6. All of these quotes are from ‘Poems of 1912–13’. Hardy changed the ‘clodded’ to ‘jailing’ – I prefer the first version.
7. TH to Florence Henniker, 17 July 1914, Letters, V, 37–8.
8. The words are taken from the Aeneid, Book IV, line 23, where Dido explains that the love she once felt for her husband, now dead, will revive for Aeneas. In Book VI Aeneas, who has betrayed Dido’s love by abandoning her, so that she kills herself, encounters her silent ghost on his visit to Hades. J. Hillis Miller points out that the silence of Dido’s ghost is echoed in Hardy making the ghost of Emma ‘voiceless’ in ‘After a Journey’: see Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970), 248–9. There were originally eighteen poems, to which Hardy added three more in later editions.
9. There is also a faint echo of Donne’s ‘Twicknam Garden’ (‘Blasted with sighs and surrounded with tears / Hither I come to seek the spring’) in the line ‘Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost.’ Edmund Gosse had given Hardy an edition of the poems of John Donne for his birthday in the summer of 1908. See his letter of thanks, 24 July 1908, ‘The Donne has arrived and is just the type for my eyes… 1000 thanks.’ Letters, III, 326.
10. Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Page (1950), 386, Pound writing to John Lackay Brown [n.d. but Apr. 1937], about Hardy’s Collected Poems.
11. Sydney Cockerell noted Florence Hardy’s remark to him in his diary for 24 Sept. 1916. British Library Add. MSS 52653.
12. From the unpublished diary kept by Arthur Benson, Nov. 1913, by permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
13. TH to Florence Henniker, 23 Dec. 1914, Letters, V, 70–71. ‘When I Set Out for Lyonnesse’ is in Satires of Circumstance but not among the ‘Poems of 1912–13’; nor is ‘Under the Waterfall’, based on Emma’s own account of losing their picnic glass in the summer of 1870. ‘Lost Love’ and ‘My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound’ are also about Emma.
14. New Statesman, 23 Dec. 1914.
15. ‘Days to Recollect’, first published in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles, 1925. ‘On a Discovered Curl of Hair’ was written in Feb. 1913 but not published until 1922 in Late Lyrics and Earlier.
16. This is from ‘Penance’, first published in 1922 in Late Lyrics and Earlier.
1. Life, Chapter 1, first section. A surgeon is mentioned, but that is likely to be an embellishment, as cottage deliveries at this time were rarely presided over by doctors or surgeons. Life was written in the third person, since the author was ostensibly Hardy’s widow.
2. ibid.
3. ibid.
4. Hardy told Sydney Cockerell on 23 Aug. 1925 that ‘his mother had wished to call him Christopher, and that he wished he had had that name as there were so many Thomas Hardys.’ Cockerell’s diary for 1925, British Library Add. MSS 52662.
5. The 1801 census for Melbury Osmond is in the DCRO and shows Elizabeth Swetman, ‘Spinner’, living with her father, who was in Agricultural Husbandry, mother not working, and brother John employed like his father. See also Life, first section of Chapter 1.
6. The 1801 census shows ‘George Hann’, with some doubt about the spelling, in the household of the Revd Jenkins (DCRO).
7. Betty Hand to her daughter Mary, letter 17 Jan. 1842, in which she complains of her poverty separating her from her children, worries about her son Christopher’s brutal treatment of his pregnant wife and expresses her love for her grandson ‘Tomey’, i.e., little Thomas Hardy. DCM, Kate Hardy and Lock Collection.
8. TH to Frederic Harrison, 20 June 1918, Letters, V, 269.
9. Even if she went to school, as a girl she would have been made to concentrate on knitting, sewing and mending. A school founded in Dorchester in 1813 did not allow girls to learn either writing or ciphering (arithmetic) until they were ten and could already knit stockings, read the Bible fluently, repeat the Catechism and do ‘all sorts of common plain work’.
10. Personal communication from John Antell, great-grandson of Jemima’s younger sister Mary Hand and her husband, John Antell of Puddletown.
11. Kate Hardy to cousin Jim Sparks, 2 Dec. 1902, Sparks Archive, Hardy Collection, Eton College.
12. E.g., to her sister Martha after she emigrated to Canada. In July 1870 TH’s first cousin Louisa Sharpe, daughter of Jemima’s sister Martha, wrote to Jemima from Canada recalling how TH had written for his mother on 11 Jan. 1858: ‘a letter from you written by my cousin Thomas dated Jan. 11 1858’. DCM, H. 1975.316.30.
13. Henry Moule was appointed to Fordington, a village with a rough population, so close to Dorchester that it had become part of it. He had seven sons, of whom Horace particularly was Hardy’s friend.
14. TH to Lytton Strachey, 20 Apr. 1921, thanking him for the gift of his book on Queen Victoria. Letters, VI, 84.
15. Caroline Leonora Murray married Lord Ilchester in 1812 and died in childbirth at Melbury House in January 1819, her death recorded in the diary of Lady Susan O’Brien, her husband’s aunt, according to her sister Amelia Matilda Murray’s Recollections, from 1803 to 1837 (1868).
16. Amelia Matilda Murray, Recollections. Miss Murray lived from 1795 to 1884 and was the fourth daughter of Lord George Murray (1761–1803), Bishop of St David’s, who invented and organized the first telegraphic communication. In acknowledgement of this, Pitt gave a pension to his widow after his early death, and a dowry of £70 to each of his daughters.
17. She seems to have gone with her previous employer too, but she specified the time of her last visit when she went through London with her son in 1849. See Life, Chapter 1, section ‘A Journey’: ‘Mrs Hardy had not been to London since she had lived there for some months twelve years earlier.’
18. Life, first section of Chapter 1: ‘She resolved to be a cook in a London club-house; but her plans in this direction were ended by her meeting her future husband, and being married to him at the age of five-and-twenty.’ (In fact, she was twenty-six when she married.)
19. It happens that Hardy drew a plan of Stinsford House in his architectural notebook, and it shows that the library was one of the largest rooms. A facsimile of Hardy’s architectural notebook in the DCM was published in 1966 with notes by C. J. Beatty. The plan of Stinsford House is on p. 44.
20. Dr F. B. Fisher, quoted in Life in Thomas Hardy’s Dorchester 1888–1908, (Beaminster, 1965), 21.
21. Handley Moule, Memories of a Vicarage (1913), 67.
22. Jo Draper’s booklet Regency, Riot and Reform (2000) gives a useful summary.
23. Entry dated 30 Oct. 1870, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1978), ‘Memoranda, I’, 6–7.
24. He died in 1852.
25. Celia Barclay suggests in her study of Thomas Hardy’s cousin, Nathaniel Sparks: Memoirs of Thomas Hardy’s Cousin the Engraver (1994), 30, that Jemima went back to the Maiden Newton vicarage after Murray moved to London and worked as a cook for ‘Hon. William Scott MA’, and the information must have come through the Sparks family, i.e., her sister Maria, brother-in-law James and their children.
26. Life, Chapter 20, taken from diary entry for 14 Aug. 1892.
27. Census for 1841. Shirley kept four servants. He married later.
28. Robert Gittings in The Young TH suggests Kingston Maurward House, 7.
29. The 1841 Census gives Herbert Williams, banker, aged thirty-four, with wife, Marie, aged thirty-five, and seven servants.
30. See Celia Barclay, op. cit., 30–31.
31. Life, Chapter 20, entry for 4 Aug. 1892.
32. Life, first section of Chapter 1, for her wanting to be a cook in London. For her remark about rustic and quaint country neighbours, May O’Rourke reports Hardy telling her this about his mother, Hardyana (1966), 8–12.
33. Hardy told this to Edmund Blunden in July 1922, as he related in The Great Victorians, ‘Notes on Visits to Thomas Hardy’, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 171.
34. Life, Chapter 35, reporting a speech made by Hardy on opening Bockhampton Reading Room and Club on 2 Dec. 1919. He also spoke of there having been a water mill, homes for parish paupers, predating the workhouse system, and old Elizabethan houses of stone, with mullioned windows, near the withy bed.
35. Hardy pointed out the pit to Sydney Cockerell on Wednesday, 30 June 1926, telling him that his father had helped the smugglers. British Library Add. MSS 52663.
36. The story, set in the 1830s, was first published in 1879 in the New Quarterly Magazine and in America in Harper’s Weekly. It was collected in Wessex Tales.
37. See Robert Gittings The Older TH, 55–6. He found in the parish register that Hardy’s great-grandmother had an illegitimate son who died in infancy, and that in 1796 a girl was born to a Mary Head and a John Reed, baptized seven years later, in 1803, as Georgiana Reed at St Mary’s, Reading, and presumably given up by Mary Head, who then moved south to Dorset, where she met her future husband, Thomas Hardy. Other parts of Gittings’s research which appeared to link Mary Head’s story with that of Tess have been shown by Michael Millgate to be inaccurate.
38. Fanny Robin is the maid whom Sergeant Troy deserts to marry her mistress, Bathsheba, in Far from the Madding Crowd. Tess is the heroine of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, seduced by her ‘cousin’ Alec. She calls her baby ‘Sorrow’ and baptizes him herself before he dies.
39. TH to Florence Henniker, 27 Oct. 1918, Letters, V, 283.
1. He would certainly have learnt later that, although in Christian imagery the snake is a symbol of evil, in Greek mythology it signifies fertility and wisdom.
2. Opening words of Life. The census lists twenty-two children in Higher Bockhampton alone, with many more in the surrounding area.
3. Hardyana (1969), 229. Interview with Harold Voss.
4. He told Sydney Cockerell about hearing his parents on 12 Jan. 1927. British Library Add. MSS 52664.
5. Life, Chapter 38, section ‘Notes by F. E. H.’.
6. TH made the handkerchief rabbit for Middleton Murry’s daughter in the 1920s, and said he had not done it or seen it done for seventy-five years. Interviews and Recollections, 159.
7. Timothy Hands, Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher? (1989), 5 and note. Stinsford Church accounts for 1842 to 1871 show that Hardy’s father was paid sums of up to £15 a year for work he did for the church.
8. J. Stevens Cox in Hardyana (1964), 56, on apples grown at Bockhampton. On 12 June 1913 Mary Hardy wrote to TH saying their brother Henry’s garden was like their father’s, listing the vegetables in order: large beds of carrots, onions and parsnips, a patch of broad beans, a line of peas and potatoes recently hoed up. DCM, H.1975.316.22.
9. Life, Chapter 38, section ‘Notes by F. E. H.’.
10. Life, Chapter 1, first section.
11. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982), 38, Note 34, gives a reference to G. H. Moule, Stinsford Church and Parish (Dorchester, 1940), 27–8.
12. Sydney Cockerell noted Hardy’s words about the skull on 30 June 1926 when they drove to Stinsford and Bockhampton and past his first school. British Library Add. MSS 52663. It is a grisly one.
13. Life, Chapter 1, first section.
14. Life, Chapter 16, passage from journal dated 15–21 Oct. 1888.
15. Both stories in Life, Chapter 1.
16. Hardy told this to the publisher Newman Flower in his seventies. Interviews and Recollections, 176.
17. Hardy told T. E. Lawrence this story in 1925. Interviews and Recollections, 184.
18. Life, Chapter 1.
19. TH to William Archer in interview of 1901, Interviews and Recollections, 68. Hardy also said, in a speech made in 1910 on accepting the freedom of Dorchester, that he had seen a man in the stocks in Dorchester ‘in the back part of this very building’.
20. Life, Chapter 1, section ‘Birth and Boyhood 1849–50’.
21. ‘The Roman Road’ in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909).
22. Life, Chapter 1, section ‘Birth and Boyhood 1849–50’.
23. ‘Childhood among the Ferns’ was first printed in the Daily Telegraph on 29 Mar. 1928 and collected in Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).
24. Life, Chapter 1, first section.
25. Celia Barclay, Nathaniel Sparks: Memoirs of Thomas Hardy’s Cousin the Engraver (1994), 32.
26. The MS letter signed ‘Mary’, dated Hitchin, 11 Dec. 1846, begins ‘My dear Mother’. DCM.
27. He lived from 1816 to 1878, had four children and became an alcoholic. By family tradition he was one of the inspirations for Jude.
28. They were a couple, John and Martha Horsman, according to the 1851 Census. The attractive school building is still standing, but is now a private house and somewhat changed.
29. Contributory evidence to the supposition that Jemima was not a confident writer.
30. Life, Chapter 7. Hardy cancelled the passage, but it has been restored in later editions.
31. Hardy’s words in Life, Chapter 1, section ‘A Journey’.
32. The third-class fare on the London and South Western Railway in 1850 was 3 s. for an excursion train, which meant travelling in open carriages.
33. So he told Stewart M. Ellis in 1913, who described the conversation in an article in the Fortnightly Review, Mar. 1928, just after Hardy’s death. Cited in Interviews and Recollections, 110.
34. TH letter to Florence Dugdale, 18 Nov. 1909, about the actress playing Bathsheba in a production of Far from the Madding Crowd: ‘she gave the real B. quite startlingly to me, seeming just like my handsome aunt from whom I drew her.’ Letters, IV, 58.
35. Life, Chapter 1, ‘A Journey’.
36. In the DCM.
37. Life, Chapter 1, section ‘Birth and Boyhood 1849–50’.
38. The census for 1851, taken in June, shows that Kingston Maurward House was empty.
1. We don’t know where his Bockhampton cousins, the children of his uncle James Hardy, were educated, but one of them, Augustus, a year older than Thomas, left Dorset, settled in Twickenham and raised his children there. One of his sons, Henry, became an Anglican clergyman, and his son Basil Augustus went to Oxford and became head of the choir school of Chester Cathedral. Augustus died in 1916, and Hardy wrote a letter of condolence to the eldest son, Albert; and there is a sparse occasional exchange of letters, initiated by the Revd Henry, who invited Hardy to visit him in Fifeshire in 1906 when he went to Aberdeen – Hardy declined – and sent a card for his seventy-second birthday. See Letters, V, 151.
Uncle James’s eldest son married a local girl and the second, Walter, died as a child in 1844. The girl, Theresa, born in 1843, remained all her life at Bockhampton, eccentric, reclusive and disliked by Thomas Hardy’s family.
Uncle James is known to have given violin lessons as well as being a builder. He lived until 1880, but the two families were not on close terms.
2. See, for instance, the history of Joseph Arch, whom Hardy knew and admired later when he was a trades union organizer and MP. Arch was born in Warwickshire in 1826. His father owned his own cottage, and his mother was a strong-willed, intelligent woman – she had been a nurse and laundress at Warwick Castle – but Arch got only three years of schooling and went to work when he was nine, scaring crows in the fields for a farmer twelve hours a day for fourpence (the experience Hardy gave to Jude). The best his mother could do for him was to encourage him to read in the evening, and she died early. He worked his way up as a ploughboy and hedge-cutter. He wrote his own Life (1898).
3. James Savage, History of Dorchester (1832) gives the time of the arrival of the London post and the name of the local paper, Dorset County Chronicle and Somersetshire Gazette, in full, founded in 1821.
4. Savage, op. cit. The theatre was put up in Back West Street in 1828 by the theatre manager Henry Lee.
5. Captain Frederick Hovenden, in charge of defence measures during risings of 1830, to the Home Office, from Barbara Kerr, Bound to the Soil: A Social History of Dorset 1750–1918 (1968).
6. For Hardy pulling the carriage, Life, 50, giving Florence Hardy as source, in conversation with R. L. Purdy and written down by him in his private notes, 1931. A search of the electoral registers shows that Hardy’s father acquired a vote only in 1885.
7. Life, Chapter 38, Florence Hardy’s notes made after drive with TH, 4 Nov. 1927.
8. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 39, ‘On Casterbridge Highway’, and Chapter 6, ‘The Fair; the Journey; the Fire’.
9. Life, Chapter 38, Florence Hardy’s notes dated 27 Oct. 1927.
10. ibid. This is Florence Hardy’s rendering of his words. Robert Gittings suggests the men were smugglers sitting on their casks, although it may seem unlikely that they would hide them from a small boy. Another possibility is that they were strolling actors.
11. A Pair of Blue Eyes, Vol. II, Chapter 9.
12. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Chapter 43. The Return of the Native, Book 4, Chapter 5.
13. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 14 Oct. 1917: ‘My husband says he did not like going to school as a boy.’ Letters of E & F Hardy, 133.
