Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in the hamlet of Higher Bockhampton on June 2, 1840. His father was a
master mason, satisfied with his low social status and his rural surroundings. His mother,
however, whom Hardy once called “a born bookworm,” encouraged Hardy’s education and
urged him to raise his social standing. John Hicks, a Dorchester architect, took the boy on as a
pupil at the age of sixteen. While in Hicks’s office, Hardy met the well-known poet William
Barnes, who became an important influence on his career. Another early influence was the
classical scholar Horace Moule, an essayist and reviewer. Moule encouraged Hardy to read John
Stuart Mill and the iconoclastic Essays and Reviews (1860) by Frederick Temple and others,
both of which contributed to the undermining of Hardy’s simple religious faith.

At age twenty-two, Hardy went to London to pursue his architectural training; by this time,
however, he had also begun to write poetry and to entertain hopes of a literary career. In 1866,
after reading Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), he began
an intensive two-year period of writing poetry. He submitted many poems for publication during
this time, but none was published, although many of these were published later, when he began
writing poetry only.

After returning to Bockhampton in 1867, Hardy decided to try his hand at writing fiction. His
first effort in this genre, “The Poor Man and the Lady,” based on his perception of the difference
between city and country life, received some favorable attention from publishers. After a
discussion with novelist George Meredith, however, Hardy decided not to publish the work but,
on Meredith’s advice, to strike out in a new direction. In imitation of the detective fiction of
Wilkie Collins, he thus wrote Desperate Remedies (1871). In spite of his success Hardy did not
stay with the melodramatic novel but instead took the advice of a reader who liked the rural
scenes in his first work and wrote a pastoral idyll entitled Under the Greenwood Tree (1872).
Although the book was well received by critics, its sales were poor. Yet Hardy had found his true
subject—the rural English life of an imaginary area he called Wessex—and he was on his way to
becoming a full-time writer. He began writing serials for periodicals, abandoned architecture,
and launched himself on a career that was to last well into the twentieth century.
Life’s Work

In 1874, Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford, a socially ambitious young woman who shared
his interest in books. At about the same time, his first great novel, Far from the Madding Crowd
(1874), appeared and received many favorable reviews. As a result, editors began asking for the
works of Thomas Hardy. Hardy composed his next great novel, The Return of the Native (1878),
and enjoyed what he later called the happiest years of his life. After a brief social life in London,
Hardy returned to Dorset, had his home “Max Gate” built, and published the third of his five
masterpieces, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). For the next several years, Hardy continued his
writing, traveled with his wife, and read German philosophy.

By this time, Hardy himself was being seen as a philosophical novelist. What has been called his
“philosophy,” however, can be summed up in an early (1865) entry in his notebooks: “The
world does not despise us; it only neglects us.” The difference between Hardy and many
nineteenth century artists who experienced a similar loss of faith is that while others such as
William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle were able to achieve some measure of religious
affirmation, Hardy never embraced a transcendent belief. He did not try to escape the isolation
that his loss of faith created, although in all of his major novels and in most of his poetry, he
continued to try to find some value in a world of accident, chance, and indifference. Indeed, all
of Hardy’s serious artistic work can be seen as variations on his one barren theme of the loss of
God and the quest for a new value system.

Late in his life, Hardy said that he never really wanted to write novels and did so only out of
economic necessity. Indeed, many of his minor works are imitations of popular forms of the
time. While he did imitate the detective novel or social comedy, however, when he wished to
write a novel that more clearly reflected his own vision of man’s situation in the world, he could
find no adequate fictional model among the popular forms of the time. Thus, he returned to
classical models such as the pastoral for Far from the Madding Crowd and The Woodlanders
(1887), Greek tragedy for The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native, and the epic
for Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896).
Since these early genres were based on some sense of there being a God-ordered world, Hardy
could not imitate them exactly but rather had to transform them into his own grotesque versions
of pastoral, tragedy, and epic. As a result, in his pastorals nature is neither benevolent nor
divinely ordered; in his tragedies, his heroes are not heroic because they defy the gods but
precisely because there is no God; and in his epic works, his epic figures—Tess and Jude—are
not heroes who represent the order of their society but rather are outcasts because neither their
society nor indeed their universe has inherent value.

