Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  So he accepted final defeat in the matter of publishing The Poor Man and the Lady in September 1869, after trying for fourteen months.6 It was an agonizing experience, but his determination was such that he made up his mind to learn from it. He would take all the advice he got and write a different sort of novel, using the country life he knew, dreaming up a thrilling plot – whatever they recommended. Hardy’s readiness to follow the dictates of publishers may seem too humble, but it was a practical response. Only by getting himself published, by whatever means, could he test out whether he might go on to make a career as a writer. Later in life he insisted that he was primarily a poet and that his novels were merely his craft, taken up as a means to a livelihood, but this is not the whole truth. He did want to become a serious novelist, and his best novels are great works of imagination, each with its own seam of poetry sewn into the narrative. Even his minor novels are wonderful oddities, amusing, disquieting, distinctive. The point was that he had to get started as best he could, and for years he had to sell what he wrote to earn his bread, which forced him to work too fast. He went on taking advice from publishers, accepted cuts and changes imposed by editors who serialized his novels, snipped, filleted and padded them, sometimes damagingly, into the shapes required by the serial market, and tried to keep to the subject preferred by the circulating libraries and thought suitable for family reading – which was, roughly, romance without sex. This is what he meant when he talked of craft, not art. He was not a Flaubert or a Henry James, who had the luxury of taking time and polishing. He sometimes apologized to friends for the shortcomings of his books, saying he knew he had failed to render what his imagination had first suggested to him. But in 1869 the one thing he knew was that he must get something written that Macmillan, or Chapman & Hall, or Tinsley Brothers, would actually set up in proof, publish and put into the bookshops; and to bring that about he was prepared to write whatever they asked for.

  Another effect of his encounter with Meredith, with his perfect air of a man of letters, may have been that Hardy decided to improve his own appearance. He could not produce anything to rival Meredith’s poetic locks, but by the end of 1869 he had grown a respectable beard of his own, in colour a yellowish brown.7 A hairy face was required of writers in the mid nineteenth century, and in appearance at any rate he could now take his place alongside Dickens, Tennyson, Trollope, Arnold and Browning.

  While The Poor Man and the Lady was still being considered in London, he was offered work by a Weymouth architect, George Crickmay. He had bought Hicks’s practice and needed an assistant who understood something about church restoration. Hardy decided to take this on for a few months at least and to move into lodgings in Weymouth. Living under the scrutiny of even the most sympathetic family makes waiting to hear from publishers doubly painful, and he says his spirits lifted once he had made the decision. He stood on the Esplanade facing the sunlit sea, the town band doing its best with some Strauss waltzes close by, and after all the strain was suddenly glad that he would not have to make any decisions about his own affairs for the next three months.

  Weymouth was booming and expanding, but it had kept some of the glamour bestowed on it by George III’s visits, and still had its handsome houses along the sea front looking out over the dazzling, unspoilable bay. He found himself lodgings in a small street near the harbour, at 3 Wooperton Street, and resumed his bachelor life. In the evening he liked to take out a rowing boat as dusk fell and lights began to shine out along the sea wall, ‘seeming to send long tap-roots of fire quivering down deep into the sea’.8 He was a good swimmer and took early-morning dips, floating on his back to enjoy the lift and fall of the waves and the warmth of the sun.

  When a new assistant arrived in Crickmay’s office, he turned out to be another dancing enthusiast, and he talked Hardy into enrolling for dancing lessons, where they met Weymouth girls. Hardy found them heavier on the arm than London ones, but dancing led to summer flirtations. He was as hungry for women as any other man of his age, but he fell in and out of love helplessly and often, and distrusted his own impulses. On a boat trip to Lulworth with his sister Mary in the summer of 1868, he had noticed a pretty woman and written a note about her afterwards: ‘Saw her for the last time standing on deck as the boat moved off. White feather in hat, brown dress, Dorset dialect, Classic features, short upper lip. A woman I wd have married offhand, with probably disastrous results.’ He carried on a half-hearted romance with another local girl, Cassie Pole, lady’s maid to one of the daughters of the current owners of Kingston Maurward House and daughter of the butler at another house near by.9 He must have appreciated the irony of making the hero of his novel fall in love with the squire’s daughter while in his own life he was making do with ladies’ maids.