14. Anonymous article ‘My Famous Schoolfellows’ in Sunday at Home, 1915, reprinted in Interviews and Recollections, 1. Author P. claimed to have been at school with Hardy and sometimes walked home with him. Jemima Hardy described her husband and father-in-law as having curly hair in her description of their appearance when she first knew them, given to Hardy 14 Aug. 1892: see Life, Chapter 20.
15. Farmer Locke, talking in 1931 to Llewelyn Powys at the unveiling of the statue of Hardy in Dorchester; given in Interviews and Recollections, 4.
16. According to George (Dadie) Rylands, who wrote to James Gibson on 9 Nov. 1990, ‘my Great Grandfather was Rector of West Stafford (next parish to Stinsford) for 60 years. He had a large family – contemporary with Hardy: who as a boy on his way to Dorchester School had a glass of milk at the Rectory and later became a close friend. One son, Bosworth, a Master at Harrow, knew him best.’ True, although West Stafford was not on the direct way from Bockhampton to Dorchester. He goes on to describe his own visit to Hardy: ‘It was clear that he had very warm memories of the Stafford children in early days; I have a Golden Treasury given by one Great Uncle in memory of another to his sister Mary.’ This letter is in an archive given to me by the late James Gibson.
17. Julia Green née Harding, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 3.
18. TH to James Murray, 9 July 1903, Letters, III, 70.
19. Interview with William Archer, Apr. 1901, printed in Interviews and Recollections, 67 (from Archer’s Real Conversations).
20. TH to William Rothenstein, who had sent him The Village Labourer: 1760–1832. A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill (1911), by John Lawrence and Barbara Bradby Hammond, 11 Mar. 1912, Letters, IV, 206. Hardy said this happened soon after his return from Hatfield, i.e., in 1850, when he was nine or ten.
21. Dorset County Chronicle, 22 May 1834. Cited by Jo Draper in Regency, Riot and Reform (2000).
22. Life, Chapter 1, section ‘1852’.
23. Biography Revisited, 49 and note, attributes this story to Nathaniel Sparks.
24. Handley Moule recalls, in his Memories of a Vicarage (1913), how his father, the rector of Fordington, took him and two of his brothers by train to see the Exhibition.
25. Hardy was well informed about the trains. See his story of 1893 ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, in which he describes the arrival of the heroine on an 1851 excursion train from Dorchester, having travelled with her little girl in just such an open carriage. It is early summer, and they are wearing cotton dresses; both are chilled and wet through. He tells us that some of the men travelled without hats, and the women put their skirts over their heads to protect themselves from the rain, getting their hips wet and cold in the process.
26. It was suggested by Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman in Providence and Mr Hardy (1966), that Tryphena was Rebecca’s illegitimate child, brought up as her younger sister. It is possible, but unproven in their book, and not likely to be proven or disproved at this date.
27. Lord Salisbury gave £50 towards the Sharpes’ passage. I am indebted to Robin Harcourt Williams, archivist at Hatfield House, for this information.
28. Hardy told Sydney Cockerell that he had ‘very little in common’ with Henry. Cockerell’s diary, 17 Apr. 1916, British Library Add. MSS 52653.
29. It was supported by the British and Foreign Bible Society, a Nonconformist body, and also by the considerable Congregationalist community in and around Dorchester.
30. Hardy describes a village confirmation in Chapter 24 of Two on a Tower, his young hero being an unenthusiastic candidate. In Chapter 22 the villagers comment that there has not been a confirmation for twenty years in the parish, and that in the past ‘The Bishops didn’t lay it on so strong then as they do now. Now-a-days, yer Bishop gies both hands to every Jack-rag and Tom-straw that drops the knee afore him; but ’twas six chaps to one blessing when we was boys.’ In a letter of 8 May 1923 to Arthur Benson he recalls that he was confirmed by the Bishop of Salisbury, Letters, VI, 194.
31. In the Life, Chapter 1, penultimate paragraph, Hardy says the original girl ‘was by no means a model of virtue in her love-affairs’, but Marian is not so characterized. She takes to alcohol when working conditions are harsh, but otherwise she is trustworthy and loyal and tries to help Tess. Her chief bond is with her friend Izzy, who becomes her companion in their travels as itinerant labourers.
32. ‘Lizbie Browne’ was written for the gamekeeper’s daughter, Elizabeth Bishop, a lively poem with a dancing rhythm, published in his first collection, Wessex Poems and Other Verses. It calls up her red hair, her gaiety and bright glance, regrets his failure to woo her, being too young, says she married someone else and was happy and had no reason to remember him. ‘The Passer-By’ (in Late Lyrics and Earlier) gives Louisa a voice to describe a young man – presumably Hardy – who passed her window and blushed at the sight of her, until she came to love him but too late – he stopped passing by. ‘Louie’, written in July 1913 (in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles), raises the phantom of ‘Louie the buoyant’ but says ‘She will never thrust the foremost figure out of view!’ (the foremost figure being that of his first wife, Emma), rather a backhanded compliment. Finally ‘To Louisa in the Lane’, a short, late poem in Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres, imagines meeting her ghost in the lane where they had passed one another when young. The real Louisa never married and lived out her life in Dorchester, but as far as we know they had no contact in later life. It was the memory of the young Louisa he cherished.
33. TH to Edmund Gosse, 22 Jan. 1920, Letters, VI, 3.
34. This is from Florence Hardy’s letter of 3 Apr. 1937 to Morris Parish about Joshua J. Foster, a few years younger than Hardy, son of the Dorchester bookseller James Foster, listed in the 1861 Census as bookseller and printer. Florence reported that ‘JJF told me this himself, and he was the only person I ever spoke to who remembered T.H. at that early age.’ Letters of E & F Hardy, 346.
35. Life, Chapter 2, first paragraph.
36. ibid.: ‘he had sometimes… wished to enter the Church.’
37. The present John Antell told me that it was well known in the family that Jemima Hardy disapproved of large families and had not wanted one herself.
38. He told his second wife, Florence, and she passed it on to R. L. Purdy in 1933. Timothy Hands has questioned whether Shirley was likely to have preached in this way, saying that both his character and the ethics of Tractarianism made it unlikely (Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher?, 1989, 10). But it seems unlikely that Hardy would have imagined it, and there is plenty of evidence of clergymen objecting to village people getting above themselves – see, for example, Joseph Arch’s Life.
39. James Criswick, Walks Round Dorchester (1820).
40. TH to Lady Pinney, 20 Jan. 1926, Letters, VII, 5. Robert Gittings suggests in The Young TH, 34, that Hardy’s response to the hanging ‘supplied at least part of the emotional power of his best-known novel’. Gittings also accuses him of finding some sort of sexual meaning in hanged women. His ideas have been taken up by other writers, e.g., Howard Jacobson in his novel Peeping Tom.
41. Household Words, 30 Oct. 1852, cited in Philip Collins’s Dickens and Crime (1994).
42. TH to W. Stebbing, Oct. 1926, Letters, VII, 46.
43. Life, Chapter 2, section ‘July 1856’.
1. Barnes, born in 1801 in north Dorset, had published poems both in English and in the dialect. He was now a widower and his school was failing. It closed in 1862, when he was given a ‘Literary Pension’ of £30 a year by the government, and a living at Winterborne Came, three miles from Dorset, where he settled in the parsonage.
2. According to Hardy’s great-nephew John Antell the Hardy family spoke what he calls ‘old Dorset’, in which pronunciation, grammatical construction and some vocabulary would all differ from standard English. Hardy said they did not speak the local dialect at home, only with the men who worked for his father, but ‘old Dorset’ and the dialect would certainly have shaded into one another.
3. Swithin St Cleeve’s Granny Martin in Two on a Tower, written in 1881–2, Chapter 2. Swithin’s father was a clergyman who married beneath him, his mother a village girl who was not accepted by the local gentry. Both parents die young, and Swithin, brought up by his maternal grandmother, is a very clever boy and has been sent to the grammar school.
4. In his novel A Laodicean.
5. He become curator of the Dorset County Museum in 1883.
6. This was in 1833. Handley Moule, Memories of a Vicarage (1913), 56–7.
7. In 1854 there was an outbreak of cholera in the Millbank Prison in London, where 700 convicts were held, and the Home Secretary, learning that the Dorchester barracks were empty, simply packed off all the prisoners and their warders to Dorset. In Moule’s parish the women were used to taking in washing from the barracks to earn money, and within days of the prisoners’ arrival two women had arranged to do washing for them. In another few days there were cases of cholera in Fordington, and people began to die. The disease was not yet understood, and those who could fled, but Moule stayed. Fires in the streets were thought to purify the air, and he made such bonfires, using them to burn linen and bedding and to heat cauldrons to disinfect. He held open-air services. He hardly expected to survive himself but worked steadily, visiting, comforting, burning, boiling and praying. His school was closed, but he sent two of his sons out on ponies to millers in the area, asking them to release river waters to wash out the local ponds. He aimed to confine the outbreak to Fordington, and he succeeded.
8. Meanwhile Dr John Snow was establishing how it travelled through an infected water pump in London and a parcel of infected clothes in Yorkshire, but he had not yet published his findings, and the disease was still a mystery, like the plague. It killed quickly and spread through bacteria, for which water and soiled clothing were ideal agents.
9. Handley Moule, Memories of a Vicarage, 62
10. Information from Handley Moule’s Memories of a Vicarage and J. B. Harford’s Biography of Bishop Moule (1922).
11. Information from The Memory of the Just is Blessed: A Brief Memorial of Mrs Moule of Fordington (1877), 56, quoting a letter of 20 Apr. 1871 which mentions Horace writing to her ‘almost every year’ about the death of the fifteen-month-old baby.
12. From ‘The Muffled Peel’, 1858:
Flow gently, sweet Frome, under Grey’s gleaming arches,
Where shines the white moon on thy cold sparkling waves;
Flow gently tonight, while time silently marches
Fast hastening to lay the Old Year in her grave.
13. See H. and H. Moule, Fordington Times Society (1859), privately printed.
14. Bastow went first to London and then Tasmania, where he practised as an architect. His letters are in the DCM. None of Hardy’s has survived, and the correspondence dwindled away within a few years.
15. Timothy Hands, Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher? (1989), 14.
16. A manuscript in his hand adds a note, ‘[T. Hardy’s [first del] earliest known production in verse] (originally written between 1857 and 1860 this being a copy some years later.)’ See Variorum Poems, 3.
17. Life, Chapter 2, section ‘Student and Architect 1860–61’.
18. The story about Martha comes from the family of her brother Nathaniel Sparks. For Mary Waight, the only evidence is the word of a granddaughter who was five years old when her grandmother died: see Thomas Hardy Proposes to Mary Waight (Beaminster, 1964), a leaflet reporting Constance M. Oliver’s words to J. Stevens Cox in 1963. Mary Waight was born in 1833. She worked in a Dorchester shop selling mantles, i.e., coats. She married George Oliver in 1865, bore a son the same year, and her husband emigrated alone to the US almost at once. She kept a lodging house at 1 West Walks in Dorchester and died in Jan. 1915. She never spoke about Hardy, and the story was told by her daughter-in-law, who said there had been a signed photograph of Hardy in her possession but which had disappeared.
19. Asked about his boyhood by a journalist, Hardy, in his forties, described it as ‘uneventful and solitary’, which may have been simply a way of dealing with the journalist; but the ‘solitary’ invites a question about Mary, so close to him in age and so little mentioned in his own accounts of his life. TH to William Henry Rideing, journalist compiling collection ‘The Boyhood of Living Authors’, Letters, I, 13 Dec. 1886, 158.
20. Life, end of Chapter 37, his own note dated 23 Dec. 1925.
21. All the other students at Salisbury were Queen’s Scholars at this time. There was a government grant to cover this, and it was highly unusual for any students to be paid for by their families. Teacher training colleges for young women were first set up in England in the 1840s by two competing religious groups, the Church of England and the Nonconformist British and Foreign Bible Society. Both were supported by the government, which gave them grants to cover the costs of non-paying students. They were known as ‘Queen’s Scholars’, and most had been pupil teachers in their schools. Mary had not, which may be why she was not taken as a scholar at first. The Salisbury college was one of the first, founded in 1841 (it closed in 1978). A similar college for young men at Winchester was founded in 1840.
22. From an anonymous account by a student of the 1850s printed in Clare Conybeare’s Short History of the King’s House, Salisbury [1987], 10.
23. Jude the Obscure, Part III, Chapter 3.
24. Jude the Obscure, Part III, Chapter 1. This is Sue speaking to Jude when he visits her. ‘She told him about the school as it was at that date, and the rough living, and the mixed character of her fellow-students, gathered together from all parts of the diocese.’
25. Frederick Maurice in his ‘Lectures to Ladies on Practical Subjects’ in 1855, cited by Ray Strachey in The Cause (1928), 168.
26. The first women’s colleges in Oxford and Cambridge were started in the 1870s. Mill’s The Subjection of Women appeared in 1869. Florence Nightingale became a public heroine by her work during the Crimean War and set up her School of Nursing in 1861 at St Thomas’s Hospital.
27. Under the Greenwood Tree, Part IV, Chapter 2.
28. Diary of Wynne Alfred Bankes, pupil of Moule, cited in Biography Revisited, 60, from DCRO.
1. Life, Chapter 4, section ‘1869’. The rest of the information in this paragraph comes from the Life, from his letters to his sister Mary, from later letters (on hearing Mill, see below note 26) and from poems dated by him to the 1860s. Some is inferred from his other writing, e.g., going into Rotten Row, which he described in both his first unpublished novel, as we know from the comments of a publisher, and in A Pair of Blue Eyes.
2. In Life, Chapter 14, he writes ‘In evening to bookstalls in Holywell Street known to me so many years ago.’
3. So Hardy told Sydney Cockerell on 26 July 1917, standing on Adelphi Terrace. Cockerell diary for 1917, British Library Add. MSS 52654.
4. Life, Chapter 4, section ‘1869’.
5. Celia Barclay, Nathaniel Sparks: Memoirs of Thomas Hardy’s Cousin the Engraver (1994), 32, for information about James and Nat in London.
6. This is Picotee arriving in Feb., in The Hand of Ethelberta.
7. TH to Mary Hardy, 19 Feb. 1863, Letters, I, 3–4.
8. The Hand of Ethelberta, Chapter 32.
9. TH to Florence Henniker, 21 Apr. 1912, Letters, IV, 211.
10. See Leon Edel’s Henry James: The Untried Years (1953), 288–91, with quotations from his letters to his family on his arrival in London in Mar. 1869.
11. Life, Chapter 3, section ‘A New Start’.
12. For reference: Hardy’s salary was better than Gosse’s starting pay of £100 a year at the British Museum, less than the £250 Eliza Lynn Linton earned by journalism in a year, and a great deal less than the £400 a year allowed to the young Swinburne by his father.
13. TH to Mary Hardy, 17 Aug. 1862, Life, Chapter 3.
14. TH to Mary Hardy, 19 Feb. 1863, Letters, I, 4; TH to Mary Hardy, 19 Dec. 1863, Letters, I, 5; TH to Mary Hardy, 5 Oct. 1865, Letters, I, 5. Information from Christian Wolmar’s The Subterranean Railway (2004), 39, 41, 81.
15. Horace Moule to TH, 2 Mar. 1863, DCM H. 4469.
16. George Somes Layard, Mrs Lynn Linton: Her Life, Letters and Opinions (1901), chapter on the 1850s, when she arrived in London.
17. Life, Chapter 3, section ‘At Blomfield’s’.
18. This house is still standing. Clarence Place in Kilburn has gone.
19. Eliza Nicholls (1840–1914) is a shadowy figure. R. L. Purdy heard about her from her niece in the 1950s, who said Hardy had given her his photograph, which she produced, and a ring, and said they were engaged for several years, and that she was the original for Cytherea in Desperate Remedies, which seems particularly far-fetched. She was the daughter of a coastguard official who worked at Kimmeridge in Dorset until 1861, when he moved to Findon in Sussex and ran a pub there. Millgate believes that there was an ‘understanding’ between them from 1863, when she left London, which lasted until 1867, and it is true that Hardy visited Findon in 1866, when he drew the church. It is possible, but not certain, that she inspired the ‘She, to Him’ sonnets. She never married and is said to have called on Hardy after the death of his first wife. Caution is necessary with stories given by descendants because well-known men attract claims of this kind.
