Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  43. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 26 Nov. 1922, ibid., 193.

  44. Hardy wrote to Florence in London on 5 Oct. 1924 about ‘Gertrude B.’, saying she was rather dismayed at the bigness of her part ‘& says she does not like the Tess of the play as well as the Tess of the book (which is intelligent criticism)’. Letters, VI, 279.

  45. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 22 Oct. 1924, Letters of E & F Hardy, 213.

  46. Diary of Sydney Cockerell, 27 Nov. 1924, British Library Add. MSS 52661.

  47. Gertrude Bugler’s letter of 18 Feb. 1964 to Cockerell’s biographer, Wilfrid Blunt, Cockerell (1964), 216.

  48. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 10 Mar. 1925, Letters of E & F Hardy, 220–21.

  49. For Florence preventing her from reciting a Hardy poem at a recital at a Dorsetmen’s dinner in London, see Florence Hardy to Gertrude Bugler, 7 Feb. 1925, ibid., 219. Cockerell’s diary shows that in Aug. 1925 he was still doing his best to allay her uneasiness by pointing out that Gertrude lived at Beaminster, a considerable distance from Max Gate, and that she and Hardy did not even correspond with one another.

  50. Florence Hardy to Sir Arthur Pinero, 1 Aug. 1929, ibid., 297.

  51. TH to Gertrude Bugler, 7 Feb. 1924, Letters, VI, 308.

  52. As Note 47, above.

  53. Marjorie Lilly reports him telling her in the 1920s that ‘Tess was his favourite heroine; “my Tess” he called her.’ ‘The Hardy I Knew’, Hardy Society Review, 1, 4 (1978), 100–103.

  54. From À la recherche du temps perdu. Hardy’s note dated July 1926 suggests that someone drew his attention to this passage, because he does not appear to have read Proust otherwise. The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1978), 92.

  55. Michael Millgate gives the first in Biography Revisited, 510, its source a letter from Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell in 1924. The second is in the Life, Chapter 38, from Mrs Granville-Barker’s description of Hardy’s visit in 1927.

  56. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 19 Nov. 1923, British Library Add. MSS 52660.

  24. WINTER WORDS

  1. Marjorie Lilly, ‘The Hardy I Knew’, Thomas Hardy Society Review, 1, 4 (1978), 100–103.

  2. On the manuscript he wrote and erased ‘Snow at Upper Tooting’.

  3. Discussed above in Chapter 9.

  4. Discussed above in Chapter 18.

  5. TH to Revd H. G. B. Cowley, 16 Dec. 1924, Letters, VI, 298.

  6. TH to Arthur Benson, 26 Dec. 1924, Letters, VI, 300.

  7. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 18 June 1925, British Library Add. MSS 52662. During 1925 he visited Max Gate in Jan., Mar., June, Aug. and Sept. 21 June: ‘TH extremely well, preparing a new volume of poems! TEL came to dinner and we were all in very good spirits.’ On Sunday, 22 Mar., TH shows Cockerell ‘some of his new poems’ and Cockerell goes by car with Florence to spend an hour at T. E. Lawrence’s cottage. In 1926 he visited in Apr. and June.

  8. M. M. Allen to TH, 23 Aug. 1925, and James Sparks to TH, 11 Sept. 1925, headed ‘Almora’, Corowa, N.S.W. DCM, Kate Hardy and Lock Collection, B5.

  9. H. A. Martin, Hon. Secretary of the Dorchester Dramatic and Debating Society, writing in the Dorset County Chronicle, 6 June 1940. Hardy also said that revolutionaries lacked historical knowledge and advised any local parliamentary candidate to stand at the Town Pump on market day and shake hands with as many farmers as possible.

  10. Women of thirty and over until 1928, when, soon after his death, they achieved equal voting rights.

  11. Florence Hardy to Rutland Boughton, 29 June 1924, Letters of E & F Hardy, 208.

  12. Florence Hardy to Siegfried Sassoon, 5 July 1926, Letters of E & F Hardy, 241.

  13. 25 July 1926, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, III (1979), 96–101.

  14. Leonard Woolf, ‘Thomas Hardy’, Athenaeum, 21 Jan. 1928, 597–8.

  15. 1 Nov. 1926, Life, Chapter 38.

  16. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 17 Nov. 1926, Letters of E & F Hardy, 245.

