Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  He had been working supremely hard in order to succeed so that he and Emma could be married. Now, as a result of this intense dedication to his work, the world was opening out for him, and he began to have the chance to meet people he found interesting. Emma, who had so dazzled him, may have begun to seem less extraordinary. On his return to Bockhampton, he was invited to dine with a neighbouring family, that of the Revd Reginald Smith, rector of West Stafford, and his wife, Geneviève. At their house he had once been offered a glass of milk as a schoolboy. Now they were aware of his literary success. Their son Bosworth was teaching at Harrow, and their two daughters, Evangeline and Blanche, were both bookish. This was a notable social occasion for Hardy, the first formal invitation he had received from any member of the Dorset gentry. He went on his own, and the butler who served at table that evening was the father of Cassie Pole, with whom he had flirted in London. If it was a disconcerting situation for butler and guest – the butler is said to have resented it – it passed without anyone else being aware of it, and the next day Hardy sent a copy of A Pair of Blue Eyes to Mrs Smith, with a note of thanks for her hospitality, saying it had a ‘peculiar charm’ for him as a writer, the more so since he had been ‘denied by circumstances until very lately the society of educated womankind, which teaches men what cannot be acquired from books, and is indeed the only antidote to that bearishness which one gets into who lives much alone’.29

  He had London invitations too. In April the Stephens introduced him to George Smith, publisher and proprietor of the Cornhill, and in May to Helen Paterson, the young artist who was illustrating Far from the Madding Crowd; also to Mrs Procter, a lively and remarkable old woman who had known everybody, her stepfather having been a friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.30 Hardy greatly enjoyed her company. He also developed a tendresse for Helen Paterson on the one hand and Anny Thackeray on the other. Meanwhile he was preparing to be married to Emma.

  And where was Emma? A mystery hangs over her whereabouts during 1874, which neither Hardy nor Emma ever chose to explain. The inscription he wrote for her memorial stone in St Juliot Church stated that she had lived at St Juliot until 1873. His last visit to Cornwall was made for Christmas 1873, and they were not married until September 1874. She wrote in her recollections that ‘I went as a country cousin to my brother in London’, but she gave no dates. Did she live with Walter for nine months? Did she go to friends? There was no reconciliation with her parents. Hardy was at Bockhampton for much of the early part of the year, with visits to London in April and in May. In late May he arranged a passport for himself and his wife ‘travelling on Continent’. This was four months before it was needed.

  A poem called ‘The Change’, written in early 1913 among the other poems recalling the time of his courtship of Emma, describes her arrival unaccompanied at what appears to be a London railway station. It sounds like a winter scene, with its ‘murks of night’ and ‘lamps wanning her face’:

  Mid murks of night I stood to await her,

  And the twanging of iron wheels gave out the signal that she was come.

  … She said with a travel-tired smile,

  Half scared by scene so strange;

  She said, outworn by mile on mile,

  The blurred lamps wanning her face the while,

  ‘O Love, I am here; I am with you!’… Ah, that there should have come a change!

  This suggests that Hardy met Emma in a place strange to her after a long railway journey made alone, very likely from Cornwall to London. Her sister and brother-in-law were unlikely to have agreed to her making such a journey alone to meet Hardy in London, which suggests further that there had been a falling out between Emma and the Holders. Had they been on good terms, it would have been natural for Emma to be married from their house. In fact, contact between the sisters seems to have been broken off for a time. Her journey must have been made between January and May 1874, but under what circumstances we can only guess. Hardy was absorbed in writing. He was much at home, where his mother’s influence was felt, but sometimes in London, where he was experiencing the charms of the world into which Leslie Stephen had introduced him and meeting women he found attractive. Hardy wobbled, as happens during a long engagement, and thought he might have liked to woo Miss Paterson. She was quite uninterested in him and about to be married herself, to another writer, William Allingham, but Emma would have noticed a change of tone in his letters. If her journey to London was impulsive and meant to remind him of their engagement, it succeeded when in May he took out the passport for himself and wife. He says nothing about any of this in his memoirs, and Emma’s own Recollections make her stay in London into a joke: ‘I went as a country cousin to my brother in London, and was duly astonished, which gave him even more pleasure than it did me. I was rather bewildered with the size and lengths and distances, and very much embarrassed at going in an omnibus, which seemed a very undignified method of getting about.’ Nothing about when, or how long her visit was, or how she occupied herself.