20. See Chapter 4, p. 57 and Note 18.
21. Note dated in Life, Chapter 3, section ‘At Blomfield’s’.
22. There were probably more than four sonnets in the sequence originally, but these were the ones he thought worth saving and published in his first collection, Wessex Poems and Other Verses, in 1898.
23. Printed in Poems of the Past and the Present, published 1901, the poem has a note at the end reading ‘Westbourne Park Villas 1866’.
24. An obvious exception is George Eliot, who triumphed over the disadvantages of being female, low-born, provincial, denied university education and irregular in her sexual life, by having a brain so large and a personality so strong that she imposed herself on Victorian society through her writing as no one else did.
25. This is Sol Chickerel, one of two brothers, country-born carpenters working in London, in The Hand of Ethelberta. Other remarks are made to his sister, who has bettered herself: ‘you keep to your class, and we’ll keep to ours’ and ‘you’d better not bide here, talking to we rough ones.’ And she says, ‘My brother… represents the respectable British workman in his entirety, and a touchy individual he is… on points of dignity, after imbibing a few town ideas from his leaders.’ Robert Gittings believes that Hardy based Sol, ‘a carpenter of radical tendencies’, on his cousin James, and in The Young TH, 103, quotes from a letter from the younger brother, Nat, about James, describing him as ‘a real loyal Rad’. Gittings does not give a date for the letter but says that James was then working at Windsor, hence the ‘loyal’ – possibly satirical? I have not been able to trace the letter.
26. The description was written in a letter to The Times, 20 May 1906, reprinted in Chapter 28 of Life. Either Hardy was using old diary notes or his memory was phenomenal.
27. A search of the register of electors for Bockhampton and Dorchester in 1851/2 shows that Thomas Hardy’s name was not entered. Nor was it entered for 1866/7.
28. Gittings describes in The Young TH, 79, this annotation in Hardy’s copy of Queen Mab and Other Poems, bought and inscribed by Hardy in 1866. The Revolt of Islam is a political epic in twelve cantos, originally written under the title ‘Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution in the Golden City, A Vision of The Nineteenth Century’. It alludes to the French Revolution but transposes the action to the East. The revolution is set off by an incestuous brother and sister, both ardent feminists.
29. Park Honan, Matthew Arnold (1981), 240–41.
30. Life, Chapter 3, section ‘At Blomfield’s’.
31. See Delmore Schwartz’s ‘Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy’, on which I draw here, printed in Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Albert Guerard (1963).
32. Horace Moule to TH, 2 July 1863, from Dorchester, DCM, H. 4470.
33. Horace Moule to TH, 21 Feb. 1864, DCM, H. 4471.
34. So Hardy says in the Life, Chapters 3 and 19. Note however that Arthur Benson, in a conversation about Newman with Hardy in 1904, thought he heard him say ‘I joined the RC Church for a time, but it has left no impression.’ See Chapter 19 below, p. 284.
35. According to his poem ‘A Confession to a Friend in Trouble’, dated 1866.
36. Diary of Wynne Albert Bankes in DCRO, quoted in Biography Revisited, 68. Millgate also quotes from R. L. Purdy’s notes of a conversation with Florence Hardy in 1933 giving the story of Moule having an affair with a Mixen Lane Dorchester girl who went to Australia, adding the gruesome extra that the son of the girl was hanged. Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982), 154.
37. Horace Moule to TH [fragment undated but probably June 1867], DCM, H.4472.
38. First printed in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses in 1909, placed and dated ‘16 W.P.V. 1866’.
39. MS title ‘An Exhortation’. First printed as ‘A Young Man’s Exhortation’ in Late Lyrics and Earlier in 1922, fifty-five years after he wrote it, dated and given its place of composition as Westbourne Park Villas.
40. They also represent his withdrawn state. This is roughly what T. S. Eliot described years later as an objective correlative. First printed in Wessex Poems and dated 1867.
41. In Wessex Poems.
42. It lasted long enough for Sydney Cockerell to have it handsomely bound in 1917, but Hardy later burnt it. See Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 10 Feb. 1917, and note, Friends of a Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, ed. V. Meynell (1940), 295.
1. Hardy’s own description in Life, Chapter 4, section ‘End of Summer 1867’.
2. Used at the end of Under the Greenwood Tree: ‘Tippiwit! swe-e-et! ki-ki-ki!’
3. Hardy says in Life, Chapter 4, section ‘1869’, that the manuscript was read by only three people, Macmillan, Morley and Meredith, and he told Cockerell that he was the fourth person to read it, but this is clearly wrong because it must have been read by Chapman’s reader and Tinsley, and it seems unlikely that Moule would write a letter of recommendation without having read it.
4. ibid.
5. TH to Alexander Macmillan, 10 Sept. 1868, Collected Letters, I, 8.
6. Information from Hardy’s published letters and from Life, Chapter 4, section ‘1869’.
7. Emma Gifford, who became his first wife, remembered it as yellowish in 1870.
8. A description from Chapter 3 of Desperate Remedies.
9. The note on the boat trip is from Hardy’s ‘Poetical Matter’ notebook, cited by Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982), 112. Catherine Pole (1845–91) was the daughter of James Pole, the butler at West Stafford House, not far from Bockhampton. She went to London with her mistress Emily Fellowes when the latter married in 1872, and herself married a Londoner, landlord of a pub in Shepherd’s Market, and died young.
10. Hardy’s first cousin Nat Sparks left London at about the same time that he did and went to work in Somerset, becoming a restorer of violins and other musical instruments. He married Mary Hardy’s college friend Annie Lanham in 1877 and settled in Bristol. His son, confusingly also named Nat Sparks, became a fine artist. He disliked Thomas Hardy and resented what he felt were the superior airs of the Hardy family. In fact, Mary and Kate Hardy kept up friendly relations with the Sparkses – there are letters to show this – but Hardy himself did become distant and formal towards them. Nat talked and wrote about Hardy at various times – e.g., in letters cited by Robert Gittings, The Young TH, 115 and Note 17, where he claimed that Hardy had wanted to marry his aunt Martha. More of his views appear in Celia Barclay’s Nathaniel Sparks: Memoirs of Thomas Hardy’s Cousin the Engraver (1994). Lois Deacon took up the idea of a love affair between Hardy and Tryphena and expanded it into a book written with Terry Coleman, Providence and Mr Hardy (1966), which takes off into fantasy.
11. The story of a love affair between Hardy and Tryphena, with the birth of an illegitimate son, caused a stir, but no hard evidence has ever been produced to support it. Tryphena attended Stockwell Training College on a scholarship from Jan. 1870 to Dec. 1871, did very well and was immediately appointed headmistress of a small girls’ school in Plymouth at a salary of £100 a year. Her sister Rebecca went to live with her. After six years she resigned her post in order to marry a local publican, Charles Gale. There were four children, and she died young of cancer in 1890. Hardy wrote his poem ‘Thoughts of Phena’ in memory of her.
12. There was some communication between them later. In 1902 Hardy told his sister Mary he had heard from Martha, announcing the coming visit to England of two members of her family, May and Ethel. A letter from Kate Hardy to her cousin Jim Sparks, 2 Dec. 1902, confirms that a grandson of Martha was brought to see him and was christened in Puddletown Church (Sparks Archive, Hardy Collection, Eton College). Martha died in 1916. According to Emma Cary’s son James, many of the Cary family became schoolteachers in Queensland. Letter from James Cary to TH, 11 Sept. 1925, DCM, B5.
13. The Mystery of Edwin Drood did not begin to be serialized until the spring of 1870.
14. Robert Gittings speculated that his cousin Martha Sparks might be his source, perhaps the most likely, although it could have been another of the several maids he knew well.
1. One of the first reviews of Desperate Remedies was in the Athenaeum, 1 Apr. 1871, 398–9, and praised a character as ‘really almost worthy of George Eliot’. When Far from the Madding Crowd began to be serialized, the Spectator guessed that Eliot was the author. The comparison with French novelists comes from an unsigned article in the Saturday Review, 2 Aug. 1873, 36, 158–9.
2. Henry Holt of Holt & Williams in New York was quick to acquire Hardy’s work. In June 1873 they started with Under the Greenwood Tree and went on to A Pair of Blue Eyes in July, then Desperate Remedies the following Mar. Far from the Madding Crowd would follow in Nov. 1874.
3. Emma described herself as the fair sister, Helen being the dark one, and because of A Pair of Blue Eyes people expected her to have blue eyes like the heroine. When she described herself in 1892, however, she said her eyes were dark.
4. Most likely a slightly dislocated hip that went untreated.
5. Emma Hardy to Lady Grove, 23 Jan. 1906, Letters of E & F Hardy, 32.
6. Rawle (1812–89) was consecrated Bishop of Trinidad in June 1872 and returned to the West Indies, where he remained until his death.
7. By then it had become important to him to fix every detail of their life together, but the poem is a plod: ‘Green slates – seen high on roofs, or lower / In waggon, truck or lorry – / Cry out: “Our home was where you saw her / Standing in the quarry!” ’ In another version of his visit, given to Eden Philpotts in a letter of 24 Oct. 1915, he was taken back to the manager’s house and given gin and hot water at the end of his visit. Perhaps there were two visits?
8. Her remarks in this paragraph are from her own writing published after her death as Some Recollections of Emma Hardy, ed. Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings (1961), as are her remarks about neighbours.
9. The four phrases come from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, Wordsworth’s ‘Phantom of Delight’ and Shelley’s ‘Song’: ‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou / Spirit of Delight!’
10. The poem clearly describes the end of his first visit, although he suggests it might have been the second in Life, Chapter 5. The dark dawn, alley of bare boughs overhead in the garden, clammy lawn, candlelight in the house, all point to Mar., not Aug.
11. He gave them to Henry Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes, according to his own testimony in Life, Chapter 5.
12. Louisa Sharpe was acting as mother to a brood of younger siblings. As the years went by, she is likely to have heard something of cousin Tom and his work, but she did not try to contact him again. She outlived him by many years, reaching the noble age of ninety-seven and dying in 1941.
13. Life, Chapter 5.
14. Some Recollections, 35.
15. Millgate points out in Biography Revisited, 119 and note, that there is a pencilled note of a scene something like this by Hardy in the endpapers of a German prose textbook in R. L. Purdy’s private collection, reading: ‘Sc. rusty harrow – behind that rooks – behind them, 2 men hoeing mangel, with bowed backs, behind that a heap of couch smoking, behind these horse & cart doing nothing in field – then the ground rising to plantn.’ So there were no other lovers in view.
16. All three are in the DCM.
17. Lyonesse was the name given to a mythical land between Land’s End and the Scilly Isles from which came King Arthur and Tristram: ‘that sweet land of Lyonesse’, according to Spenser in the Faerie Queene; it was ‘Lyones’ in Milton’s Paradise Regained.
1. This is from the Hardys’ friendly but objective neighbour Evangeline Smith. See Michael Rabiger’s account of the papers of Harold Hoffman in The Thomas Hardy Year Book (St Peter Port, 1981). Hoffman interviewed Evangeline Smith in 1939 and noted what she said about Jemima’s complaints. Hoffman’s papers are held at Miami University of Ohio. This is the only record of her views, given long after Mrs Hardy’s death, and uncheckable, but likely to be true.
2. From Hardy’s Notebooks, ed. Evelyn Hardy (1955), 31, quoting from a letter by Emma dated Oct. or Nov. 1870.
3. Biography Revisited, 122 and note. The Shakespeare is in the DCM.
4. The quotation is from Scott’s 1830 introduction to his novel The Monastery, first published in 1820, in which he apologizes for its clumsy construction.
5. Simon Gatrell gives a full and clear account of these striking additions and changes, based on his study of the manuscript, in Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (1988).
6. Tim Dolin, in his introduction to the 1998 Penguin Classics edition, on p. xxiii, writes of Hardy disowning the first published version as ‘the careless work of his youth’. He also suggests, on p. xxiv, that ‘The dominant love romance of 1872 was a paltry confection for subscribers to circulating libraries, he implied.’ See also Hardy’s remark in a letter to Florence Henniker that ‘the “Mellstock” choir’ consisted of ‘the characters that I like best in my own novels’. 30 Dec. 1896, Letters, II, 141.
7. Under the Greenwood Tree, Part I, Chapter 8.
8. ‘Great Things’, first printed in 1917, lists cider, dancing and love as three great things for him, and associates the last two.
9. Denys Kay-Robinson, The First Mrs Thomas Hardy (1979), 104, ‘Because of her lameness it is improbable that she could walk much, or dance.’
10. Under the Greenwood Tree, Part II, Chapter 7.
11. ibid., Part V, Chapter 2.
12. ibid., Chapter 1.
13. The unsigned article was written by Charles Kegan Paul, who had been a clergyman in Dorset. He lost his faith and became a publisher and writer, and a friend of Hardy. See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (1971), 121.
14. In Life, Hardy says what he felt as a rejection from Macmillan came in Aug., and that Emma wrote to him urging him to stick to his writing, but Macmillan’s letter is dated Oct., when Hardy was with Emma in Cornwall.
15. Hardy’s second wife, Florence, put forward suggestions that Hardy was pressurized into marrying Emma by the Holders, but this does not fit with Hardy’s own account of the sequence of events.
16. In 1920 Vere H. Collins asked him about his poem ‘I Rose and Went to Rou’tor Town’, which clearly alludes to this visit, and what the evil mentioned in it was. Hardy replied ‘Slander, or something of the sort’. Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate 1920–1922 (New York, 1928; reprinted St Peter Port, 1971), 26.
17. TH to Florence Hardy, 9 Mar. 1913, from Boscastle where he was staying, a propos the ritualistic services now held in the church at St Juliot.
18. Some Recollections of Emma Hardy, ed. Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings (1961), 20.
19. Her letter to Hardy is quoted in Hardy’s Notebooks, 31, written apparently in late Oct.
20. Some Recollections, 18–19.
21. Horace Moule to TH [n.d. but 21 May 1873], DCM. Moule’s point about Hardy understanding the woman better than the lady was echoed by Virginia Woolf, who complained that he could not draw a lady. Moule may have made amends in an anonymous piece in the Saturday Review praising Hardy as ‘a writer who to a singular purity of thought and intention unites great power of imagination… without resorting to mere surprises or descending to what is ignoble’. Moule had earlier reviewed Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree in the same journal, always anonymously. This one is dated 2 Aug. 1873, 36, 158–9.
22. Life, Chapter 6, last page. Part of the entry at least was clearly written later. The Backs are the wide grassy grounds stretching between the colleges and the river.
23. ‘Midnight on Beechen, 187–’ It is of course 1873.
1. Life, Chapter 7, and interview with Frank Hedgcock in 1910, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 93.
2. James reviewed Far from the Madding Crowd in the Nation, 24 Dec. 1874, Lang in the Academy,2 Jan. 1875.
3. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 50 and Chapter 4.
4. ibid., Chapter 8.
5. ibid., Chapter 3. We have been told in Chapter 2 that she is not using a side saddle: ‘I can ride on the other: trust me,’ she tells her aunt. Hardy’s graphic and detailed description of her riding feats prompts the question as to whether he ever saw Emma ride without her habit and side saddle, enjoying herself in the same way.
6. ibid., Chapter 15.
7. Henery Fray describing Bathsheba’s sacking of her dishonest bailiff in Chapter 8.
8. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 12.
9. Lang’s review appeared in the Academy on 2 Jan. 1875 and is partly reprinted in R. G. Cox’s Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1995). This passage, 35.
10. Joseph Arch, Life (1898), 110.
11. Hardy himself said he heard Arch speak in his essay ‘The Dorsetshire Farm Labourer’ (1883).
12. Joseph Arch, Life, 35.
13. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 41.
14. TH to Smith, Elder, 4 Dec. 1873. Hardy did not know at this stage who would be illustrating the book.
15. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 2.
16. ibid., Chapter 11.
17. J. M. Barrie, ‘Thomas Hardy: The Historian of Wessex’ in the Contemporary Review, 56, 57 (1889), printed in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 156–66.
18. Life, Chapter 7.
19. F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906), 273. Neither Stephen nor Hardy explained who the other Leslie Stephen was.
20. ibid.
