British Literature: Hardy

The poet and novelist Thomas Hardy is perhaps most famous for his powerfully visual novels, concerned with the inexorability of human destiny. His works unfold against a rural background drawn as an elegy for vanishing country ways, but which also provides much-needed comic relief...

Augustus John had met the octogenarian English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy through T.E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – in September 1923. In the following weeks he made several visits to Max Gate, the house that Hardy had designed and built for himself in Dorchester, Dorset, to work on this affectionate and admiring portrait. The study in which Hardy is shown is that in which he wrote many of his most celebrated works, including Jude the Obscure (1895), the manuscript of which is in the Fitzwilliam. The opening page, with Hardy's corrections, can be seen left...

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840 in Higher Bockhampton in Southwest England to Jemima and Thomas Hardy; he was the third Thomas Hardy in as many generations (Tomalin 3). Hardy was a frail child with an affinity for animals and music (he played fiddle most of his life) and a passion for reading (Tomalin 19). At ten, with the driving will of his mother, Hardy enrolled in a private school in Dorchester where his serious education began (Tomalin 31). In 1862, in order to help with the finances, Hardy’s parents apprenticed him to the architect John Hicks...

The novels and poems of Hardy are set in the land of his birth, Dorset, which he called by its ancient name of Wessex. Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure all draw their characters, their daily activities, the locales in which they are set, from the farmers and farriers, shopkeepers and schoolteachers, from the towns and fields and coastline, from the sights and smells and mood of this part of England. Juxtaposing the scenes of today—barely changed from those of Hardy’s day—with his poems and descriptive passages from the novels, this program provides an underpinning of the author’s reality for his poetic and fictional creations.

Poems on the death of his wife by Thomas Hardy in a Screenbook read by Malcolm Hossick. Thomas Hardy is well known for his novels like Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Far from the Madding Crowd. However he considered his best work to be his poetry. Here we have a few of the poems he wrote after the sudden and unexpected death of his first wife Emma. She had not been able to bear children, he saw his work as his main concern and they had drifted apart. On her death he was grief stricken and full of remorse for his neglect of her and he remembers their early happiness when they first met in Cornwall. Many folk approach poems with diffidence thinking them to be oblique and hard to understand. Hardy's poetry is clear and direct and these poems I find moving and astonishingly sensitive to the little details of ordinary life.

Although Thomas Hardy is interred at Westminster Abbey, his heart is ever in his native Dorset. In this timeless program, Hardy experts James Gibson, Mike Murray, and Martin Seymour-Smith study the life of England’s foremost regional novelist and poet par excellence while discussing many of his works, including Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Location footage of Hardy’s beloved Dorset, fictionalized in his writings as Wessex, and excerpts from his novels and poems offer deep insights into the people and places that defined his world.