Thus, if Hardy is a philosophical novelist, as is often claimed, his philosophy is a simple and
straightforward one—the world is an indifferent place and the heavens are empty of meaning and
value. Although Hardy did not have a unified philosophical system, he was more committed to
metaphysical issues than he was to the various social issues that preoccupied many novelists of
the late nineteenth century. This is true in spite of the fact that the surface plot of Tess of the
D’Urbervilles deals with the so-called marriage question in England and Jude the Obscure
ostensibly deals with the problem of equal education.

Hardy’s initial enthusiasm for his fourth important novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, was
dampened when it was turned down by two editors before being accepted for serial publication
by a third. The publication of this work brought hostile reaction and notoriety to Hardy—a
notoriety that increased after the publication of his last great novel, Jude the Obscure. Hardy was
both puzzled and cynical about these reactions to his last two novels for their iconoclastic views
of sexuality, marriage, and class distinctions, but he was by then financially secure and decided
to return to his first love, poetry.

In poetry, Hardy believed that his views could be presented in a less obvious and more distanced
way. For the rest of his career, he wrote little else. His poems, of which he published well over a
thousand, were very well received, and his experimental drama, The Dynasts: A Drama of the
Napoleonic Wars (1903-1908), brought him even more respect, fame, and honor. The final years
of Hardy’s life were spoiled only by the death of his wife in 1912. Within four years, he married
his secretary, Florence Dugdale, who cared for him in his old age. Hardy continued to write
poetry regularly for the rest of his life; his final volume, Winter Words (1928), was being
prepared for publication when he died on January 11, 1928. His death was mourned by all of
England, and his ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey.

Summary

Thomas Hardy is second only to Charles Dickens as the most read and most discussed writer of
the Victorian era. New books and articles appear on his life and work each year with no signs of
abating. In terms of volume and diversity of work, Hardy is a towering literary figure with two
highly respected careers—one as a novelist and one as a poet.

Interest in Hardy’s work has followed two basic patterns. The first is philosophical, with many
critics creating elaborate metaphysical structures which supposedly underlay his fiction. In the
last two decades, however, interest has shifted to that aspect of Hardy’s work which was most
scorned before—his technical expertise and his experiments with many different genres. Only in
the last few years has what once was termed his fictional clumsiness been reevaluated as
sophisticated poetic technique. Furthermore, Hardy’s career as a poet, which has always been
under the shadow of his fiction, has been seen in a more positive light recently and has even been
called by some critics the most significant and important part of his life’s work.

Hardy was a curious blend of the old-fashioned and the modern. With a career that began in the
Victorian era and did not conclude until after World War I, Hardy was contemporary with both
the representative Victorian writer Matthew Arnold and the most frequently cited representative
of the modern, T. S. Eliot. Many critics suggest that Hardy, more than any other writer, bridges
the gulf between the Victorian sensibility and the modern era.

Although not a systematic philosophical thinker, Hardy was a great existential humanist. His
hope for humanity was that man would realize that creeds and conventions which presupposed a
God-oriented center of value were baseless. He hoped that man would loosen himself from
religious dogma and become aware of his freedom to create his own value system. If only man
would realize that all people were equally alone and without divine help, Hardy believed, he
would realize also that it was the height of absurdity for such lost and isolated creatures to fight
among themselves. The breakout of World War I was thus a crushing blow to whatever optimism
Hardy held for modern man.
In his relentless vision of a world stripped of transcendence, Hardy is a distinctly modern
novelist. As one critic has said of him, he not only directs one’s attention back to the trauma of
the loss of faith in the nineteenth century, he also leads one into the quest for renewed value that
characterizes the modern era.