21. Minny Stephen to Anny Thackeray [n.d. but 1874], cited in Henrietta Garnett, Anny: A Life of Anne Isobella Thackeray Ritchie (2004), the source given as ‘MS to AIT’ from Eton Ritchie Papers at Eton College Library.
22. F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 266.
23. Leslie Stephen to TH, 12 Mar. 1874, printed in R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), 338–9.
24. ibid., 13 Apr. 1874.
25. Life, Chapter 7.
26. From his Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873).
27. TH to Leslie Stephen, 18 Feb. 1874, Life, Chapter 7.
28. Emma Gifford to TH, July 1874, printed in The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1978), 17.
29. TH to Geneviève Smith, 6 Jan. 1874, Letters, I, 26.
30. He was Basil Montagu, an illegitimate but acknowledged son of the fourth Earl of Sandwich by Martha Ray, brought up at Hinchingbrooke and sent to Cambridge.
31. A story was put about by Hardy’s second wife that Emma travelled to Bockhampton to speak to Hardy’s parents, or so Henry Reed told Michael Millgate. Reed said that Florence Hardy told him Emma travelled to Bockhampton before her marriage in an unannounced visit intended to make the Hardy family accept her, with disastrous results. There is no other source for the story, nothing written down, Florence Hardy was hostile to Emma, and everything she said about her has to be taken with caution. It seems unlikely that Emma would have considered making such a difficult journey alone across country to seek out people she did not know. She had no money and no friends in Dorset. Her own family would not have approved, and what could she have said to the Hardys? She would not have done it without Hardy’s agreement, and she had no need to ask for their approval once she had decided to do without her own parents’ – she and Hardy were in the same boat and planning to start their lives in splendid isolation. Biography Revisited, 134, Note 19.
32. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter 56.
33. Hamilton Gifford to TH, 4 Sept. 1874, DCM, H.2587.
34. ibid., 12 Sept. 1874, DCM, H.2588.
1. Some Recollections of Emma Hardy, ed. Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings (1961), 60, and The Emma Hardy Diaries, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1985). All quotations are taken from this facsimile edition.
2. The church did not last very long but was pulled down and replaced a hundred years later, between 1974 and 1977, by a modern complex of buildings, a low church-cum-hall, day centre, sheltered housing and vicarage. Pevsner finds the fine old plane tree preserved on the site more interesting than the buildings, which might have pleased Hardy.
3. Queen’s Road was renamed Queensway later.
4. TH to Henry Hardy, Friday [18 Sept. 1874], Letters, I, 31.
5. Life, Chapter 7.
6. The house is no longer there. It stood just south of the junction of Hook Road with Ditton Road. See Mark Davison’s booklet Hook Remembered Again (2001), 11. Davison believes that a Francis Honeywell, who grew up in Weymouth before moving to Kingston upon Thames and knew Hardy, found the lodgings for him. Emma’s diary entry ‘Annie & the Retriever playing in the garden with Papa’ has been misinterpreted to mean that her own father, Mr Gifford, called on them, which of course he did not – the Papa was Mr Hughes.
7. Tinsley to TH, 5 Jan. 1875, printed in R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), 335.
8. The first edition was of 1,000 copies, the second of 500.
9. Purdy, op. cit., 18.
10. See Raymond Williams, ‘Wessex and the Border’ in The Country and the City (1973), 197.
11. Hardy quotes this remark in the Life, Chapter 7.
12. Leslie Stephen to TH, 13 May 1875, F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906), 276.
13. The evidence of Emma’s dislike rests on what she said to an American friend, Rebekah Owen, in 1892, when they visited Swanage together. Asked about Ethelberta, which was partly written there, Emma said she disliked talking about it because it had ‘too much about servants’ in it. See Denys Kay-Robinson’s The First Mrs Hardy (1979), 94 (taken from Carl Weber’s Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square, 1952).
14. Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (1984), 2.
15. The Hand of Ethelberta, Chapter 23.
16. For Katie’s pupil teaching, see records of Salisbury Teacher Training College for 1876, with summary of previous experience of scholars. Martha and her husband and children emigrated in May 1876. Hardy does not mention seeing her after her marriage, but you would expect them to have kept up some contact as long as she was in London.
17. The Hand of Ethelberta, Chapter 29.
18. ibid., Chapter 9.
19. ibid., Chapter 7.
20. ibid., Chapter 42.
21. ibid., Chapter 25.
22. ibid., Chapter 46.
23. ibid., final chapter, headed ‘Sequel’.
24. Leslie Stephen to TH, Aug. 1875, F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 276.
25. ibid., 263–4.
26. It is in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, published in 1917.
27. This is from Sir George Douglas’s recollections, printed in Interviews and Recollections, 32–3. It was written much later, but Sir George first met the Hardys in 1881, six years into their marriage, and saw it as a happy one.
28. Again, Rebekah Owen’s account, in Denys Kay-Robinson’s The First Mrs Hardy.
29. All these quotations from Emma’s diary for 13 Sept. 1875, 65–7 in Richard H. Taylor’s edition.
30. At this stage it was called ‘The Fire at Tranter Sweatley’s’.
31. TH to William Minto, 4 Nov. 1875, Letters, I, 41.
32. The house, 7 Peter Street, is no longer there; its site is now covered by a car park.
33. F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 290.
34. The typescript, made much later by Florence Dugdale, is held at the DCM, H.6213. It is subtitled ‘A story of fair passions, and bountiful pities, and loves without stain’. The original manuscript is no longer extant, but there are a few notes relevant to the novel in Emma’s diary.
35. Life, Chapter 8.
36. She has a passage in The Maid on the Shore about ‘poor little rustic Rosabelle’ who had ‘never breathed the dear smokiness of London life and was… a mere country maiden, sweet and pure, gently nurtured it is true, but bearing the signs of complete rusticity’, which looks like an allusion to her own situation.
37. Hardy, however, told Virginia Woolf in 1926 that he had seen her mother when he visited Leslie Stephen at his friends, the Lushingtons, in Kensington Square: ‘She used to come in and out when I was talking to your father.’ Also that he saw a Stephen baby in a cradle whom he thought was Virginia, born in 1882, but may have been Vanessa, born in 1879. This from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, III (1979), 99, 97.
1. The mansion is said to have been the home of Robert Young (1811–1908), a Dorset dialect poet who took the pseudonym ‘Rabin Hill’. He was a friend of William Barnes, but there is no evidence that Hardy knew him.
2. Life, Chapter 8, note from Nov. 1877.
3. Life, Chapter 8.
4. Especially since Annie Lanham, Mary’s friend, was already pregnant and Nat needed some persuading to marry her. See Celia Barclay, Nathaniel Sparks: Memoirs of Thomas Hardy’s Cousin the Engraver (1994), 37. The Sparks family built up strong resentments against Hardy for his stand-offishness, a good deal of it chronicled in Barclay.
5. 13 Nov. 1876, Emma Hardy Diaries, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1985), 103.
6. Michael Millgate suggests she may have been the ‘Jenny Phillips’ whose name appears in one of Hardy’s song books, and he thinks her family may have been descended from the ancient Phelips family of Corfe Mullen. He also argues that she is a model for Tess, which in certain respects is plausible.
7. The poem first appeared in 1922 in Late Lyrics and Earlier, undated. The manuscript from which it was printed bears no signs of revision, but that does not mean it had not been worked over.
8. He means Eustacia, of course. Book IV, Chapter 3. A ‘reddleman’ is one who deals in red dye, used for marking sheep.
9. The Return of the Native, Book I, Chapter 1.
10. ibid., Book V, Chapter 5.
11. ibid., Book IV, Chapter 1.
12. Simon Gatrell, Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (1988), 42.
13. ibid., 41.
14. Frank Hedgcock’s ‘Reminiscences of Thomas Hardy’, published in the National and English Review in 1951, relating to two interviews in July 1910.
15. The Return of the Native, Book IV, Chapter 2. They sound like Lulworth Skippers, butterflies that favour ‘arid localities and steppes’ outside England (A Field Guide to Butterflies and Moths by Ivo Novak, 1980) and in England are found only around Swanage and the coast from Swanage to Devon, according to Charles Knight and Margaret Brooks’s Complete Pocket Guide to British Butterflies (1982).
16. The Return of the Native, Book I, Chapter 6.
17. ibid., Chapter 5.
18. ibid., Book IV, Chapter 5.
19. ibid., Chapter 6.
20. TH to George Smith, 5 Feb. 1877, Letters, I, 47.
21. TH to John Blackwood, 13 Feb. 1877, Letters, I, 47.
22. Blackwood’s comments given by Simon Gatrell in Hardy the Creator, 33, 43.
23. Stephen’s remark cited by John Paterson, The Making of ‘The Return of the Native’ (1960). Also given by F. W. Maitland for 1877 in The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906).
24. George Smith of Smith, Elder did publish it, in three volumes, in Nov. 1878.
25. Life, Chapter 9, dated note.
26. This and the reviews cited by R. G. Cox in his Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1995).
27. See unpublished letter from Emma Dashwood to Emma Hardy, 1883, DCM, H.6252.7. ‘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.’
28. Described in ‘The Musical Box’: ‘the dusky house that stood apart, /And her, white-muslined, waiting there / In the porch with high-expectant heart’. Hardy himself says this poem refers to their time at Sturminster Newton in Life, Chapter 8.
29. ‘On Sturminster Foot-Bridge’, dated 1877 in the MS.
30. She was Julia Duckworth, and their four children were Toby, Vanessa, Virginia and Adrian.
31. Life, Chapter 8, dated notebook entry.
32. Millgate, in Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982), 191, suggests she was the Jane Phillips who registered the baby in Nov.
33. My transcription of unpublished letter, TH Snr to Kate Hardy, 13 Nov. 1877. DCM, Kate Hardy and Lock Collection, A2 and H.2003.453.
34. The house is now 172 Trinity Road.
1. Life, Chapter 8.
2. Garrett Anderson, Hang Your Halo in the Hall: A History of the Savile Club (1993), 52. The Irving evening is mentioned on p. 53.
3. Life, Chapter 10, and TH to Walter Besant, 17 Mar. 1879, Letters, I, 63. Hardy had received a flattering letter from Besant [7 Mar. 1879] praising The Return of the Native as ‘the most original the most virile and most humorous of all modern novels’ – a curious description but likely to make Hardy look favourably on joining Besant’s club. Besant’s letter cited in Biography Revisited, 194.
4. TH to Charles Kegan Paul, 21 June 1878, Letters, I, 57.
5. Cited in Biography Revisited, 182.
6. Leslie Stephen to Charles Eliot Norton, 5 Aug. 1880, F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906), 341.
7. Life, Chapter 10.
8. ibid. She told Hardy about Henry James’s proposal, which he doubted, but James himself told his mother about it. It was a gesture that clearly gave both parties pleasure without either taking it seriously. See Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London (1962), 355. James went to her funeral in 1888, with Browning, who had been encouraged as a young writer by her husband.
9. Interviews and Recollections gives this, 12–13, taken from E. McCluny Fleming’s R. R. Bowker: Militant Liberal (1952), 146.
10. Life, Chapter 10.
11. Life, Chapter 9.
12. Hardy’s essay ‘The Dorsetshire Farm Labourer’ was published in Longman’s Magazine in July 1883. He describes improvements in their lives but laments the breakdown of rural communities and says they have ‘lost touch with their environment’.
13. All this from Life, Chapter 10.
14. For Leslie Stephen, Smith, Elder records, Life, Chapter 9; for Black-wood, TH to John Blackwood, 9 June 1879, Letters, I, 64–5.
15. The US serialization was in Demorest’s Monthly Magazine.
16. It was remaindered in 1882.
17. Life, Chapter 9.
18. TH to Henry Hardy, 20 Apr. 1880, Letters, I, 73.
19. Cited in Biography Revisited, 190–91; from ‘Poetical Matter’ notebook, dated 19 Jan. 1879.
20. TH to Edmund Gosse, 14 Feb. 1922, Letters, VI, 115.
21. A note made in Jan. 1881, printed in Life, Chapter 11.
22. Mary Hardy, writing from her headmistress’s house in Bell Street, to Emma Hardy, 28 Jan. 1881, DCM, H.6302.
23. All from Life, Chapter 11.
1. TH to George Greenhill, a mathematician, Professor at the Royal Artillery College in Woolwich, 6 Apr. 1881, Letters, I, 88.
2. I assume this is because he recommended the King’s Arms in Dorchester as ‘fairly comfortable’ two years later to an American visitor, Brander Matthews. You can still stay there.
3. A letter from Hardy dated 4 June 1881 gives Dorchester but asks for his proofs to be sent to Tooting. His next letter, dated 22 June, is from Tooting, announcing the imminent move to Wimborne.
4. Life, Chapter 11.
5. Astronomers had travelled all over the world in 1769 and arrived at a good result, which they hoped to improve in 1882 and succeeded in doing. Transits come in pairs, eight years apart, but then do not happen again for about a century. The 1882 transit had been preceded by one in 1874.
6. He said he had other towers in mind also, one being the brick obelisk set up in the eighteenth century over an Iron Age hillfort known as Weatherby Castle, at Milborne St Andrew; the other, Horton, north of Wimborne, is described by Pevsner as ‘a megalomaniac folly, called “observatory” in 1765, when it must have been quite new’. It is a six-storey brick tower, hexagonal, with pointed windows and domed turrets. But Charborough is clearly the chief inspiration. It is still not open to the public.
7. Hardy did visit Charborough House but not until 1927, when he was invited to lunch.
8. Two on a Tower, Chapter 1.
9. From Hardy’s 1895 preface to the book.
10. The German physicist Rudolf Clausius formulated the basis of the Second Law in 1850, but only in 1863 did he express it in the familiar form, ‘Heat cannot of its own accord move from a colder to a hotter body.’
11. Two on a Tower, Chapter 4.
12. ibid., Chapter 11.
13. Hardy calls Swithin ‘the Adonis-astronomer’ in Chapter 8 – the manuscript shows he inserted the ‘Adonis’ as an afterthought, on folio 64.
14. Two on a Tower, Chapter 14.
15. ibid., Chapter 8.
16. ibid., Chapter 7.
17. ibid., Chapter 36.
18. TH to Henry Massingham, 31 Dec. 1891, Letters, I, 250. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was put on for the first time under that name in England in 1889, although there had been performances earlier in the 1880s under other titles such as Nora.
19. See Chapter 4 for an account of Hardy’s grandmother as the original for Gammer Martin.
20. The story was ‘Benighted Travellers’, which appeared in England and the US, and was collected in A Group of Noble Dames as ‘The Honourable Laura’. A Laodicean was published in the US in Nov., in England in Dec. 1881.
21. Life, Chapter 11.
22. As it happens, he did jot down some notes about writing fiction at this time, but they are thin and unilluminating, and he soon set them aside. They are given in Chapter 11 of Life.
23. Hardy adapted Far from the Madding Crowd for theatrical performance in 1879, while living in Tooting, passed it on for further work to Comyns Carr and submitted it to the St James’s Theatre. It was turned down, but Mrs Kendal, who had read it, described it to Pinero, from which he wrote his own play, The Squire, with a strikingly similar plot. Hardy objected in letters to The Times and other papers in Jan. 1882, and his own, or partly his own, version, with melodramatic additions, was put on as a result. It ran for over 100 performances in London but was disliked by the critics, and by Hardy himself. No script survives among his papers.
24. Life, Chapter 12.
25. Hardy’s wording for the advertisement placed in the Athenaeum, 2 Dec. 1882, cited by R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), 44.
26. Havelock Ellis’s review is printed in R. G. Cox, Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1995), 103–32.
27. Two on a Tower, Chapter 7.
28. ibid., Chapter 14.
29. ibid., Chapter 3.
30. Emma Hardy to Mary Haweis, 13 Nov. 1894: ‘He understands only the women he invents– the others not at all.’ Letters of E & F Hardy, 6.
31. TH to Edmund Gosse, 21 Jan. 1883, Letters, I, 114.
32. Life, Chapter 13.
33. Quoted in Interviews and Recollections, 16–17.
34. Helen Holder to Emma Hardy [13 or 15 Aug.?], 1881, DCM, H.3605.
35. Helen Holder to Emma Hardy, 28 Nov. 1882, DCM, H.6306.
36. ‘The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid’ is poor stuff, which he regretted. ‘Our Exploits at West Poley’ is an excellent and exciting children’s story with a theme along the lines of Pagnol’s Manon des Sources.