  Or with cousins. There are stories that suggest he was involved at different times with three of his aunt Maria Sparks’s daughters. They need to be taken with caution, because they rest mostly on what their brother Nat Sparks’s son (another Nat) alleged years later. Not surprisingly, Hardy himself had nothing to say about any of it, but there may well be some truth in Nat’s account, which claimed that Hardy was attracted first to Rebecca, the eldest, on whom he was accused of crudely launching himself at a party as a boy; then to Martha, whom he was said to have wanted to marry; and finally to the youngest, Tryphena.10 Cousins could be a heaven-sent answer to the need for emotional experiment and sexual adventure in Victorian England. They were accessible, flirtable with, almost sisters, part of the family, and, indeed, in many families marriages took place between cousins. So it is likely that Tom thoroughly enjoyed the company of all his girl cousins, flirted with them and made as much love to them as he could get away with when he had the chance. Tryphena, who had been a child when he went to London, was sixteen when he returned. She was clever and pretty, like her sister Martha, and it seems that a warm cousinly affection developed as they got to know one another better. She was now working as a pupil teacher in the Puddletown school. The Sparkses had learnt from the Hardys and resolved that she should aim higher than her sisters and apply to a teacher training college when she reached the right age. Tryphena got into trouble for neglecting her duties at the school in January 1868 and was formally reproved, but she continued with her plans.

  The death of her mother in the autumn of 1868 was a blow to all the family, Maria Sparks and Jemima Hardy being close sisters, and Maria a good and careful mother to her daughters, now left to run their own lives, their father being very old and reduced to poverty. Tom was at his aunt’s funeral. He gave Tryphena some French lessons, passing on what he had learnt at King’s College. She knew about London from Martha, and no doubt he talked of his London experiences, and when she came to apply for her training in 1869 she chose the Nonconformist Stockwell Training College in south London. She was awarded a scholarship and studied there for two years. But there is no evidence she and Hardy met in London, and the friendship or flirtation between them cannot have lasted long.11

  At the end of her training Tryphena was offered a post as headmistress of an elementary school in Plymouth. London did not turn out so well for Martha. Within months of her mother’s death she became pregnant. It was a classic Victorian servant’s story, the father of her child being another servant, the butler in the same household. She was dismissed at once, and her lover, William Duffield, was also sent packing. At least he did the right thing by Martha and married her, and they tried to make a go of running a coffee shop in Kensington Park Road. The baby proved to be twins, a boy and a girl, the little girl dying during her first year. Martha had another daughter two years later, and then no more children. The coffee shop was not a success. They struggled on until 1876, when they made up their minds to leave England, not for Canada, as Martha’s aunt had done, but further away still, for Queensland, Australia.12 The fourth Sparks sister, Emma, whom Hardy had visited in Somerset in 1861, also by then living in poverty with her carpenter husband and more children than they could afford, left for Austra
lia too. They were driven by the fear of sinking into still worse misery and destitution than they already suffered. The workhouse loomed brutally in the imagination of the poor, as it was meant to, and Australia seemed a better bet. Hardy must have known of the difficulties and then the emigration of these once dearly loved cousins and been unable to intervene. It was another grim thing to keep at the back of his mind while he pursued his own ambitions through doubts, setbacks and discouragement.