  After Emma’s and Hardy’s deaths, his second wife put out various stories about Emma. One was that Emma’s family put pressure on him to marry Emma. Another had Emma visit Bockhampton alone to confront Hardy’s parents.31 Neither seems likely. A more probable scenario is that Emma began to worry that Hardy’s affections might be wandering and told her sister she would like to go to London. Helen said, on no account, it is not done. Emma answered, I am going whatever you think, and let Hardy know she was coming. Hardy met her at the station. Now what? He could not take her to his lodgings. She had to go to her brother Walter, fortunately established in London, and stay there. The drama of the arrival fixed itself in Hardy’s imagination and appeared in the poem.

  Hardy applied for the passport for himself and wife to demonstrate his commitment, but he still had to go on writing Far from the Madding Crowd. He went back to Bockhampton to do so, remaining until July, when he returned to London. In August he brought the book to its conclusion with ‘the most private, secret, plainest wedding that it’s possible to have’,32 and at the beginning of September he wrote to Emma’s uncle, the Revd Edwin Hamilton Gifford, a man in his fifties, Cambridge educated and at this time a Canon of Worcester, asking if he would officiate at his and Emma’s wedding on 17 September. He also offered the Canon a bed at his own lodgings in Celbridge Place. Gifford declined the offer – he preferred Onslow Square, where he often stayed – but kindly declared, ‘I shall be very happy to tie the knot for you’, adding that he had left a little present of salt cellars and spoons for Emma, to be engraved at his expense.33 It may have been their only wedding present. Hardy meanwhile was finishing a short story commissioned by the New York Times, ‘Destiny and a Blue Cloak’, which he posted off on 12 September. On the same day Canon Gifford wrote again, confirming that he would be at Chippenham Road, where Emma’s brother lived, at 10.45 on the 17th and advising Hardy, who had evidently told him about his honeymoon plans, that Rouen was an expensive place.34

  10. A Short Visit to the Continent

  Hardy never wrote or spoke about his wedding to Emma. There is a short, serene account of the day by Emma in her Recollections, written some thirty-five years afterwards. ‘The day we were married was a perfect September day – the 17th, 1874 – not brilliant sunshine, but wearing a soft, sunny luminousness; just as it should be.’ Nothing more. At the time she wrote even less in her diary:

  Married September 17th. 1874

  St Peter’s Paddington from 54 Chippenham Rd. Westbourne Pk1

  St Peter’s Church was newly built and ugly, and must have been picked purely for its convenience, Elgin Avenue being within easy walking distance of Walter Gifford’s house in Chippenham Road.2 Canon Gifford’s letter suggests that the ceremony took place in the morning. Emma was given away by her brother. The marriage certificate shows that Hardy’s witness was the daughter of his landlady. Either he could find no friend or family, or he preferred not to ask any, out of shyness,
or wanting to protect Emma. He put down his own and his father’s occupations plainly as ‘Author’ and ‘Builder’.

  A line in Emma’s diary has been scored over but seems to read ‘Palace Hotel, Queen’s Road’, which could be where the small party had lunch, and almost certainly where she and Hardy spent their first night together before going on to Brighton.3 The next entry is ‘Brighton. Rough sea on Friday’. At Morton’s Hotel in Brighton, Hardy wrote to his brother:

  Dear Henry, I write a line to tell you all at home that the wedding took place yesterday, and that we are got as far as this on our way to Normandy and Paris. There were only Emma and I, her uncle who married us, and her brother, my landlady’s daughter signed the book as one witness.

  I am going to Paris for materials for my next story. Shall return the beginning of October… We sent an advertisement of the marriage to the Dorset Chronicle – Try to see it. Yours in haste / Tom.

  Thanks for your good wishes.4

  Hardy was never a florid letter writer, and this sticks to the barest facts, suggesting that Henry was at this point the only member of the family he felt inclined to write to.