37. TH to Joseph Eldridge, declining to nominate the Liberal candidate for South Dorset, 8 June 1892: ‘I am & have always been compelled to forego [sic] all participation in active politics, by reason of the neutrality of my own pursuits, which would be stultified to a great extent if I could not approach all classes of thinkers from an absolutely unpledged point – the point of “men, not measures” – exactly the reverse of the true politician’s.’ Letters, I, 272.
38. TH to Percy Bunting, editor of the Contemporary Review, 12 Oct. and 5 Nov. 1883, Letters, I, 121, 123.
1. Hardy describes the touring players admirably in a note dated 14 Aug. 1884, printed in Life, Chapter 13.
2. Life, Chapter 13.
3. Biography Revisited, 228, for details of the lease.
4. This was Virginia Woolf’s description when she visited Max Gate in 1926.
5. The Woodlanders, Chapter 8. He also wrote a poem, ‘The Pine Planters (Marty South’s Reveries)’, printed in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses. Marty goes further here and makes the trees’ sighing signify grief that they have not remained undeveloped seeds, safe from storm and drought.
6. ‘Some Romano-British Relics Found at Max Gate, Dorchester’, text of speech read by Hardy at Dorchester meeting of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club in 1884. Printed in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. H. Orel (1990).
7. So Hardy told William Archer when he interviewed him in 1901. Interviews and Recollections, 69.
8. So he told John Middleton Murry in 1921, adding that ‘nothing had happened’ to bear out his fear. Cited in ibid., 154, taken from J. M. Murry, Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Portraits (1949).
9. Life, Chapter 20, in a passage contrasting the gaieties of the London Season with his home life.
10. ibid., Chapter 14.
11. Details of Wilde’s lecture taken from Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987), 184.
12. TH interview with Frank Hedgcock in 1910, Interviews and Recollections, 95.
13. Hardy reported by John Middleton Murry, Interviews and Recollections, 156.
14. The phrase is from his paper ‘Memories of Church Restoration’, given in 1906 and partly printed in ‘Thomas Hardy and Anti-Scrape’, The Times Literary Supplement, 23 Feb. 1928.
15. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Chapter 7.
16. ibid., Chapter 45.
17. ibid., Chapter 9; ibid., Chapter 14. Auden’s essay on Hardy is from the Southern Review, 1940, 6.
18. Life, Chapter 29: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge was issued complete about the end of May [1886]. It was a story which Hardy fancied he had damaged more recklessly as an artistic whole, in the interest of the newspaper in which it appeared serially, than perhaps any other of his novels, his aiming to get an incident into almost every week’s part causing him in his own judgment to add events to the narrative somewhat too freely. However, as at this time he called his novel-writing “mere journey-work” he cared little about it as art, though it must be said in favour of the plot, as he admitted later, that it was quite coherent and organic, in spite of its complication.’
See also TH to W. D. Howells, 9 Nov. 1886: ‘Accept my best thanks for your kindly notice of The M of C… It is what the book would probably have deserved if the story had been written as it existed in my mind, but, alas, was never put on paper. / I ought to have improved it much – for the greater part was finished in 1884 – a year & half nearly before publication. But I could not get thoroughly into it after the interval.’ Letters, I, 156. The interval was presumably the period in June and July spent in London for the Season that year, followed by his trip to Jersey with Henry in Aug.
19. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Chapter 7.
20. ibid., Chapter 20. This is a slight preview of Tess’s suffering when Angel rejects her.
21. ibid., Chapter 44.
22. Mabel Robinson (1858–1954), who wrote a long letter answering questions from Florence Hardy’s executrix, Irene Cooper Willis, 17 Dec. 1937, DCM. She met the Hardys in London in the 1880s and stayed with them at Max Gate.
23. I have taken this idea from Lawrence Lerner’s excellent Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’: Tragedy or Social History? (1975), 72.
24. Information about Abel Whittle of Maiden Newton from the Census and with kind help from David Smith. The 1871 Census does not give Whittle, who was presumably dead by then.
25. TH to Edmund Gosse, 30 Aug. 1887, Letters, I, 167.
26. All three quotations from Life, Chapter 14.
27. Written to Edmund Gosse many years later, in a year when he did not get to London, 13 Dec. 1916, Letters, V, 190.
28. Life, Chapter 14.
29. ibid., Chapters 13 and 19.
30. TH note, 15 Mar. 1890, in Life, Chapter 18 – after attending a crush at the Jeunes’.
31. This is what he wrote on the subject of shooting for pleasure, from a notebook kept at Wimborne, DCM fragment H.1958.57: ‘I meet with a keeper – tells me that one day this season they shot – (3 guns) 700 pheasants in the day – a battue– driving the birds into one corner of the plantation – when they get there they will not run across the open ground – rise on the wing – then are shot wholesale – they pick up all that have fallen – night comes on – the wounded birds that have hidden or risen into some thick tree, fall and lie on the ground in their agony – next day the keepers come and look for them. (They found 150 on the above occasion, next day.) Can see that night scene – moon – fluttering and gasping birds as hours go on – the place being now deserted of human kind.’
32. Biography Revisited, 227, citing a letter from her uncle Archdeacon Gifford to Emma Hardy, 6 Apr. 1885, letter in DCM.
33. Her marriage to John Stanley meant she was Bertrand Russell’s aunt – Stanley’s sister Kate married Frank Amberley, son of Lord John Russell. Both the Amberleys were admirers of John Stuart Mill, and Kate was a remarkable young woman with advanced ideas, an atheist and feminist who would have interested Hardy. Sadly, she and her husband both died young in the mid 1870s.
34. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934), 213.
35. Life, Chapter 18, note dated 8 Dec. 1890.
36. Biography Revisited, 251, citing Purdy’s report of a conversation with Dorothy Allhusen (née Stanley) in 1931 in which she said, ‘We all hated her.’
37. Life, Chapter 12.
38. Edmund Gosse to his wife, 22 July 1883, cited in Edmund Gosse, Portraits from Life, ed. Ann Thwaite (1991).
39. The population remained below 10,000 into the twentieth century. Fordington Field began to be enclosed in the 1870s.
40. Emma Dashwood to Emma Hardy, 1883, DCM, H.6252.7.
41. The ‘Facts’ Notebook has been usefully edited by William Greenslade (2004).
42. He dated it when he printed it in 1909 in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses.
43. ‘The Conformers’ is not dated. The section in which it appears, close to ‘He Abjures Love’, is rather oddly headed ‘Love Lyrics’.
1. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Chapter 44.
2. One modern critic, Lawrence Lerner, calls it ‘the most unsatisfactory ending of all Hardy’s novels’, describes him as writing against the grain, not wanting to renounce or modify his pessimism ‘under the pressure of a happy ending’. Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’: Tragedy or Social History? (1975), 64.
3. R. H. Hutton in the Spectator, 26 Mar. 1887.
4. Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (1985 ed.), 91.
5. Life, Chapter 17, note dated under 15–21 Oct. 1888.
6. TH to Florence Dugdale, 22 Apr. 1912, Letters, IV, 212.
7. Cited by David Lodge in his essay ‘The Woodlanders: A Darwinian Pastoral Elegy’ in Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature (1981), 79–94.
8. He told J. A. Symonds he thought The Woodlanders‘rather a failure towards the end’. 14 Apr. 1889, Letters, I, 191.
9. Life, Chapter 20.
10. Jude the Obscure, Part I, Chapter 4.
11. Edmund Gosse in Cosmopolis, 1 (Jan. 1896), 60–69, reprinted in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1995), 269.
12. The research of Charles Booth and Beatrice Webb showed that about a third of the population lived in poverty and that there was bitter class hatred. The English translation of Marx’s Das Capital appeared in 1884, and there were riots in the West End in Feb. 1886 and Nov. 1887.
13. T H to J. A. Symonds, 14 Apr. 1889, Letters, I, 190.
14. ibid.
15. Harrison’s article was in the Fortnightly, Feb. 1920. Hardy’s response is described in Biography Revisited, 488 and note, based on Florence Hardy’s letter of 24 Feb. to Sydney Cockerell, and her later conversation in 1933 with R. L. Purdy, in whose collection the letter is.
16. Life, Chapter 14, note dated May 1886.
17. This was in answer to a review of his poems by Alfred Noyes, who alleged that Hardy believed in a malign force in charge of the universe. 20 Dec. 1920, Letters, VI, 54.
18. ‘God’s Education’ was printed in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses and originally called ‘His Education’.
19. Life, Chapter 27, note dated 7 Apr. 1889.
20. TH to H. Rider Haggard [n.d. but the Haggards’ son died in Feb.], Letters, I, 135.
21. The ballad-style poem is about a mother who procures an abortion for her daughter which kills her. Hardy wrote it in 1904 and later told Galsworthy he had wanted to make ‘a tragic play’ of the subject and shaped some scenes before realizing it would never be put on.
22. Life, Chapter 16.
23. The poem is dated 1896 on the manuscript.
24. TH to Thomas Macquoid, 29 Oct. 1891, Letters, I, 245.
25. TH interview with Frank Hedgcock in 1910, Interviews and Recollections, 92; TH to George Douglas, 30 Dec. 1891, Letters, I, 249.
26. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, last words of Chapter 15.
27. From Hardy’s 1892 preface to the fifth edition.
28. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Chapter 15.
29. Already cited in Chapter 13, TH to Henry Massingham, 31 Dec. 1891, Letters, I, 250.
30. Life, Chapter 18.
31. See interesting arguments in Linda M. Shire’s essay ‘The Radical Aesthetic of Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (1999).
32. D. F. Hannigan in the Westminster Review, Dec. 1892, reprinted in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 244–8.
33. The first English edition of 1,000 copies was in three volumes, published by Osgood, McIlvaine on 29 Nov. 1891. Harper & Bros published the first American edition in Jan. 1892.
34. W. P. Trent in the first issue of the Sewanee Review, Nov. 1892, reprinted in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 221–37.
35. Robert Louis Stevenson from Samoa to Henry James, 5 Dec. 1892. Henry James to Robert Louis Stevenson, 17 Feb. 1893, both from P. Horne, Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999), note on 249. Tess has always had its detractors. Someone complained to me recently of ‘Tess’s violet eyes’, suggesting this was a novelettish touch. In fact, Hardy says her eyes are ‘neither black nor blue nor gray nor violet’.
36. Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy, 131.
37. TH to Mrs Fawcett, 14 Apr. 1892, Letters, I, 264.
38. Life, Chapter 21.
39. The Well-Beloved appeared in 1897, and, although it has never been popular, it was admired by Proust, who gives his narrator a little educational speech about Hardy to Albertine in ‘La Prisonnière’, Vol. XII of À la recherche du temps perdu. The sculptor hero falls in love regularly from the age of nine, each time with a girl who seems to embody his dream of a ‘well-beloved’, but only temporarily. Each soon loses what he thought he saw in her and she becomes ‘a corpse’ to him. The chief charm of the book lies in the descriptions of the Isle of Portland (renamed the Isle of Slingers), home of the hero and the three generations of women he falls in love with. See below, Chapter 18.
40. Collected in Life’s Little Ironies (1894).
1. There was a third, Randall, mentioned in Walter Gifford’s letters to Emma, who was considered an unsuitable visitor and seems to have suffered from some disability.
2. TH to Elspeth Grahame, 31 Aug. 1907, Letters, III, 270.
3. TH to Florence Henniker, 23 Aug. 1899, Letters, II, 227, and Life, Chapter 25.
4. Frank Hedgcock reported in 1951 his visit in 1910, when she talked about her little emendations and referred to ‘our books’. Interviews and Recollections, 92.
5. Alfred Pretor to Emma Hardy, letter dated 1899, DCM, cited in Denys Kay-Robinson, The First Mrs Hardy (1979), 174.
6. Raymond Blathwayt’s interview in Black and White, 27 Aug. 1892.
7. It was sold to Howard Bliss in 1924, and he found that 106 pages were partly or wholly in Emma’s hand. He insisted that he found this interesting, but when he got into financial difficulties later he sold it back to the Hardys. See Florence Hardy to Howard Bliss, 14 Dec. 1924, Letters of E & F Hardy, 217.
8. Mabel Robinson to Irene Cooper Willis, 17 Dec. 1937, DCM.
9. F. Stevenson to S. Colvin, Sept. 1885, and to D. Norton Williams, also 1885, both cited in Biography Revisited, 250.
10. Cited from a Gissing letter of 22 Sept. 1895 in Interviews and Recollections, 50.
11. Gertrude Atherton’s Adventures of a Novelist, 258, given in Interviews and Recollections, 26.
12. It appeared May 1895 in the Ladies’ Home Journal and is cited in Interviews and Recollections, 41.
13. Emma Hardy to Revd Bartelot, 3 July 1912, cited in Denys Kay-Robinson, The First Mrs Hardy, 6–7.
14. Emma Hardy, Alleys, and Spaces. Poems and Religious Effusions (1966 ed., first published privately by F. G. Longman of Dorchester in 1912).
15. ‘An Old Likeness (Recalling R. T.)’ was published in 1922 in Late Lyrics and Earlier. Rosamund Tomson had died in 1911.
16. TH to Florence Henniker, 16 July 1893, Letters, II, 24. His last surviving letter to her is dated Dec. 1891.
17. These three words set off a search for evidence of a love affair, and Lois Deacon devoted years to trying to prove that Tryphena bore Hardy a child. The book she wrote with Terry Coleman, Providence and Mr Hardy (1966), was taken seriously by many before Robert Gittings disproved most of it in his The Young TH in 1975, and Michael Millgate concurred in his 1982 Thomas Hardy: A Biography, where he said no evidence ‘capable of withstanding scholarly or even common-sensical scrutiny’ had been produced by Deacon.
18. In a letter of 30 Aug. 1898 he told Mrs Henniker, ‘I have not yet been to Exeter, though I had hoped to get there this summer,’ and in Sept. he announces he is going, on his bicycle, and chiefly to see the cathedral. Letters, II, 199, 201.
19. Interviews and Recollections, 228, citing Lady Tweedsmuir’s recollection of what she had been told by Margaret Newbolt.
20. Since Hardy destroyed these diaries, there is no certainty about their dates or contents, but Florence Hardy saw them and told Edward Clodd in a letter of 16 Jan. 1913 that Emma’s ‘bitter denunciations’ of Hardy began ‘about 1891’ and continued ‘until within a day or two of her death’. Letters of E & F Hardy, 75.
21. Hardy said he shaved off his beard in 1890, but it is still there in photographs of 1891. Sydney Cockerell claimed that he persuaded Hardy to stop waxing his moustache, which must have been after 1911.
22. Note dated 17 Sept. 1892, given in Life, Chapter 20.
23. Note dated 28 Apr. 1888, given in Life, Chapter 26.
24. This from his preface, where Tryphena is simply ‘a woman’ recently dead.
25. Note dated Oct. 1892, Life, Chapter 20.
26. Letters, I, 287.
1. Quoted from a letter from Swinburne to Monckton Milnes dated 27 Dec. 1862, in James Pope Hennessy’s Monckton Milnes: The Flight of Youth 1851–1885 (1951), 143. I am indebted to Mark Bostridge for pointing this out.
2. MS Houghton 43/18, Trinity College, Cambridge, kindly sent to me by the librarian, David McKitterick. Mrs Henniker’s brother kept some of her ‘squibs’ in his diary for 1872. The word ‘airified’ is applied to someone who gives himself airs.
3. TH to Florence Henniker, 13 July 1893, Letters, II, 23.
4. TH to Florence Henniker, 2 July 1893, Letters, II, 20.
5. First printed in 1914 in Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries.
6. So Hardy told his friend Edward Clodd, according to his diary for 18 July 1896. Information from Biography Revisited, 313, and note on 581.
7. According to R. L. Purdy in Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), 113. He gives no source, but he must have had it from Florence Hardy, and she from Hardy himself, or possibly Mrs Henniker, whom she came to know well. The poem was printed in Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901. ‘Time-torn’ was originally ‘soul-sad’. Florence Henniker kept a bundle of manuscript poems given to her by Hardy, which have sadly disappeared.
