Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy: The Architect Who Buried Wessex

When Thomas Hardy died at Max Gate on 11 January 1928, England could not agree on where to put him. His body was cremated at Woking and the ashes interred in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey; his heart was buried separately at Stinsford, in the Dorset churchyard, beside his first wife Emma. The division was grotesque and perfectly apt. Hardy had spent sixty years being two men at once — the national literary monument and the parish boy who never really left the heath.

The Builder's Son

He was born on 2 June 1840 in a cottage at Higher Bockhampton, near Piddletown Heath, three miles east of Dorchester. His father was a builder and a musician; his mother was Jemima. There were four children, and Thomas was the only one of them to marry — a small act of defiance against a mother who had other ideas. He began at the village school in Lower Bockhampton and at ten was moved to Isaac Last's non-conformist school in Greyhound Yard, Dorchester. At sixteen his formal education stopped altogether. He was apprenticed to a local architect, John Hicks.

This is the fact that explains the novels. Hardy did not arrive at literature through a university; he arrived through the trade of measuring old buildings and working out how they stood up. The habit of structural attention — of asking what load a thing is carrying and where it will crack — never left his fiction.

Drawing Gothic in London

From 1862 to 1867 he worked in London as a gothic draughtsman, then returned west to work for G. R. Crickmay, a Weymouth architect. In March 1870 Crickmay sent him to St Juliot in Cornwall to survey a church for restoration. There he met Emma Lavinia Gifford. The journey west would supply him with a marriage, and forty-three years later, with the finest poems he ever wrote.

His first novel, *The Poor Man and the Lady*, was never published. *Desperate Remedies* followed in 1871, then *Under the Greenwood Tree*, then *A Pair of Blue Eyes*, which drew on Emma herself. *Far from the Madding Crowd* made him a bestseller and made architecture optional.

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Inventing Wessex

What followed was one of the most sustained runs in English fiction: *The Hand of Ethelberta* (1876), *The Return of the Native* (1878), *The Trumpet-Major* (1880), *A Laodicean* (1881), *Two on a Tower* (1882), *The Mayor of Casterbridge* (1886), *The Woodlanders* (1887). More than fifty short stories accompanied them. From 1885 he wrote at Max Gate, a brick villa built on Duchy of Cornwall land southwest of Dorchester, where he would live until his death.

The achievement was not merely regional colour. Britannica locates the durability of the fiction in a "richly varied yet always accessible style" joined to "convincingly presented characters," and in the "nostalgic evocation of a vanished rural world through the creation of highly particularized regional settings." Hardy did not describe a county. He built one, named it Wessex, and made it dense enough that readers still navigate it by instinct — and dense enough, Britannica notes, that it adapts unusually well to film and television, which has kept the novels in circulation for a century.

The Scandal of Tess and Jude

His last two novels are his masterpieces and they nearly destroyed him. *Tess of the d'Urbervilles* (1891) takes a milkmaid, *Jude the Obscure* (1895) a stonemason, and follows what Britannica calls their "initially hopeful, momentarily ecstatic, but persistently troubled" journeys to ruinous ends. *Tess* asked Victorian readers to extend sympathy to a seduced woman with an illegitimate child. *Jude* attacked the class system and the institution of marriage directly, through partners who live together and have children with, as Britannica puts it, "little regard" for the institution.

Both books drew what Britannica describes as "brutally hostile reviews," and Hardy — thin-skinned, and increasingly famous — took the damage personally. *The Well-Beloved* appeared in 1897 and then he stopped. He had always rated poetry above fiction anyway.

The Second Career

*Wessex Poems* came in 1898. Between then and his death in 1928 Hardy published eight volumes containing something close to a thousand poems — a body of work most writers would consider a full life, produced entirely after the age at which most novelists have finished. Between 1903 and 1908 he assembled *The Dynasts*, a three-volume verse drama on the Napoleonic Wars, which consolidated his standing and led to the Order of Merit in 1910. He had refused a knighthood. Honorary doctorates came from Aberdeen, Cambridge and Oxford, and honorary fellowships from Magdalene College, Cambridge and Queen's College, Oxford.

Emma, and 1912–13

Emma died in 1912, at seventy-two, after years in which the marriage had grown cold and estranged. Fourteen months later Hardy married Florence Dugdale, nearly forty years his junior. And then, in his seventies, something broke open. Some poems are dated December 1912; others March 1913, after he travelled back to Cornwall to stand where he had met her. The Poems of 1912–13 are, in the Poetry Foundation's phrase, "racked with guilt and wonder." Hardy's biographer Claire Tomalin identified this sequence as "the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet." Britannica calls it the peak of his poetic achievement.

Why Thomas Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is structural: Hardy could hold an entire imagined world in mind with the accuracy of a surveyor and still feel it as grief. The word has been used of him by people not given to it. Virginia Woolf, who visited him, credited him with offering "a vision of the world and of man's lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius." Yeats and Siegfried Sassoon also made the pilgrimage to Max Gate. His influence on the poets who followed — Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Donald Hall — is the practical evidence, and it is unusual for a Victorian novelist to have shaped twentieth-century verse that heavily.

The honest counter-case is that the greatness is lopsided and hard to defend cleanly. Irving Howe conceded exactly this, writing that Hardy's "strange greatness is hard to describe" and acknowledging the paradox of his significance despite apparent flaws. Britannica, while calling his double standing as major Victorian novelist and major twentieth-century poet "universally recognized," records that "his verse has been slower to win full acceptance" than the fiction. Hardy is not a writer whose case rests on flawlessness. His plots lean on coincidence and his outlook can curdle into a fatalism that reads as a thesis rather than an observation. What survives the objections is that nobody else built a world that readers still walk around inside a hundred and thirty years later.

Legacy

The divided burial turned out to be the right monument. The Abbey took the reputation; Stinsford kept the man. The novels have never gone out of print or off the screen, and the poems — the slow half of the achievement — have gone on gaining ground for a century, which is the direction of travel that matters.