  If there was a celebratory lunch, if Emma looked beautiful with the soft, sunny light on her wedding dress, if she even wore a special dress, these things went unrecorded. Their happiness at being together at last after four and a half years of being in love and apart must be assumed. No need for a party, dancing, music, food and drink, neighbours, jokes, flowers, families. Yet weddings are not easy to negotiate without festivities of some kind, and Hardy, given a little encouragement, took pleasure in parties. The fact that when he came to write about his early love for Emma, calling up so many detailed memories in so many poems, he had nothing to say of either the wedding or the honeymoon makes you wonder whether the wedding seemed to him more like a necessary adjustment made to their circumstances than like the fulfilment of a dream, and whether the wedding trip was less full of tenderness and pleasure than he had hoped. Temperamentally, he was given to self-doubt after achieving long-cherished ambitions. It happened when he finished building his house, Max Gate, and was plunged into anxiety that he had done the wrong thing, and his wedding may have produced the same sort of reaction. Weddings demand buoyant spirits. Hardy was an anxious man and easily cast down. Away from Cornwall and buttressed by her clergyman uncle, Emma seemed less of a free spirit. His London acquaintance with the Stephens and their clever circle had by his own confession given a slight shake to his attachment to her, and she must have felt it. Whether both of them, having defied their parents, had regretful thoughts for them on the day, and whether lovemaking, at last licensed, was awkward for them, as for most newly married innocents, we shall never know, but there were many possible reasons for them to feel unsure of themselves. Yet they were doing what they had both dreamt of for four years and what he had worked for with unremitting dedication. Some sense of triumph and relief must have been in the air during their simple ceremony.

  Emma’s diary is a record of their travels, not of her feelings, and ‘Tom’ makes few appearances in it. They spent the weekend in Brighton, where, she notes, they visited the Aquarium and the Pavilion, and went out on to the old pier. On Sunday they went twice to church, rather surprisingly, and back to the Aquarium for more observation of turtles and seals. A cheerful note comes in with Paris in prospect: ‘Brighton’s Sunday is like a Parisian Sunday. All enjoyment gaiety and bands of music and excursionists.’ On Monday ‘Tom bathed’ in spite of the rough sea; and in the evening they left for their Channel steamer and a choppy crossing to Dieppe. Once in Rouen she is in her element, describing the hotel, many details of the French dinner, among them ‘Little pigeons delicate to a degree and salad eaten with it’; and the bedroom, ‘night dresses laid out on bed… 2 large square pillows. Spring mattresses’, and, as they sat writing, the chambermaid coming into their room in her white cotton jacket and short petticoats, smiling and chattering, and bearing a pail to go under the washstand.

  Her delight in the trip grew as they reached Paris: ‘Place de la Concorde first seen by moonlight!… Stars quite put out by Parisian lamps.’ It was only three years since the Franco-Prussian War and the violence of the Commune, and they saw the half-destroyed Tuileries (‘tells what a French mob can effect’). Otherwise tourist Paris was in good order, and they took trains to Versailles and Saint-Cloud, saw the Louvre and Notre-Dame, the Hôtel de Cluny, Napoleon’s tomb and the morgue, so popular with Victorian visitors: ‘Three bodies – middle one pink – Their clothes hanging above them. Not offensive but repulsive.’ She was quick to notice children, cats also, the clothes and the flower shops, and she thought the working-class people of Paris very small, ‘pigmies in fact’, and the old women ‘very ugly and dark – very fierce in the poorest streets’.

  She also noticed that

  Wherever I go, whoever I pass… the people gaze at me as much or more than I at them and their beautiful city… Query – Am I a strange-looking person – or merely picturesque in this hat – Women sometimes laugh a short laugh as they pass. Men stare – some stand – some look back or turn, look over their shoulders – look curiously, inquisitively – some… tenderly without my being mistaken – they do in a French manner.