8. TH to Florence Henniker, 6 Sept. 1893, Letters, II, 29. ‘I should call the book “The Statesman’s Love-Lapse, & other stories namely…” ’
9. TH to Florence Henniker, 16 Sept. 1893, Letters, II, 32.
10. TH to Florence Henniker, 28 Oct. 1893, Letters, II, 40. For details of their joint authorship, see R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, Appendix IV, 346–8.
11. So Hardy told Mrs Henniker. TH to Florence Henniker, 16 Sept. 1893, Letters, II, 32.
12. Review quoted by R. L. Purdy in Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, Appendix IV, 348.
13. Clement Shorter of the Sketch. Letter dated 25 Apr. 1894, Letters, II, 55.
14. Emma Hardy to Mary Haweis, 13 Nov. 1894, Letters of E & F Hardy, 6.
15. This was the belief of her nephew Gordon Gifford, who stayed with them a good deal at the time. He wrote a letter to the TLS, 1 Jan. 1944, claiming that Jude ‘was the first of the Hardy novels in which she had not assisted by her counsel, copious notes for reference and mutual discussion’.
16. TH to Florence Henniker, 10 Nov. 1895, Letters, II, 94.
17. Mrs Henniker left instructions before her death in 1923 that all of Hardy’s letters that she had kept – she destroyed a good number – should be given after her death to his second wife, whom she knew well and liked. The second Mrs Hardy considered publishing them, but decided against. She preserved them carefully, however, and left them to the DCM, and they were published in 1972.
18. TH to Arthur Henniker, 19 Oct. 1899, Letters, II, 233. Request for photograph, TH to Florence Henniker, 9 Nov. 1899, Letters, II, 236.
19. According to his poem ‘Concerning Agnes’, written after her death in Dec. 1926.
20. First printed in Wessex Poems and Other Verses, his first collection, in 1898.
21. Jude the Obscure, Part VI, Chapter 2.
22. Hardy mentions this in his preface to the 1912 edition of Jude.
23. TH to Florence Henniker, 10 Nov. 1895, Letters, II, 94.
24. Jude the Obscure, Part I, Chapter 11.
25. ibid., Part III, Chapter 9.
26. ibid., Part IV, Chapter 2.
27. Information given by Florence Hardy to R. L. Purdy in 1933, cited in Biography Revisited, 25–6 and note.
28. ‘humanity’ replaces ‘morality’, which he wrote first.
29. TH to Edmund Gosse, 10 Nov. 1894, Letters, II, 93.
30. See second paragraph of Life, Chapter 24. Arthur Benson records Hardy’s remark in his diary for Nov. 1913, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
31. Jude the Obscure, Part I, Chapter 2; cf. passage in Chapter 1 of Life.
32. Hardy could have learnt about his accidental conception and the reluctance of both his parents to marry from his Sparks cousins. I think it slightly more likely he realized it when dealing with his father’s papers after his death. Since he never alludes to it, we do not know whether he ever discussed it with his mother, but he must have asked himself how welcome he was to her at birth, and even possibly whether she had tried to get rid of the pregnancy.
33. Alfred Sutro, Celebrities and Simple Souls (1933), 58, described lunch at Max Gate in 1895, at which he praised the newly published Jude. ‘Mrs Hardy was far from sharing my enthusiasm. It was the first novel of his, she told me, that he had published without first letting her read the manuscript; had she read it, she added firmly, it would not have been published, or at least, not without considerable emendations.’
34. W. D. Howells’s review in the Dec. 1895 issue of Harper’s Weekly is reprinted in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1995), 253–6.
35. Cited in R. G. Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 283.
36. Hardy printed the letter in Life, Chapter 22.
37. TH told this to James Milne in 1905, Interviews and Recollections, 81, from The Memoirs of a Bookman (1934). Hardy recalled the Gosse incident in a letter to him of 14 July 1909, Letters, IV, 33. Another admirer of Hardy’s work, George Gissing, wrote privately to a friend of his view of Jude: ‘Jude I shall never be able to read again. It is powerful, yes; but its horribleness does not, I feel, faithfully represent the life it pretends to depict… But I greatly admire Hardy and am very sorry he will write no more fiction. His verse (a volume or two recently published) has but small value.’ Gissing to Eduard Bertz, 16 Nov. 1902, The Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz, ed. A. C. Young (1960), 314.
38. For his statement, see Life, Chapter 24. He also made the curious claim here that he was worried ‘whether he might not be driven to society novels’ and that for this reason he had felt he must keep a record of his experiences ‘in upper social life, though doing it had always been a drudgery to him’. In fact, Jude was not the last novel he published, The Well-Beloved appearing in volume form in 1897.
39. Life, Chapter 23, mentions his ‘quick sense of humour… which could not help seeing a ludicrous side to his troubles over Jude’.
40. He first called them ‘De Profundis’, later changed to ‘In Tenebris’, presumably because of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, published posthumously in 1905.
41. TH replying to the question about ‘Methods of Authors’ for an American newspaper, published in 1894, cited by Michael Millgate in his edition of Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice (2001), 131.
1. TH to Florence Henniker, 30 Nov. 1895, Life, Chapter 23.
2. TH to Grant Allen, 7 Jan. 1896, Letters, II, 106.
3. R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), 77. It was reworked for America by Lorimer Stoddard and put on in Mar. 1897 under his name, successfully. Mrs Campbell never played Tess. Hardy revised his own version in 1924 for the amateur production in Dorchester, and this version was played in London in 1925 and 1929.
4. Mrs P. Campbell to Mrs S. Coleridge, 12 Jan. 1896, letter in DCM, quoted in Interviews and Recollections, 52.
5. Life, Chapter 23.
6. ibid. This was in 1896.
7. All this information from his letters of Feb. 1896, Letters, II, 108–12.
8. Emma Hardy to Mary Hardy, 22 Feb. 1896, printed in Letters of E & F Hardy, 7–8.
9. In 1902 Mary Hardy told her cousin Jim Sparks in a letter, à propos Max Gate, that ‘we never visit there.’ Mary Hardy to Jim Sparks, 1 July 1902, Sparks Archive, Hardy Collection, Eton College.
10. Hardy’s own account, although given in the third person in Life, Chapter 23.
11. TH to Florence Henniker, 1 June 1896, Letters, II, 122.
12. Life, Chapter 23.
13. TH to Florence Henniker, 17 Mar. 1903, Letters, III, 55–6.
14. She mentions the Rousseau and the Tolstoy in letters to Rebekah Owen, 14 Feb. 1899 and May 1900, Letters of E & F Hardy, 13, 21.
15. Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 31 Dec. 1900, cited in Biography Revisited, 376.
16. Walter Gifford to Emma Hardy, 7 Sept. 1898, DCM, H.6286.
17. Walter Gifford to Emma Hardy, 24 Oct. 1898, DCM, H.6288.
18. Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 27 Dec. 1899, Letters of E & F Hardy, 18.
19. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 16 Jan. 1913, Letters of E & F Hardy, 75: ‘voluminous diaries that Mrs H has kept from the time of their marriage… bitter denunciations beginning about 1891 & continuing until within a day or two of her death’.
20. Hardy noted their attendance in the Bible Emma gave him in 1899, marking their initials against the text from Jeremiah read by the Canon of Salisbury on this occasion. The Older TH, 97.
21. TH to Winifred Thomson, 31 Oct. 1897, Letters, II, 181.
22. TH to Thackeray Turner, 12 Oct. 1897, Letters, II, 179.
23. TH told Henry Nevinson in 1906 about the Kipling episode, Interviews and Recollections, 79.
24. See Chapter 15, p. 232.
25. The Well-Beloved, Part I, Chapter 2.
26. The epigraph, ‘one shape of many names’, is taken from Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam.
27. The Well-Beloved, Part II, Chapter 1.
28. ibid., Part III, Chapter 2.
29. ibid., Part II, Chapter 3.
30. Emma Hardy to Elspeth Grahame, 20 Aug. 1899, Letters of E & F Hardy, 15–16.
31. The Grahames’ only child, a son, was an unhappy boy who committed suicide at Oxford – an awful echo of Little Father Time and ‘the coming will not to live’.
32. Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 24 Apr. 1899, Letters of E & F Hardy, 19.
33. Emma’s MS plan for a story, dated 1900, is in the DCM, H.6216. Hardy’s poem was published in the Tatler in July 1901 and in Poems of the Past and the Present, also 1901, and included in Selected Poems of 1916, chosen by himself as one of his favourites.
34. TH to Florence Henniker, 25 Feb. 1900, Letters, II, 248.
35. Hardy told Mrs Henniker in a letter 25 Feb. 1900, Letters, II, 248.
36. Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 27 Dec. 1899, Letters of E & F Hardy, 19.
37. First printed in Literature, 25 Nov. 1899, 513, with a note added to the title: ‘One of the Drummers killed was a native of a village near Casterbridge.’ It then appeared in Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901. Later, Hardy changed the name of the poem to ‘Drummer Hodge’. The idea may have helped to inspire Rupert Brooke’s famous sonnet: ‘If I should die, think only this of me, / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.’
38. Bertha Newcombe to Mrs Edmund Gosse, 5 Mar. 1900, cited in Emma Hardy Diaries, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1985), 10, and Denys Kay-Robinson, The First Mrs Hardy (1979), 183, from Brotherton Library Collection, Leeds.
39. He did not publish it until 1925, in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles, dating it ‘about 1900’.
40. TH to Emma Hardy, 11 Dec. 1900 and 23 Dec. 1900, Letters, II, 276, 270.
41. When printed in Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901.
42. Barbara Hardy makes the connection in her Thomas Hardy (2001), 200.
1. TH to Edward Clodd, fragment of letter, May 1902, Letters, III, 20.
2. Figures taken from Michael Millgate’s article on Macmillan & Co. in The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy (2000), 250.
3. Hardy told Henry Nevinson about the young women who wrote to him asking for advice on settling in Wessex. Interviews and Recollections, 77–8.
4. Published by Harper Brothers in London in the autumn of 1898, and in New York in 1899.
5. See above, Chapter 5, pp. 81–2.
6. See above, Chapter 17, pp. 247–9.
7. See above, Chapter 17, p. 253.
8. From Gosse’s Portraits from Life, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 109.
9. Wells’s remark was reported by many, among them R. E. Zachrisson, the Swedish writer, who visited Max Gate in 1920 and thought Wells’s description reasonable, but insisted on Hardy’s ‘wonderful light blue eyes’. Cited in Interviews and Recollections, 132.
10. Archer’s interview was printed in the Pall Mall Magazine in Apr. 1901, reprinted in his Real Conversations (1904).
11. From Desmond MacCarthy’s Memories (1953).
12. William Rothenstein visited Hardy in 1897; his remarks are in Men and Memories: Recollections 1872–1938, given in Interviews and Recollections, 53–4.
13. Frank Hedgcock in 1910, struck by Hardy’s ‘simplicity and modesty’. ‘The great dome-like forehead spoke of power and his eyes, though tired, were dreamy and imaginative. His nose, which seemed slightly bent, was beak-like.’ ‘Reminiscences of Thomas Hardy’ in National and English Review, Oct. and Nov. 1951, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 91.
14. Winifred Fortescue, There’s Rosemary… There’s Rue (1939). This was in 1908. Keeping up the bird imagery, in 1926 another visitor, Virginia Woolf, likened him to a pouter pigeon.
15. Diary of Arthur Benson for 30 Apr. 1904, Magdalene College, Cambridge. If Benson heard Hardy’s remark about joining the Catholic Church correctly, it casts a new light on his London years and his friendship with Moule, whose interest in Newman and Roman Catholicism he mentions in the Life – but with no suggestion that he shared it at any point. It is an intriguing piece of information, but hung on a slender thread.
16. Details of Hardy’s visit from Martin Ray’s ‘Thomas Hardy in Aberdeen’, Aberdeen University Review, 56 (1995), 58–69. This was kindly brought to my attention by Myrrdin Jones.
17. TH to Florence Henniker, 2 June 1901, Letters, II, 288; TH to George Douglas, 3 Apr. 1901, Letters, II, 282; and Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 4 Apr. 1901, Letters of E&H Hardy, 23.
18. According to Christine Wood Homer in Thomas Hardy and His Two Wives (1964), 48.
19. Described in a passage written into the Life, Chapter 26, by Florence Hardy on the advice of J. M. Barrie, who had the details from Hardy.
20. Lillie May Farris, granddaughter of Jemima’s brother William. ‘Memoirs of the Hardy and Hand Families’, Hardyana (1968–73), 65.
21. TH to Edward Clodd, 12 Apr. 1904, Letters, III, 119.
22. First published in 1909 in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses.
23. Hardy quotes this entry from her diary in the Life, Chapter 28.
24. Cited in Interviews and Recollections, 108, from an undated text by Gosse given in Ann Thwaite’s edition of Portraits from Life (1991).
25. Jacques Blanche, Mes Modèles (1928), 84.
26. TH to Edward Clodd, 1 May 1909, Letters, IV, 21.
27. The letter is so well written and coherent that Michael Millgate has suggested that it was ‘polished’ at the Nation. Letters of E & F Hardy, p. xii.
28. Life, Chapter 1.
29. The Dynasts, Part III, Act VI, Scene viii. Hardy’s tramps over the field of Waterloo had stirred his imagination, and, as it turned out, he was predicting what would happen all over northern France in the coming war of 1914–18.
30. The Dynasts, Part III, Act I, Scene i.
31. Beerbohm was reviewing Part I only, in the Saturday Review, 30 Jan. 1904.
32. Harold Child in the TLS, 27 Feb. 1908, and unsigned review in Edinburgh Review, Apr. 1908.
33. I see that my own copy was bought in 1953 from Blackwell’s in Oxford for 8/6d. It is the 1910 first complete edition but bears no signs of having belonged to a previous owner.
34. This striking tribute is told in Interviews and Recollections, 181–2.
1. TH to Florence Dugdale, 10 Aug. 1905, Letters, III, 179.
2. Florence Dugdale to Rebekah Owen, 1 Dec. 1914, Letters of E & F Hardy, 101–2.
3. This is what she told R. L. Purdy in 1935 – see Biography Revisited, 409–10.
4. Michael Millgate gives these various accounts in his Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (1971), 446–7. In his Biography Revisited he settles for the version she gave Purdy, about visiting with Mrs Henniker, which seems wholly implausible.
5. From Dorothy Meech’s monograph Memories of Mr and Mrs Thomas Hardy (Beaminster, 1963). Dorothy Meech did typing work over a period of time at Max Gate for Florence Hardy after Hardy’s death. She liked her, and they often talked together. It must be remembered that such accounts, made over thirty years after the conversations described, are not necessarily accurate. It seems unlikely, for example, that Florence would have said she met the Hardys on holiday in Wareham. The point about this account is to convey that her friendship with Emma began at the same time as that with Hardy. All this information on p. 5 of the monograph.
6. ‘After the Visit’ was first printed in the Spectator, 13 Aug. 1910. It was then included in Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914) after Emma’s death, with the additional ‘(To F.E.D.)’ under the title.
7. Dorothy Meech, Memories of Mr and Mrs Thomas Hardy, 5. Even given Hardy’s reluctance to spend money, this is hard to believe.
8. TH to Reginald Smith, 26 Sept. 1907, Letters, III, 274.
9. For instance, he thanked her for a box at the Court Theatre, saying his wife could not be there, but he would bring ‘a young cousin’ – meaning Florence. TH to Lady Gregory, 7 June 1910, Letters, IV, 95.
10. According to Edward Clodd’s diary, 5 July 1909, cited in Biography Revisited, 424.
11. Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, The Second Mrs Hardy (1979), 46.
12. Edward Clodd to Clement Shorter, 27 Aug. 1909, cited in ibid., 50.
13. The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy (2000), 416.
14. This was also in 1909. Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 86.
15. From TH’s contribution to the symposium ‘How Shall We Solve the Divorce Problem?’ in Nash’s Magazine, 5 Mar. 1912, cited in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice, ed. Michael Millgate (2001), 332.
16. TH to Austin Harrison, 9 May 1910, Letters, IV, 87.
17. TH to Agnes Grove, 13 May 1910, Letters, IV, 89.
18. Emma Handy to Lady Hoare, 24 Apr. 1910, Letters of E & F Hardy, 48.
19. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 11 Nov. 1910, ibid., 66.
20. See Florence’s letters to Edward Clodd, 8 and 19 Nov. 1910, ibid., 65, 68. The amateur theatrical group became ‘The Hardy Players’ and caused much distress to Florence later; see Chapter 23, below.
21. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 19 Nov. 1910, ibid., 68.
22. Florence Dugdale to Sydney Cockerell, 25 Dec. 1925, ibid., 234.
23. As Pamela Dalziel demonstrates in Thomas Hardy: The Excluded and Collaborative Stories (1992), 336–55.
24. TH to Florence Henniker, 3 May 1911, Letters, IV, 150.
25. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 11 Dec. 1911, cited by Robert Gitting and Jo Manton, The Second Mrs Hardy, 64.
26. So he told Sassoon in 1921. Siegfried Sassoon’s diary for 22 Feb., quoted in Interviews and Recollections, 128.
27. Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973), 17.
28. The Titanic sank on 15 Apr. 1912 and Hardy’s poem was completed and first printed on 24 Apr. in a programme for a Covent Garden matinée in aid of a disaster fund. A final version was printed in Satires of Circumstance in 1914.
29. From The Later Life and Letters of Sir Henry Newbolt, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 99–100.
30. TH to Arthur Benson, 30 July 1892, Letters, I, 280.
31. Benson’s diary for Saturday, 22 Apr. 1905, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
32. Benson’s diary for Thursday, 5 Sept. 1912, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
33. Life, Chapter 31.
34. Both poems are in MS, held at the Berg Collection. The first poem is MS 64B7402 and is signed ‘E. L. Hardy’ and dated Max Gate, 22 Nov. 1912. The second is MS 64B7433, with pencilled words by Hardy, ‘Written by Mrs (Emma) Hardy 22 Nov. 1912: 5 days before her death’.
35. Rebekah Owen to a Mrs Fauty, presumably her housekeeper in the Lake District, 28 Nov. 1912, quoted in Carl Weber’s Thomas Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square (1952), 162–4. Owen was quite capable of questioning servants to extract information.
36. Dr Alan Frizzell writes, ‘Impacted gallstones could produce a fatal outcome, but I would not expect the pain of gallstones to be felt in the back. Mrs Hardy may have had gallstones, but I doubt if she died of them. The back pain suggests a retroperitoneal problem, and the course of her final illness is typical of a leaking abdominal aortic aneurysm. In the course of my career I came across more than one unfortunate patient who went to bed with the observation “My back is bad tonight”, to be found expired the next day from that cause.’
1. Mary Hardy to Mr and Mrs Hull [28 Nov. 1912?], DCM, H.1987.227.
2. Rebekah Owen to Mrs Fauty [n.d.], cited in Carl Weber, Thomas Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square (1952), 165.
3. Reported in the Dorset County Chronicle, 5 Dec. 1912.
4. See Florence Hardy’s letter to Lady Hoare, 22 July 1914, Letters of E & F Hardy, 98.
5. So Robert Gittings and Jo Manton allege in The Second Mrs Hardy (1979), 79. They also say on p. 93 that Jane Riggs stayed until 1917, when Florence alienated her further by taking cooking lessons herself.
6. So Florence reported to Edward Clodd in a letter of 30 Jan. 1913, Letters of E & F Hardy, 77.
7. Mary Hardy to Nat Sparks, 15 Feb. 1913, Sparks Archive, Hardy Collection, Eton College.
8. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, Max Gate, 7 Mar. 1913, Letters of E & F Hardy, 78–9.
9. The volume of stories was A Changed Man and Other Tales, published 24 Oct. 1913 and simultaneously by Harper’s in the US.
10. TH to Edward Elgar, 28 July 1913, Letters, IV, 291.
11. TH to Edward Clodd, 10 Dec. 1913, ibid., 327–8.
12. First printed in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), where it is dated Aug. 1913.
13. ‘When Oats Were Reaped’ is also dated Aug. 1913, but Hardy did not print it until 1925, in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles.
14. TH to Florence Henniker, 21 Dec. 1913, Letters, IV, 330.
15. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 3 Dec. 1913, Letters of E & F Hardy, 87.
16. In the Life Hardy describes this period in these words: ‘The autumn glided on… In the muddle of Hardy’s unmistressed housekeeping, animal pets of his late wife died, strayed, or were killed, much to Hardy’s regret.’
17. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 1 Jan. 1914, Letters of E & F Hardy, 92.
18. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 3 Dec. 1913, Letters E & F Hardy, 86. The ‘imbecile’ must be Randolph, mentioned in Walter Gifford’s letters to Emma.
19. See Wilfrid Blunt’s Cockerell (1964), 214.
20. Florence Dugdale to Rebekah Owen, 18 Jan. 1916, Letters of E & F Hardy, 114.
21. Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 20 Sept. 1915, cited by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, The Second Mrs Hardy, 72.
22. TH to Sydney Cockerell, 11 Feb. 1914, Letters, V, 9; TH to Edward Clodd, 11 Feb. 1914, Letters, V, 9.
23. Hardy told Edmund Blunden that he was capable of sexual intercourse until he was eighty-four, i.e., until 1924, ten years after he married Florence. This was told by Blunden to Martin Seymour-Smith, who gives it in his Hardy (1994), 728. Florence would certainly have understood that the duty of a wife was to submit to her husband’s embraces, but there is nothing to suggest that she took any pleasure in them, and a good deal to suggest she did not – her depression and hypochondria and her perpetual longing to get away from Max Gate.
24. Diary of Arthur Benson, Friday, 8 May 1914, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
25. TH to Sydney Cockerell, 9 Aug. 1914, Letters, V, 41.
26. TH to Florence Henniker, 17 July 1914, Letters, V, 37.
27. TH to Maurice Macmillan, 6 Aug. 1913, Letters, IV, 293.
28. TH to George Macmillan, 10 Aug. 1914, Letters, V, 41, and TH to Sydney Cockerell, 28 Aug. 1914, Letters, V, 45.
29. Florence Dugdale to Lady Hoare, 6 Dec. 1914, Letters of E & F Hardy, 104.
30. TH to Florence Henniker, 23 Dec. 1914, Letters, V, 70.
31. Virginia Woolf to TH, 17 Jan. 1915, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, II (1976), 58. On 23 Feb. she became ill and was out of action throughout the summer.
32. ‘Books in General’, New Statesman, 4 Nov. 1916. Squire wrote under his pseudonym ‘Solomon Eagle’. A week later Robert Lynd attacked the poems in the Nation for being ugly, prosaic and exaggerated.
33. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 12 Aug. 1916, Letters of E & F Hardy, 118.
34. ‘To Shakespeare’, one of the few poems that had already appeared in print, first in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare edited by Israel Gollancz for the 300th anniversary of his death, then in the Fortnightly Review for June 1916. Florence Hardy then printed it as a separate pamphlet with the help of Sydney Cockerell in July 1916.
35. The apparently random order of the poems is mysterious. Hardy must have realized that such personal work would be scanned for what it tells about his life, and that jumbling would not prevent this. Indeed he says himself in a letter of early Nov. 1919, ‘there is more autobiography in a hundred lines of Mr Hardy’s poetry than in all the novels.’ This is from a draft in Florence Hardy’s hand, to Archie Whitfield, a critic who had suggested that Jude might be autobiographical. Letters, VII, 161. So, given that he did put the ‘Poems of 1912–13’ and his war poems into clear, separate sections, why did he not arrange other poems by subject, or put them in chronological order? I am unable to suggest any explanation.
36. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 8 Dec. 1917, cited in Biography Revisited, 474, Yale.
37. These are discussed in Chapter 11, above.
38. From an edited version of a Radio 4 conversation between Vernon Scannell and Philip Larkin, printed in the Listener as ‘A Man who Noted Things’, 25 July 1968.
39. A letter from Florence Hardy to Marie Stopes in Sept. 1923 reads: ‘I find on talking to him [Hardy] that the idea of my having a child at his age fills him with terror… He said he would have welcomed a child when we married first, ten years ago, but now it would kill him with anxiety to have to father one.’
40. Quoted by Ann Thwaite in Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (1984), 461.
1. See Florence Hardy’s account of this to Rebekah Owen, 18 Jan. 1916, Letters of E & F Hardy, 113–114.
2. Cockerell also worked for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in Egypt and was shipwrecked with him in the Gulf of Suez. He visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana in 1903, and Tolstoy spoke to him of his admiration for Dickens: ‘All his characters are my personal friends… What a spirit there was in all he wrote!’ and his dislike of Shakespeare, who ‘had no feeling for the peasants. He never introduces a “clown” except to make fun of him. That is why I cannot read him with pleasure.’ These notes from Friends of a Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, ed. V. Meynell (1940), 81, 83–4.
3. This was Charlotte Mew and her sister Anne’s name for him, according to Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984), 176, which gives a good account of Cockerell.
4. Cockerell (1964) by Wilfrid Blunt, 269, given as a direct quotation but without a source.
5. Cockerell’s diaries are unpublished and held in the British Library. For 1911, Add. MSS 52648.
6. Howard Bliss, who sold it back when he got into financial difficulties. See Letters of E & F Hardy, 175–6, 217.
7. The remark is in Benson’s long diary entry describing the visit to Max Gate with Gosse in 1912. Hardy did give Florence the MS of Under the Greenwood Tree, as she informed Cockerell firmly in 1916: ‘We have been looking at “Under the Greenwood Tree” (which belongs to me now).’ Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 12 Aug. 1916, Letters of E & F Hardy, 118.
8. Cockerell’s diary for 1912, British Library Add. MSS 52649. Hardy was on friendly terms with Shaw and saw his Man and Superman performed. He does not mention Synge in the Life.
9. ibid., summary of year at beginning of diary.
10. See Note 15 below.
11. Mary Hardy to TH, 12 June 1913, DCM, also cited in Biography Revisited, 454.
12. The performance was given by the ADC, the Amateur Dramatic Club of Cambridge. At that date none of the Newnham or Girton students could belong. The Cambridge Magazine critic remarked on A. E. Moorsom, who played Gwendolen, having ‘just that doll’s beauty which fits with the Comedy’, otherwise regretting ‘what it means to give women’s parts to men: angular shapes and solid voices to the daintiness of feminine dress’. Siegfried Sassoon noted Hardy’s reference to ‘that man Wilde’ and his innocence about homosexuality in his diary for 28 June 1922, passage given in Interviews and Recollections, 130.
13. Diary of Arthur Benson, Wednesday, 11 June 1913, Magdalene College, Cambridge. His appreciation of Hardy is in the issue of 6 June 1913.
14. Sydney Cockerell’s diary for 1913, British Library Add. MSS 52650 for this and further quotes in this paragraph.
15. Cockerell wrote a memo in his diary explaining that ‘At my original suggestion, backed by Dr Verrall & all who stand for English Literature in Cambridge, Thomas Hardy received Doctor’s degree with great applause on June 11 and stayed with us at Wayside [SC’s house] for the purpose.’
16. All quotes and information in this paragraph from Sydney Cockerell’s diary for 1913, British Library Add. MSS 52650.
17. Arthur Benson’s diary, November 1913, notes: ‘That ass Ogden, in the Cambridge Magazine, said that Thomas Hardy “the celebrated Atheist” had been elected an Hon. Fellow. He meant it he said as a compliment to the Dons; but I wrote sharply to him to say that the word was simply an insulting word, both to Hardy & to us.’ C. K. Ogden founded the Cambridge Magazine in 1912 and an undergraduate association ‘The Heretics’. In 1923 he wrote The Meaning of Meaning with I. A. Richards and went on to invent and promote the idea of Basic English as an international language.
18. Alan Rusbridger was told this by I. A. Richards and kindly passed it on to me. Richard Luckett, friend and executor of Richards, believes it must have been the Benson building, finished in 1913, and tells me that Benson’s diary shows that he knew and liked the young Richards.
19. Florence Dugdale to Sydney Cockerell, 30 Nov. 1913, Letters of E & F Hardy, 85.
20. Sydney Cockerell’s diary for 5 May 1914, British Library Add. MSS 52651.
21. Arthur Benson’s diary for Friday, 8 May 1914, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
22. Information about Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones, Mistress of Girton from 1903 to 1916, kindly provided by Kate Perry, Archivist of Girton College.
23. Quoted in Michael Millgate’s edition of Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice (2001), 374. Bernard Shaw, Sassoon, Masefield, I. A. Richards (later co-editor) and the young historian Eileen Power were among contributors to the English part of the magazine.
24. This was in Mar. 1917. Hardy always took care with group letters and suggested changes because this one seemed to be attacking the whole of the British press, ‘which would have the effect of setting it all against you, which I am sure you do not wish to do’. His emendation was accepted, and the letter appeared in the Morning Post and in the Cambridge Magazine itself. See Letters, V, 207–8.
25. TH to Florence Henniker, 23 Mar. 1915, Letters, V, 86.
26. TH to Florence Hardy, 28 May 1915, Letters, V, 101.
27. Printed in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), in a small section of war poems at the end.
28. TH to John Galsworthy, 15 Aug. 1918, Letters, V, 275.
29. See Chapter 7, above, for genesis of this poem, which was first published in the Saturday Review, 29 Jan. 1916.
30. Life, Chapter 33.
31. TH to Sydney Cockerell, 23 Feb. 1917, Letters, V, 203.
32. He showed them and talked about them to John Squire in Aug. 1927 as part of the history of the garden, along with the Roman remains. From his Sunday Mornings, quoted in Interviews and Recollections, 234.
33. Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 3 Dec. 1915, Letters of E & F Hardy, 111.
34. Made in a letter to Emma, 28 Jan. 1881, after the Lock family had invited her to dinner. DCM, H.6302.
35. Vere H. Collins, Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate 1920–1922 (New York, 1928; reprinted St Peter Port, 1971), 58, a conversation held on 29 Oct. 1921. Florence added that Mary collapsed at the station the last time she went.
36. Mary Hardy to older Nat Sparks, 16 Jan. 1905, Sparks Archive, Hardy Collection, Eton College.
37. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, 17 Apr. 1916: ‘He told me that his surviving brother and sister (born eleven years or so after him and his favourite sister who died at the end of last year) are wholly without interest in art and letters, and that he has very little in common with them – with them the family becomes extinct.’ British Library Add. MSS 52663.
38. ‘Logs on the Hearth (A Memory of a Sister)’, dated Dec. 1915, published in Moments of Vision.
39. Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 18 Jan. 1916, Letters of E & F Hardy, 113.
40. Sydney Cockerell to TH, 7 Dec. 1915, DCM, given in Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts (1992), 123.
41. TH to Gertrude Bugler, 7 Dec. 1915, Letters, V, 137.
42. His diary shows that he sent her forty letters in 1916 alone, and he kept up a tremendous volume of correspondence with her for many years, rarely writing less than once a fortnight except when he was abroad.
43. For example, he suggested she come and hear Quiller-Couch lecture in Cambridge in Feb. 1918, but she felt it her duty to stay with Hardy: Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 2 Feb. 1918, Letters of E & F Hardy, 137. He took her to Shaw’s St Joan with his wife and saw her off on the Dorchester train on 4 June 1924. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, British Library Add. MSS 52661.
44. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, 19 Feb. 1916, British Library Add. MSS 52653, as are all entries for 1916.
45. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, Sunday, 24 Sept. 1916, British Library Add. MSS 52653.
46. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1920, British Library Add. MSS 52657, for this and all other quotations in this paragraph.
47. Robert Gittings made a bold attempt to claim that Hardy’s grandmother Mary Hardy, née Head, born in 1772, was the original for Tess, and he did discover that she had almost certainly given birth to an illegitimate child some years before her marriage, but that isn’t enough to make her Tess. There are too many discrepancies, starting with her not being a Dorset girl, and going on to her happy marriage to his grandfather and long life with more children and grandchildren at Bockhampton. It is extremely tempting to try to make out a case for Jemima having had some of Tess’s experiences before her marriage – a rich lover, a lost child – but there is no evidence at all to support it.
48. ‘Private Memorandum/Information for Mrs Hardy in the preparation of a biography’ in DCM, quoted in Millgate’s introduction to his 1984 edition of the Life, p. xix.
49. They were published as her work, she died in 1937, and by the 1950s the truth of their composition had emerged. R. L. Purdy’s Bibliographical Study of 1954 gave the true facts and described the process by which the Life, originally in two volumes published in 1928 and 1929, was put together from Hardy’s manuscript, which was then destroyed, along with most of the source materials. Michael Millgate’s edition is outstanding, combining the two volumes as The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, with notes and index, first published 1984 and revised 1989.