  17. TH to Ernest Barker, 23 Nov. 1926, Letters, VII, 50.

  18. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 29 Dec. 1926, Letters of E & F Hardy, 247.

  19. TH to the Granville-Barkers, 29 Dec. 1926, Letters, VII, 54.

  20. Bertie Norman Stephens, Hardy and His Gardener (Beaminster, 1963).

  21. Quoted in Ann Thwaite’s Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (1984), 507.

  22. Life, Chapter 38.

  23. J. C. Squire, Sunday Mornings, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 233–5.

  24. Hardy never heard it. It was first performed early in 1928.

  25. The NPG did not accept posthumous representations and would certainly not have considered either Florence or Emma Hardy eligible.

  26. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 25 Dec. 1927, Letters of E & F Hardy, 256.

  27. According to Florence, at any rate, in a letter to Howard Bliss, 11 Mar. 1930, Letters of E & F Hardy, 304. In a postscript she writes, ‘I did not intend to return to this painful topic, but I feel obliged – I asked J. M. Barrie whether he could recall the circumstances of the Abbey burial, and whether Cockerell was against it, as he now represents himself to have been. J. M. B.’s reply, as nearly as I can quote it was: “Why, he was the one who was all for it. I remember that he walked to the station with me the night before Hardy’s death, and he was urging it on me all the way.” Cockerell knew that I did not wish it.’

  28. Diary of Sydney Cockerell for 1928, British Library Add. MSS 52666.

  29. Ellen Titterington (1899–1977) was in service at Max Gate from 1921 to 1928. This and the quotation in the next paragraph are from her monograph Hardy and His Parlour-Maid (Beaminster, 1963).

  30. Diary of Kate Hardy, cited in Biography Revisited, 531.

  EPILOGUE

  1. Dr Mann’s account, given years later, was wrong about this and about details of the day of the funeral in London.

  2. From Kate Hardy’s diary in DCM, quoted in Biography Revisited, 533.

  3. Florence Hardy to T. E. Lawrence, 5 Mar. 1928, Letters of E & F Hardy, 275.

  4. Harry Bentley, the postman befriended by Hardy (see Chapter 23) who also delivered post to Dr Mann, believed the story. Bentley lived at 3 Rothesay Road, Dorchester, and died in 1985. He said the doctor called him in, saying, ‘Come and look at this’, and showed him the biscuit tin.

  The theatre Sister Mary Eastment was only twenty-three. She was the daughter of a schoolmistress at Haselbury Plucknett and like many local people had no great admiration for Hardy. She told her daughter that Mr Nash-Wortham summoned her on her free afternoon with ‘Sister, I have a job for you. We have to cut out Mr Hardy’s heart.’ All she could think of was how much she resented losing her free time, and she had no sense of making history. The job was done antiseptically, and she never heard the story of the cat. All this from Mrs A. Brock, her daughter.

  5. Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (1984), 508.

  6. From account by Bertie Norman Stephens, Hardy and His Gardener (Beaminster, 1963).

  7. 17 Jan. 1928, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, III (1979), 173–4. Virginia Woolf was among the mourners and described the pallbearers. She thought the coffin ‘like a stage coffin, covered with a white satin cloth’.

  8. The late James Gibson showed me a copy of Mrs Shaw’s letter to T. E. Lawrence.

  9. Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw (1961), 378.

  10. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, III, Note 23.

  11. Photocopy of the Dean’s letter, clearly dated 16 Jan. 1928 (the day of the funeral), in file given to me by the late James Gibson, with Bartelot’s reply. It would be nice to know who the head of the ‘great religious body’ was – could it have been the King? No member of the royal family attended the funeral, only aides representing them.

  12. From William Rothenstein, Since Fifty: Men and Memories 1922–1938 (1939), 99–104.

  13. The diary of Sydney Cockerell, 14 June 1928, British Library Add. MSS 52666.

  14. American
editions were published at the same time.

  15. ‘When Dead’, published in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles in 1925, headed ‘To —’. The joke about Einstein comes in ‘Drinking Song’, published posthumously in Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres in 1928. ‘The Ruined Maid’ was written in the 1860s and first published in Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901.

