THOMAS HARDY, NATURALISM & VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Today, The Grandma has been reading some works of Thomas Hardy, the English novelist and poet, who was born on a day like today in 1840.

Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840-11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. 

A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain such as those from his native South West England.

While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.

Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in south-west and south central England. Two of his novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBC's survey of best-loved novels, The Big Read.

Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in Higher Bockhampton (then Upper Bockhampton), a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford to the east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, where his father Thomas (1811-1892) worked as a stonemason and local builder. His parents had married at Melbury Osmond on 22 December 1839.

Hardy's interest in the theatre dated from the 1860s. He corresponded with various would-be adapters over the years, including Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886 and Jack Grein and Charles Jarvis in the same decade. Neither adaptation came to fruition, but Hardy showed he was potentially enthusiastic about such a project. One play that was performed, however, caused him a certain amount of pain. His experience of the controversy and lukewarm critical reception that had surrounded his and Comyns Carr's adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd in 1882 left him wary of the damage that adaptations could do to his literary reputation.

So, in 1908, he so readily and enthusiastically became involved with a local amateur group, at the time known as the Dorchester Dramatic and Debating Society, but that would become the Hardy Players. His reservations about adaptations of his novels meant he was initially at some pains to disguise his involvement in the play. However, the international success of the play, The Trumpet Major, led to a long and successful collaboration between Hardy and the Players over the remaining years of his life. Indeed, his play The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse (1923) was written to be performed by the Hardy Players.

In 1914, Hardy was one of 53 leading British authors -including H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle- who signed their names to the Authors' Declaration, justifying Britain's involvement in the First World War. This manifesto declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime, and that Britain could not without dishonour have refused to take part in the present war.

Hardy was horrified by the destruction caused by the war, pondering that I do not think a world in which such fiendishness is possible to be worth the saving and better to let western 'civilization' perish, and let the black and yellow races have a chance. He wrote to John Galsworthy that the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world.

Shortly after helping to excavate the Fordington mosaic, Hardy became ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died at Max Gate just after 9 pm on 11 January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed. 

His funeral was on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, and it proved a controversial occasion because Hardy had wished for his body to be interred at Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma.

Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England, and criticises those beliefs, especially those relating to marriage, education and religion, that limited people's lives and caused unhappiness.

More information: The Thomas Hardy Society

There are accents in the eye

which are not on the tongue, 
and more tales come from pale lips 

than can enter an ear. 
It is both the grandeur 

and the pain of the remoter moods 
that they avoid the pathway of sound.

Thomas Hardy