1. It was his third study at Max Gate, to which he moved after he had given up writing novels.
2. Hardy bought the cello from his cousin Nathaniel Sparks of Bristol, a restorer of musical instruments, in 1902. See Letters, III, 38, TH to Nathaniel Sparks, ‘No doubt the old viol has many a score time accompanied such tunes as “Lydia” or “Eaton” – (the latter was the tune with which they used nearly to lift off the roof of Goddard’s chapel of a Sunday evening).’ This was a Dissenting chapel in Puddletown, obviously well known to them both from their childhood.
3. Cynthia Asquith visited Max Gate in May 1921 and published her account in 1954 (in Portrait of Barrie, whose secretary she was, 105– 10). She thought there were no pictures hanging in the study except for a framed ‘wage-sheet’ from Hardy’s father’s or grandfather’s papers, on the shelf over the fireplace. She also gave her view that the study, ‘bare, simple, workmanlike and pleasantly shabby, was the only room in the house that had any character at all’. On the other hand Florence Hardy pointed out to R. L. Purdy in 1929 (after Hardy’s death) family photographs, portraits of Shelley and George Eliot, and illustrations to Tess and Jude, all hanging on the walls. It is of course perfectly possible that things changed between 1921 and 1928, and memories are fallible.
4. May O’Rourke’s reminiscences are in the monograph Thomas Hardy: His Secretary Remembers (1965), reproduced in Interviews and Recollections, 188–91.
5. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1919, British Library Add. MSS 52656.
6. See Note 12 to Chapter 22, above. Sassoon described Hardy as the ‘Wessex wizard’ in his poem ‘At Max Gate’.
7. Robert Graves to TH, 9 Jan. 1919, DCM, H.2633.
8. Article by Graves in the Sphere, 28 Jan. 1928, reprinted in Interviews and Recollections, 135.
9. These are the second and third stanzas. Bale means evil, suffering, injury, infliction of death; ban signifies a curse or malediction.
10. TH to Florence Henniker, 29 May 1922, Letters, VI, 132.
11. See Chapter 5, p. 81.
12. See Prologue, p. xxv.
13. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 6 Feb. 1919, Letters of E & F Hardy, 157.
14. Elliott Felkin, ‘Days with Thomas Hardy: From a 1918–1919 Diary’, Encounter, 18, Apr. 1962, 27–33. Felkin was a young officer on the staff of the prisoner-of-war camp at Dorchester at the end of the war and afterwards, introduced to the Hardys by the Cambridge don Lowes Dickinson and welcomed by them. He kept a diary recording his visits to them between Oct. 1918 and Aug. 1919.
15. This is from Virginia Woolf’s report of Forster describing a visit to Max Gate, in a letter to Janet Case, 23 Sept. 1922, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, II(1976), 559.
16. This was Harry Bentley, a young Dorchester man with a liking for books but denied secondary education by his parents’ poverty. Personal information from Anne Blandamer, wife of his nephew, who talked at length with Mr Bentley in 1978 and saw the pictures of Hardy and William Barnes he put up in his house.
17. The book is in the DCM, from Hardy’s library. His remark comes from Life, last words of Chapter 28. Notebook entry, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1978), 71. The listing of the Nordmann book is on p. 99, at the back of the notebook.
18. TH to Sir Rennell Rodd, 27 June 1924, Letters, VI, 262.
19. Florence Hardy to Louise Yearsley, 10 Nov. 1918, Letters of E & F Hardy, 151.
20. Hardy’s account of his intentions are in a letter to the music critic Harold Child, 11 Nov. 1923, Letters, VI, 221. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, 11 Aug. 1923, British Library Add. MSS 52660.
21. Life, Chapter 37. Boughton’s account of their venture appeared in the Musical News and Herald, 15 Feb. 1928, 73, 33–44, and ends, ‘His work is not a refuge from the woe of the world, but the battleplain of a courageous spirit.’
22. Hardy, when invited in 1917 to support a proposal for a memorial to Shakespeare to be put up in Rome after the war, had agreed, but insisted it should not be characterized as pertaining to ‘Christian civilization’, saying ‘I for one could not subscribe to a manifesto which did not keep silence on that point.’ TH to Richard Bagot, 7 June 1917, Letters, V, 218.
23. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 30 June 1923, Letters of E & F Hardy, 197.
24. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1923, British Library Add. MSS 52660.
25. TH to Kate Hardy, 18 July 1923, Letters, VI, 204–5 and note.
26. On 26 June the Council of the Duchy noted in their minutes that ‘Mrs Hardy is the wife of the celebrated novelist, Thomas Hardy O. M.’ The Duchy records say nothing about what prompted the Prince’s advisers to suggest his visit to Max Gate, but it seems just possible that the negotiations for the little plot of land gave them the idea, since the Prince’s visit was primarily to visit his tenants.
Neither Hardy nor Florence appears to have explained why they wanted the extra land, or why it was negotiated for in her name, nor is it clear which of them actually paid for it, but the Duchy dealt only with her, mostly through the Hardys’ solicitors, Lock, Reed & Lock. In Sept. the £100 asked by the Duchy was paid through the lawyers, and in Oct. the land was pegged out and Florence formally took possession of it, but no gardener’s cottage was ever built on it.
27. ‘Afterthoughts of Max Gate’ by Ellen Titterington, Hardyana (1969), 342.
28. Description of Hardy in T. E. Lawrence’s letter to Robert Graves, 8 Sept. 1923, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 182.
29. Florence Hardy to Marie Stopes, 14 Sept. 1923, Letters of E & F Hardy, 203.
30. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 3 Jan. 1922, ibid., 179.
31. Letter quoted by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton in The Second Mrs Hardy (1979), 87, no source but attributed to 1917.
32. See letter from TH to Lady St Helier, 25 Sept. 1919, Letters, V, 325.
33. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 31 Jan. 1921, Letters of E & F Hardy, 173.
34. Florence Hardy to E. M. Forster, 6 Jan. 1924, ibid., 206.
35. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1924, British Library Add. MSS 52661.
36. Virginia Woolf, who was just finishing writing Mrs Dalloway, noted in her diary for 17 Oct. 1924 her musing about her own predicted fame:
… very likely this time next year I shall be one of those people who are, so father said, in the little circle of London Society which represents the Apostles [exclusive Cambridge club]… on a larger scale… To know everyone worth knowing. I can just see what he means; just imagine being in that position – if women can be. Lytton is: Maynard; Ld Balfour; not perhaps Hardy. Which reminds me I ought to dash in Mrs Hardy in nursing home, having had her tumour cut out with Miss Charlotte Mew. Nothing very exciting, even as a boast not very exciting now. H. remembers your father: did not like many people, but was fond of him; talks of him often. Would like to know you. But I cant easily fit into that relation; the daughter grateful for old compliments to her father. Yet I should like to see him; to hear him – say something. But what? One or two words about a flower, or a view, or a garden chair, perhaps.
No doubt this led to her visit to the Hardys in 1926.
37. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1924, British Library Add. MSS 52661. Florence Hardy mentions Virginia Woolf’s visit in a letter to her, 31 May 1925, Letters of E & F Hardy, 225. Woolf put a postscript to her letter to V. Sackville-West, 9 Nov. 1924, ‘I have met Mrs Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew… Siegfried Sassoon…’, all evidently at the nursing home. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, III (1977), 140.
38. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, Letters of E & F Hardy, 213.
39. This is the second of two stanzas. The poem is dated 9 Oct. 1924 and was first printed in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925). The word ‘whangs’, meaning to make a noise while moving along, is unusual and comes from northern and Scottish dialect, but it was used by Browning and also by Masefield in 1912, ‘the organ whangs, the giddy horses reel’, where Hardy is likely to have read it.
40. Florence Hardy to Siegfried Sassoon, 30 June 1922, Eton College Archive, cited in Letters of E & F Hardy, p. xxii.
41. This was in Jan. 1918. The production, a revival of one performed in 1910, was based on Under the Greenwood Tree. Information from W. G. L. Parsons, ‘A Mellstock Quire’ Boy’s Recollections of Thomas Hardy (St Peter Port, 1967).
42. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 26 Dec. 1920, Letters of E & F Hardy, 171. Hardy must have known that Gertrude Bugler’s mother had grown up at Higher Bockhampton and worked in a dairy, like Tess. She married a Dorchester confectioner, and their children were brought up in South Street. Gertrude chose to be married in Stinsford Church.
43. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 26 Nov. 1922, ibid., 193.
44. Hardy wrote to Florence in London on 5 Oct. 1924 about ‘Gertrude B.’, saying she was rather dismayed at the bigness of her part ‘& says she does not like the Tess of the play as well as the Tess of the book (which is intelligent criticism)’. Letters, VI, 279.
45. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 22 Oct. 1924, Letters of E & F Hardy, 213.
46. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, 27 Nov. 1924, British Library Add. MSS 52661.
47. Gertrude Bugler’s letter of 18 Feb. 1964 to Cockerell’s biographer, Wilfrid Blunt, Cockerell (1964), 216.
48. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 10 Mar. 1925, Letters of E & F Hardy, 220–21.
49. For Florence preventing her from reciting a Hardy poem at a recital at a Dorsetmen’s dinner in London, see Florence Hardy to Gertrude Bugler, 7 Feb. 1925, ibid., 219. Cockerell’s diary shows that in Aug. 1925 he was still doing his best to allay her uneasiness by pointing out that Gertrude lived at Beaminster, a considerable distance from Max Gate, and that she and Hardy did not even correspond with one another.
50. Florence Hardy to Sir Arthur Pinero, 1 Aug. 1929, ibid., 297.
51. TH to Gertrude Bugler, 7 Feb. 1924, Letters, VI, 308.
52. As Note 47, above.
53. Marjorie Lilly reports him telling her in the 1920s that ‘Tess was his favourite heroine; “my Tess” he called her.’ ‘The Hardy I Knew’, Hardy Society Review, 1, 4 (1978), 100–103.
54. From À la recherche du temps perdu. Hardy’s note dated July 1926 suggests that someone drew his attention to this passage, because he does not appear to have read Proust otherwise. The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1978), 92.
55. Michael Millgate gives the first in Biography Revisited, 510, its source a letter from Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell in 1924. The second is in the Life, Chapter 38, from Mrs Granville-Barker’s description of Hardy’s visit in 1927.
56. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 19 Nov. 1923, British Library Add. MSS 52660.
1. Marjorie Lilly, ‘The Hardy I Knew’, Thomas Hardy Society Review, 1, 4 (1978), 100–103.
2. On the manuscript he wrote and erased ‘Snow at Upper Tooting’.
3. Discussed above in Chapter 9.
4. Discussed above in Chapter 18.
5. TH to Revd H. G. B. Cowley, 16 Dec. 1924, Letters, VI, 298.
6. TH to Arthur Benson, 26 Dec. 1924, Letters, VI, 300.
7. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 18 June 1925, British Library Add. MSS 52662. During 1925 he visited Max Gate in Jan., Mar., June, Aug. and Sept. 21 June: ‘TH extremely well, preparing a new volume of poems! TEL came to dinner and we were all in very good spirits.’ On Sunday, 22 Mar., TH shows Cockerell ‘some of his new poems’ and Cockerell goes by car with Florence to spend an hour at T. E. Lawrence’s cottage. In 1926 he visited in Apr. and June.
8. M. M. Allen to TH, 23 Aug. 1925, and James Sparks to TH, 11 Sept. 1925, headed ‘Almora’, Corowa, N.S.W. DCM, Kate Hardy and Lock Collection, B5.
9. H. A. Martin, Hon. Secretary of the Dorchester Dramatic and Debating Society, writing in the Dorset County Chronicle, 6 June 1940. Hardy also said that revolutionaries lacked historical knowledge and advised any local parliamentary candidate to stand at the Town Pump on market day and shake hands with as many farmers as possible.
10. Women of thirty and over until 1928, when, soon after his death, they achieved equal voting rights.
11. Florence Hardy to Rutland Boughton, 29 June 1924, Letters of E & F Hardy, 208.
12. Florence Hardy to Siegfried Sassoon, 5 July 1926, Letters of E & F Hardy, 241.
13. 25 July 1926, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, III (1979), 96–101.
14. Leonard Woolf, ‘Thomas Hardy’, Athenaeum, 21 Jan. 1928, 597–8.
15. 1 Nov. 1926, Life, Chapter 38.
16. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 17 Nov. 1926, Letters of E & F Hardy, 245.
17. TH to Ernest Barker, 23 Nov. 1926, Letters, VII, 50.
18. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 29 Dec. 1926, Letters of E & F Hardy, 247.
19. TH to the Granville-Barkers, 29 Dec. 1926, Letters, VII, 54.
20. Bertie Norman Stephens, Hardy and His Gardener (Beaminster, 1963).
21. Quoted in Ann Thwaite’s Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (1984), 507.
22. Life, Chapter 38.
23. J. C. Squire, Sunday Mornings, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 233–5.
24. Hardy never heard it. It was first performed early in 1928.
25. The NPG did not accept posthumous representations and would certainly not have considered either Florence or Emma Hardy eligible.
26. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 25 Dec. 1927, Letters of E & F Hardy, 256.
27. According to Florence, at any rate, in a letter to Howard Bliss, 11 Mar. 1930, Letters of E & F Hardy, 304. In a postscript she writes, ‘I did not intend to return to this painful topic, but I feel obliged – I asked J. M. Barrie whether he could recall the circumstances of the Abbey burial, and whether Cockerell was against it, as he now represents himself to have been. J. M. B.’s reply, as nearly as I can quote it was: “Why, he was the one who was all for it. I remember that he walked to the station with me the night before Hardy’s death, and he was urging it on me all the way.” Cockerell knew that I did not wish it.’
28. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1928, British Library Add. MSS 52666.
29. Ellen Titterington (1899–1977) was in service at Max Gate from 1921 to 1928. This and the quotation in the next paragraph are from her monograph Hardy and His Parlour-Maid (Beaminster, 1963).
30. Diary of Kate Hardy, cited in Biography Revisited, 531.
1. Dr Mann’s account, given years later, was wrong about this and about details of the day of the funeral in London.
2. From Kate Hardy’s diary in DCM, quoted in Biography Revisited, 533.
3. Florence Hardy to T. E. Lawrence, 5 Mar. 1928, Letters of E & F Hardy, 275.
4. Harry Bentley, the postman befriended by Hardy (see Chapter 23) who also delivered post to Dr Mann, believed the story. Bentley lived at 3 Rothesay Road, Dorchester, and died in 1985. He said the doctor called him in, saying, ‘Come and look at this’, and showed him the biscuit tin.
The theatre Sister Mary Eastment was only twenty-three. She was the daughter of a schoolmistress at Haselbury Plucknett and like many local people had no great admiration for Hardy. She told her daughter that Mr Nash-Wortham summoned her on her free afternoon with ‘Sister, I have a job for you. We have to cut out Mr Hardy’s heart.’ All she could think of was how much she resented losing her free time, and she had no sense of making history. The job was done antiseptically, and she never heard the story of the cat. All this from Mrs A. Brock, her daughter.
5. Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (1984), 508.
6. From account by Bertie Norman Stephens, Hardy and His Gardener (Beaminster, 1963).
7. 17 Jan. 1928, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, III (1979), 173–4. Virginia Woolf was among the mourners and described the pallbearers. She thought the coffin ‘like a stage coffin, covered with a white satin cloth’.
8. The late James Gibson showed me a copy of Mrs Shaw’s letter to T. E. Lawrence.
9. Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw (1961), 378.
10. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, III, Note 23.
11. Photocopy of the Dean’s letter, clearly dated 16 Jan. 1928 (the day of the funeral), in file given to me by the late James Gibson, with Bartelot’s reply. It would be nice to know who the head of the ‘great religious body’ was – could it have been the King? No member of the royal family attended the funeral, only aides representing them.
12. From William Rothenstein, Since Fifty: Men and Memories 1922–1938 (1939), 99–104.
13. The diary of Sydney Cockerell, 14 June 1928, British Library Add. MSS 52666.
14. American editions were published at the same time.
15. ‘When Dead’, published in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles in 1925, headed ‘To —’. The joke about Einstein comes in ‘Drinking Song’, published posthumously in Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres in 1928. ‘The Ruined Maid’ was written in the 1860s and first published in Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901.