  Abbreviations

  Biography Revisited Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Michael Millgate (2004)

  DCM Dorset County Museum

  DCRO Dorset County Record Office

  Interviews and Recollections Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections, ed. James Gibson (1999)

  Letters The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. R. L. Purdy and Michael Millgate (7 vols., 1978–88)

  Letters of E & F Hardy The Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (1996)

  Life The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (1984)

  The Older TH The Older Hardy, Robert Gittings (1978)

  Variorum Poems The Variorum Edition of the Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (1979)

  The Young TH Young Thomas Hardy, Robert Gittings (1975)

  Text and Illustration Permissions

  The publishers would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for their kind permission to reproduce copyright material in the book:

  TEXT

  Extracts from letters by Emma Dashwood, Mary Hardy, Helen Holder and Horace Moule, and from Thomas Hardy’s ‘Wimborne Notebook’, are from the Thomas Hardy Collection, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester

  Extracts from letters by James Sparks Cary and Thomas Hardy Snr are from the Kate Hardy and Lock Collection, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester

  Extracts from the unpublished diaries of A. C. Benson are reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  First Inset

  1. The view of Dorchester that Hardy knew from his earliest years (The British Library)

  2. Hardy’s drawing of his birthplace at Higher Bockhampton, which shows it as it was in the 1890s (from The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1928)

  3. and 4. Hardy’s parents in old age (Dorset County Museum)

  5. Melbury House, the seat of the Earls of Ilchester (Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy)

  6. Stinsford House, near Bockhampton (Dorset County Museum)

  7. Hardy’s first school at Lower Bockhampton (Dorset County Museum)

  8. The Revd Moule and his family on the lawn in front of his Fordington vicarage (Dorset County Museum)

  9. Horace Moule, Hardy’s great friend and mentor (Dorset County Museum)

  10. Hardy at nineteen, when he was an architectural pupil in Dorchester (National Portrait Gallery)

  11. The garden terrace of the rectory at St Juliot, showing the Revd Cadell Holder, his wife, Helen, and her sister, Emma Gifford (Berg Collection, New York Public Library)

  12. Emma Gifford (Dorset County Museum)

  13. Hardy at thirty (National Portrait Gallery)

  14. Hardy’s sketch of Emma on her knees searching in the river (Dorset County Museum)

  15. Emma’s sketch of Hardy holding a flag (Dorset County Museum)

  16. Emma’s drawing of the summerhouse in the garden of the St Juliot rectory, where she and Hardy often sat together (Berg Collection, New York Public Library)

  17. Emma’s drawings of the Boscastle Valley and ‘The Watercourse’ of the Valency River (from The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1928)

  18. A page of Emma’s honeymoon diary (The British Library)

  19. Riverside Villas, near Sturminster Newton, where Hardy and Emma enjoyed two happy years from 1876 (Rodney Legg / Hallsgrove)

  20. The view of the Blackmore Vale from Hardy’s upstairs study window at Riverside Villas, where he wrote The Return of the Native (Rodney Legg / Hallsgrove)

  Second Inset

  21. Hardy at thirty-four, looking the part of the successful Victorian literary man (Dorset County Museum)

  22. Leslie Stephen, the editor of the Cornhill, who commissioned Far from the Madding Crowd (Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College)

  23. The house in Tooting taken by the Hardys in 1878 (Dorset County Museum)

  24. Max Gate, the house designed by Hardy and built by his brother. Hardy and Emma moved there in June 1885 (National Portrait Gallery)

  25. The hall at Max Gate (Dorset County Museum)

  26. Hardy dressed for the road, with his bicycle (Dorset County Museum)

  27. Mrs Florence Henniker, with whom Hardy fell in love in 1893 (photo by Chancellor of Dublin, 1894)

  28. Emma Hardy in her later years, dressed for one of her garden parties (Berg Collection, New York Public Library)

  29. Drawing of Florence Dugdale by William Strang (National Portrait Gallery)

  30. Florence Dugdale and Hardy on the beach at Aldeburgh in 1909 (Dorset County Museum)

  31. Florence, Hardy and their dog Wessex (Bettman / Corbis)

  32. Luncheon visit to the Hardys by the Prince of Wales in 1923 (Dorset County Museum)

  33. Hardy in 1924: ‘a human being, not “the great man” ’ (Dorset County Museum)

  34. Augustus John’s 1923 portrait of Hardy (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge © The Estate of the artist / Bridgeman Art Library)

  Acknowledgements

  This book goes back a long way. My mother loved Hardy and set his ‘Faintheart in a Railway Train’ to music, and my sister and I knew by heart ‘This is the weather the cuckoo likes’ and ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’, like most children of our generation, I suppose. When I was fourteen my mother saw me with a library copy of Jude the Obscure and told me not to read it, advice I naturally ignored. I began to buy every Hardy volume I could find in second-hand bookshops – novels, poetry, memoirs. At Cambridge in the early 1950s I heard George Rylands read the ‘Poems of 1912–13’ in a lecture hall, an unforgettable experience. My first husband, Nick, and I were married by chance on the 85th anniversary of Hardy and Emma’s wedding day, 17 September 1955, but we realized its significance, and he gave me the Collected Poems as a wedding present.