  In the autumn of 1869 he started on another novel. He followed Meredith’s advice about plot and structured it around a melodramatic and intricate story that included wife murder, a lady of high position with a secret illegitimate child, the result of a rape, and a crop of preposterous coincidences. His title, a good one, told the reader roughly what to expect: Desperate Remedies. What had he in mind? The example of Wilkie Collins’s recent hit The Moonstone, perhaps, and Dickens’s use of mystery plots, as in Our Mutual Friend.13 George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical, which also came out when he was in London, in 1866, was another novel that made use of mysteries involving birth, parentage and inheritance. Some of Hardy’s book reads as though he had said to himself, if this is what the publishers and the public want, I’ll give it to them. On top of the lurid plot points he threw in everything that came to hand, the experience of struggling architects, life in Weymouth lodgings, a boat trip to Lulworth, the two big houses on the Kingston Maurward Estate, the trials of a lady’s maid, the harsh treatment meted out to tenants by country landowners, a glimpse of the London poor and another of apple picking in the West Country, quotations from English and Latin poets, some picturesquely spoken rustics and a midnight disposal of a body, supposedly secret, actually witnessed by three separate observers. If the story sometimes seems in danger of flying apart, he just manages to tie it up prettily at the end with the sudden deaths of the two most delinquent characters.

  His heroine, Cytherea, is pretty, graceful and submissive. She is given a striking moment at the start of the book when, attending a public Shakespeare reading, she looks through the windows of the town hall at the spire of the local church which her architect father is restoring, and, as she watches, sees him lose his footing on the scaffolding and drop to his death. It should be a terrible experience for her, but it has no point except to mark the beginning of her and her brother’s adventures as orphans who must earn their livings. By the end of the book she has been through further ordeals, remaining pretty and graceful throughout, but without ever managing to become interesting. She is wooed by a young architect and by a murderous villain, her heart flutters and her tears flow; she thinks she may end her days in the workhouse and agrees to marry to escape poverty, the reason that leads ‘many thousands of women’ into marriage every year, Hardy tells us. The charm of Desperate Remedies – and it has its charms, particularly in the early chapters – lies not in the plot but in Hardy’s incidental comments and descriptions. He describes the dullness of provincial towns where the citizens are given to watching newcomers, ‘silently criticising their dress – questioning the genuineness of their teeth and hair – estimating their private means’. He tells us that the county hospital ‘is only another name for slaughter-house’. A man in love looks at the girl he wants to walk home ‘as a waiter looks at the change he brings back’, whereas a young single woman tells how much she enjoys living alone: ‘If you knew the pleasure of locking up your own door, with the sensation that you reigned supreme inside it, you would say it was worth the risk of being called odd.’

  One night, Cytherea, lying awake, hears ‘a very soft gurgle or rattle’ followed by the low whining of a dog, taken up by other dogs that start to howl. It is the dying breath of the old master of the house, alone in his bedroom, and Hardy says she had heard it before, when her mother died. He is so confident and precise in his description that you wonder if he had heard it himself at the death of his grandmother.

  There is also a famous scene in which Cytherea, working as a lady’s maid, has her bed invaded by her employer Miss Aldclyffe, an ageing unmarried lady. Miss Aldclyffe presses Cytherea to her heart, kisses her lips with ‘a warm motherly salute’, asks for her love and questions her jealously about her relations with men. Cytherea is not particularly worried by her physical proximity – beds were often shared – so much as embarrassed by Miss Aldclyffe’s bullying insistence on being given the name of the young man she is in love with. Lesbianism was little mentioned in Victorian England, but the episode may well have been based on something told Hardy by one of the lady’s maids he knew. At the same time the frisson in this scene is social as much as sexual, distaste for a demonstration of the arrogant behaviour of the upper classes in intruding and prying even into the private feelings and experiences of their servants.14 No modern reader can be unaware of the sexual element, but the line between physically demonstrative displays of innocent affection and conscious eroticism was not easily drawn in the mid nineteenth century. Even men sometimes had difficulty with it, as Henry James found. Hardy is not describing a rape or an erotic conquest here, although he is showing how Miss Aldclyffe, starved of affection and charmed by Cytherea (as everyone is), wants to make her into her ‘pet’, something between a companion and a daughter who will devote herself exclusively to her. She describes herself as ‘your mamma’, and she knows that Cytherea is the daughter of the man she once loved. Her behaviour in the bedroom is imperious, ill mannered and coercive, both physically and emotionally, but not seductive. She continues to bully Cytherea into doing what she wants, including marrying against her own inclinations, but there is no repetition of the bedroom scene. John Morley, who read the book for Macmillan, was horrified by the early episode of the rape of the young Miss Aldclyffe (a ‘disgusting and absurd outrage’), which Hardy removed. The scene ‘between Miss Aldclyffe and her new maid in bed’ he called merely ‘highly extravagant’. It is powerful and unpleasant, but there is nothing lewd or titillating about it.

