Today was the birthday of the writer Thomas Hardy, who was born in 1840. 10 things you might not know about him:
Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset and was the oldest of four siblings. His father, also named Thomas Hardy, was a stonemason and amateur musician, and his mother, Jemima, was in domestic service.
He was taught at home by his mother until he was eight. When he left school he became an apprentice to a local architect named James Hicks. In his twenties he moved to London and worked for the architect Arthur Blomfield (famous for, among other things, the chapel at Tyntesfield).
One of the more bizarre tasks Blomfield gave him to do was re-locating a cemetery to make way for an expansion by the Midland Grand Railway. This involved exhuming and reburying hundreds of bodies. He took the original tombstones and arranged them around an Ash tree in a circular pattern. The tree is now known as The Hardy Tree and it’s a tourist attraction.
His career in architecture meant Hardy could design his own house and get his brother to build it. He named it Max Gate after a local toll-gate named for its keeper, Henry Mack (“Mack’s Gate”). He lived there from 1885 until he died in 1928, and added to it over the years. The house now belongs to the National Trust.
Hardy married Emma Gifford in 1874. She supported him in his career as a writer and they shared support for the cause of women’s rights. Emma participated in marches and demonstrations and wrote articles on the subject. Hardy thought giving women the vote would cause a major shake up in society and while he believed this would be a good thing, Emma and her suffragette associates didn’t think his views would help the cause at all, so it was agreed he would keep quiet about it.
His marriage to Emma became somewhat strained at the end. By 1899, she was living a completely separate life in the attic and had become very religious. She’s said to have hated his novel Jude the Obscure, which she didn’t read until after it was published. That may have been due to her religious beliefs – the church at the time hated it, too. It could also have been because the story was based too closely on their own marriage. She was writing, too, a manuscript called What I Think of My Husband, and numerous diaries, all of which Hardy burned after she died in 1912. All that said, he was grief stricken when she died and wrote arguably his best and most moving Poetry at that time. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. When he died, she destroyed his personal papers much as he had done for Emma.
He was said to be extremely shy and protective of his privacy. One feature of Max Gate was that it was obscured by trees, and that he would slip out of the house and hide if a visitor turned up that he wasn’t expecting. His favourite Dog was named Wessex, an ill tempered mutt who would bite visitors!
He’s often credited with creating the term “cliffhanger” for the plot device where the episode ends at a dramatic moment and the reader or watcher has to buy or watch the next instalment to find out what happens. While Charles Dickens is sometimes given the credit for that, many scholars date it to Hardy’s 1873 novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, which, like many novels of the time, was first published as a serial in a magazine. In it, a character named Henry Knight is literally left hanging from a cliff.
From 1910 to 1927, Hardy was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature 25 times, but never won. He was, however, given an Order of Merit by King Edward VII in 1910, an order which is limited to 24 living members at a time.
When he died, he expressed the wish to be buried beside his first wife, which presumably didn’t go down too well with Florence. Nor did it with the literary community who thought he should be interred at Westminster Abbey’s famous poets’ corner. In the end a compromised was reached. Most of him was buried in Poet’s Corner near to Charles Dickens, while his heart was buried in Stinsford in Dorset near his first wife.
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