  In working on this book, which attempts to discuss Hardy’s work in the context of his life, I have relied on the labours of many others. First and foremost is Michael Millgate, the Grand Master of Hardy studies, who has not only edited Hardy’s letters and those of both Hardy’s wives, but also written two meticulously researched biographies of him and an essay on his testamentary intentions, as well as a study of the novels. His contribution to the study of Hardy is immense and invaluable. I met him for the first time about two weeks after I had finished writing this book and regret that it was not sooner. Like all who are interested in Hardy, I owe Professor Millgate a large debt.

  I owe another debt to the late James Gibson, editor of one of the two Variorum editions of Hardy’s poetry, scholar, biographer and most generous of men. We first met, appropriately, in a Dorchester bookshop, and he immediately befriended and encouraged me. He and his wife Helen invited me to stay and drove me to some of the places I needed to see in Dorset. Before I left, he offered me the files he had compiled over many years in preparing his book Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections. It was an extraordinarily generous gift, and I have used it gratefully. His death was a sad blow to all his friends, and I was fortunate to have known him. The Gibsons also introduced me to Andrew and Marilyn Leah at Max Gate, who gave me a princely welcome and allowed me to explore the whole house thoroughly.

  Everyone at the Dorchester County Museum has been patient and helpful with my demands, particularly the Director, Judy Lindsay, and Mrs Lilian Swindall, the Archivist. I am particularly grateful to them, knowing that they work under pressure. Judith Stinton of Maiden Newton has assisted me most kindly. Mrs. Barbara Davies was good enough to lend me her precious copy of a privately printed history of Melbury Osmond.

  My old friend James
Rowlatt has put up with my erratic arrivals in Dorset and entertained me beautifully, finding me books and helping me in many ways, walking and driving with me over wide areas of Dorset.

  I have again received guidance and help from Richard Luckett, Pepys Librarian at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where the diaries of Arthur Benson are held. My thanks to him and also to Aude Fitzsimons at the Pepys Library. Also to Duncan Robinson and Stella Panayotova at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, for enabling me to study the manuscript of Jude the Obscure; and to David McKitterick, Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, who sent me photocopies of limericks written by Florence Monckton Milnes as a young woman.

  Without the London Library and its ever helpful staff I should not have been able to write this book. The same is true of the British Library, which I have relied on both for its printed books and its archives. Thanks to the Curator of the Berg Collection, Isaac Gewirtz, for his kind assistance; also to Michael Meredith, Librarian of Eton College, and to Robin Harcourt Williams, Archivist at Hatfield House, who once again went out of his way to find and send me documents. Elisabeth Stuart at the offices of the Duchy of Cornwall kindly allowed me to examine the papers relating to the visit of the Prince of Wales to Max Gate and the negotiations over the purchase of extra land from the Duchy there. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings welcomed me to their library, where Cecily Greenhill and Philip Venning showed me their Hardy material.

  Thanks also to Timothy Hands, Hardy scholar and writer, who brought me much useful material. Also to Helena Caletta, who lent and found me books. Also to Mark Bostridge for sending me photocopies of interesting material. And to Anthony Barnes, who drew my attention to the reference to Hardy in Henrietta Garnett’s Anny.

  John Antell, great-grandson of Hardy’s aunt Mary Antell née Hand and sometime mayor of Dorchester, gave up a day to talk to me about family history. Mrs Moles, Archivist at Wiltshire County Record Office, Brian York, Archivist at Brunel, and Kate Perry, Archivist of Girton College, all answered my questions helpfully. Myrrdin Jones gave me information about Hardy’s visit to Aberdeen, and Mrs Anne Blandamer talked to me about her husband’s uncle Harry Bentley, who admired Hardy and was befriended by him when he delivered post to Max Gate. My thanks to all of them.