  As it is remarkable I note it –

  Children gape too –

  She does not say whether Hardy noticed people staring at her, or whether she asked him what he thought; there is nothing to suggest he teased her and they laughed about it together. He has simply disappeared from her narrative. But she loved the time spent in Paris, and on leaving on the last day of September she wrote, ‘Adieu to Paris – Charmante ville / Adieu to the Boulevards. To the gay shops – To the “ gens ” sitting in the streets To the vivants enfants To the white caps of the femmes To the river and its boats To the clear atmosphere and brilliant colourings.’

  Emma was a naive diarist, responsive to what she saw and fluent in a scatter-brained way. She makes you smile, sympathetically; and she shows her enjoyment of travel, but from our point of view she fails to seize her great opportunity – she might have been honeymooning with anyone, Hardy’s presence being barely mentioned. No doubt there was an element of decorousness in this, and intimacy is hard to describe. His only surviving account of the trip is no better, written in old age and consisting of half a sentence mentioning ‘a short visit to the Continent – their first Continental days having been spent at Rouen’.5 On the train returning them to Rouen she continued to put down her impressions of Paris, remembering the white coats of the waiters on the boulevards, ‘Blossom white – wonderfully pure and clean and smoothly starched and ironed’. Then, ‘Thursday Oct – 1 – 1874 / Arrived at London – Dirty London. Very wet –’

  They now had to begin their serious life together and establish themselves somewhere in England. Since neither possessed so much as a table, a chair or any household goods, they needed a furnished place. They looked in the south-west outer suburbs, Wimbledon and Denmark Hill, for cheapness, and after a few days took half a house in Surbiton, still mostly open country and farmland but with an efficient railway connection to central London. St David’s Villa was a new double-fronted house with two staircases, a cellar, a carriage drive and a garden, and they would be sharing it with a retired brewer called Hughes, a friend of someone Hardy had known in Weymouth. Hughes had a wife, a small daughter and a dog.6 There must also have been at least one servant to help out.

  Emma had not been brought up to clean and cook, while Hardy had always been able to take for granted that he would be looked after by his mother or by landladies. Since during the years of their courtship they had spent only a few weeks together each year, almost always in holiday circumstances, they had a great deal to learn about each other and had to establish a domestic routine. There must have been shocks on both sides. Although Emma knew she was breaking away from her family and its traditions, her model of marriage came from her mother and her sister, both installed in their own well-appointed hom
es and always supported by servants. Hardy, on the other hand, had seen his grandmother and mother in charge of all the domestic activities at home, and when his mother was ill his aunt came to take over, and his sisters grew up learning household skills. Was Emma going to wash Hardy’s linen? Out of the question. She could probably put together a light meal, but cooking and serving dinner would be outside her range.

  The pattern of his days had to be that he wrote, and thought about his work, in a room set aside as his study. He may have read aloud to her some of what he had written during the day and given her pages to copy. Unfortunately the theme of the book he was now embarked on, planned before the wedding, did not appeal to her: it was the story of the social rise of the intelligent child of two servants. He would have appreciated the irony of the situation in theory but perhaps not in practice. How did she fill her days while he was working? She no longer had a horse to ride. Neither ever said what happened to Fanny, but Emma must have missed riding sadly. She had no piano either, no garden of her own, and no family or friends close by or inclined to visit. She read. A note in her diary listing knitting wool and crewel thread suggests she embroidered and knitted. They went for walks, and to church, and sometimes into London on the train together to go to a gallery or shop. She gave her orders to the servant. She thought about her own writing projects.

  Their good fortune was that his books were selling well. Hardy began to be aware of the scale of his success only when he noticed ladies on the London train carrying copies of the just published two-volume edition of Far from the Madding Crowd with Mudie’s Library labels on the covers. It became clear that his four years of bruising hard work had succeeded, and he was well able to keep Emma in comfort. In fact, there was no need for them to be living in Surbiton, a very modest setting for a popular writer. The winter of 1874 was cold, with snow, travelling was difficult, and there were no visits to or from families at Christmas. In the new year they decided to return to central London, and in March they moved to rooms in Newton Road, just north of Westbourne Grove and close to Emma’s brother Walter. Hardy noted that all their worldly goods at this time fitted into four small packing cases, two full of books, one of books and linen, sundries in the fourth. It was not the way respectable middle-class couples were expected to start married life in the 1870s.