  To speed up completion of this book Hardy left Weymouth in February 1870 and returned to Bockhampton and his mother’s care. A message came from Crickmay inviting him to travel to Cornwall to look at a church in need of restoration in a remote spot on the north coast. Hardy delayed his departure until March in order to be able to post off his nearly finished manuscript to Macmillan before he went, on 5 March. Then, in the starlit small hours of 7 March, he got up to walk to Dorchester Station and set off on what proved to be the most momentous journey of his life.

  7. Lyonnesse

  The journey west into an unknown county marked the beginning of a new epoch in his life. The next four years were to be dominated by two enterprises: a personal adventure in which he met, courted and married Emma Gifford; and a gruelling professional ordeal which finally transformed him from an architect’s clerk with dim prospects and uncertain literary ambitions into a successful novelist. The two processes were tightly twisted together; they demanded energy, resilience and determination, and neither proceeded easily or straightforwardly. When he and Emma met, he was no more than an aspiring writer, unpublished and with small grounds for confidence. Neither of their families approved of their decision to be married when they heard of it, but they married anyway, and by that time his fourth novel was being serialized in the Cornhill, the most widely read and respected magazine in England, and Hardy had arrived on the literary scene. He had already been hailed as another George Eliot and credited with ‘the intense minuteness and vivid concentration of the most powerful among French writers of fiction’.1 All four of his novels had been published in America and three of them also serialized there.2 The gods had smiled on him: he had a secure reputation, and he was bankable. He could keep a wife.

  In March 1870 none of this could have been imagined. His starlit walk in the small hours was the prelude to a long day’s travel, because north Cornwall was not easily accessible. From Dorset he had to take four different trains: Dorchester to Yeovil, Yeovil to Exeter, Exeter to Plymouth and Plymouth north again to Launceston; and
after this came another sixteen miles in a hired trap before he arrived in front of the rectory in St Juliot, a hamlet so remote and insignificant it is still not marked on road maps in 2005. Once inside the door he found himself face to face with a young lady wearing a brown dress. She was of unmistakable gentility, graceful, with a mass of hair shading from corn-gold to bright brown, dark eyes and a pink complexion.3 She introduced herself and explained that the rector, her brother-in-law, was suffering from an attack of gout – the classic complaint of the Victorian rectory – and could not come downstairs; nor, just yet, could her sister, who was tending the invalid.

  Miss Gifford greeted Hardy with the respect accorded to a professional visitor. She knew he came on architectural business, and he spoke as an educated man with just a touch of the soft West Country in his voice; and at first sight he seemed quite old, with his beard and well-worn greatcoat. To him, her social standing was obvious: she was a lady. This was the first time he had met one of her class and age on equal terms. Class mattered to them both. When Emma declared that the nearest neighbours were nine miles away, she meant the people of her own class, because the labouring families she visited in their scattered cottages round about simply did not count as ‘neighbours’. And when Hardy spoke of his work to her he did not add anything about his background, parents or home life in a Dorset cottage. He was not going to be the poor man. They conversed, as they had met, as equals.