A Companion to Thomas Hardy

Keith Wilson, Keith Wilson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118398517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through original essays from a distinguished team of international scholars and Hardy specialists, A Companion to Thomas Hardy provides a unique, one-volume resource, which encompasses all aspects of Hardy's major novels, short stories, and poetry

• Informed by the latest in scholarly, critical, and theoretical debates from some of the world's leading Hardy scholars
  
• Reveals groundbreaking insights through examinations of Hardy's major novels, short stories, poetry, and drama
  
• Explores Hardy's work in the context of the major intellectual and socio-cultural currents of his time and assesses his legacy for subsequent writers

PART I
The Life

1

Hardy as Biographical Subject

Michael Millgate

Thomas Hardy was, for the greater part of his life, an actively publishing author and a prominent public figure, frequently written about, interviewed, and photographed. By his final decades he had become one of the most famous men in the world, and his death in the early days of 1928 prompted widespread national and international mourning, culminating in the ceremonial interment of his ashes in Westminster Abbey. Because of Hardy’s fame, the obituarists, reporters, and other commentators of the day had only to turn to the standard biographical sources – most notably the Who’s Who entry that Hardy had himself written and kept up to date (THPV 142–3, 473–4) – in order to be able to produce confident if brief accounts of his personal history and literary career. A few poorly informed biographies had already appeared – Hardy having reacted to the best of them with angry comments in the margins of his own copy – but it was only after his death that knowledge about his life was immensely enhanced and expanded by his widow’s publication of a full-scale two-volume biography, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1891 appearing before the end of 1928, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy 1892–1928 just two years later. The Life of Thomas Hardy – so called long before its first single-volume publication in 1962 – immediately became the standard work of biographical reference and has inevitably remained the foundation document for all subsequent Hardy biography.

Inevitably, but by no means unproblematically. Although the two volumes of the Life were published over Florence Hardy’s name and initially accepted as being of her own composition, it was always recognized that she must have depended largely upon Hardy’s prior assistance, and following her own death in 1937 it became known that the work had been almost entirely ghost-written by Hardy himself in his late seventies with the specific intention of its being posthumously published over the name of his widow. Florence Hardy’s actual role, though certainly important, was essentially secondary, Hardy having first written the manuscript pages in secret and then handed them successively to Florence to be typed up in triplicate – at which point the manuscript pages themselves would be destroyed in order to remove all traces of Hardy’s participation. The typescripts then became the project’s working papers, subject as such to Hardy’s further and sometimes extensive revisions and, when necessary, to his wife’s retyping. After Hardy’s death it fell to Florence to write up the two final chapters, largely on the basis of notes that her husband had left, and then see through the press the two volumes bearing her name. Ironically enough, it was her failure to destroy the working typescripts, many of them containing corrections and revisions in Hardy’s hand, that facilitated the subsequent discovery of the work’s true authorship.

For Hardy himself, writing at the pinnacle of his fame and out of a profound opposition to all invasions of his own and his family’s privacy, the composition of the Life had been a largely self-protective hence minimally revelatory exercise that drew with deliberate caution on personal memories and correspondence and on the rich store of anecdotes and observations contained within the numerous notebooks, small and large, that he had accumulated over the course of a lifetime. Written in the distancing third person, the work was clearly intended to find its place within the well-recognized tradition of family-generated memorializations as an “authorized” and as it were official biography, capable as such of anticipating and, ideally, pre-empting the production of more intrusive biographies written by outsiders. After Hardy’s death, however, and before its first publication, the Life’s underlying autobiographical character was significantly compromised by the additions, deletions, and alterations introduced by Florence Hardy on the advice and under the influence of Sydney Cockerell and James Barrie, whose assistance she had sought and whose male assertiveness she found difficult to resist.

The term “autobiography” does, however, sit somewhat better – if still imperfectly – with the comprehensively re-edited one-volume edition of 1984 that restored Hardy’s intended title, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, and sought to reconstruct his originally intended text on the basis of those working typescripts that his widow had so remarkably failed to destroy (LW x–xxix). As thus purged of post-Hardyan interventions, Life and Work can fairly claim autobiographical status as Hardy’s own account of his own life – the personal information he felt able to share with his readership, the self-image (to put it another way) he wished to project. So considered, it certainly has value, especially since the dates and details supplied for public events customarily jibe with those ascertainable from contemporary sources – Hardy having evidently worked through his old notebooks in chronological sequence – and the references to friendships and social occasions mesh well enough with Hardy’s own correspondence, both outgoing and incoming, and with the recollections of the journalists, admirers, friends, and fellow writers who encountered him in London clubs, on social occasions, or over tea at Max Gate. It also provides unique insights into Hardy’s pre-adult and early adult years, although it necessarily defers to the endnotes the four expressive letters written from London to his sister Mary that were introduced into The Early Life of Thomas Hardy only after his death.

Biographers – and all students of Hardy – are clearly better off with Life and Work than without it, but they can only regret its failure, or refusal, to address a large number of central issues. Almost nothing of significance is said about Hardy’s political and religious beliefs and values or about either of his marriages, and although his publicly acknowledged friendship with Florence Henniker is mentioned a few times, as is his elderly attraction to Agnes Grove, there are no references, direct or indirect, to his earlier relationships (such as they may have been) with Cassie Pole, Eliza Bright Nicholls, and Rosamund Tomson, while his cousin Tryphena Sparks, though briefly invoked, is not actually named. Events and quotations are sometimes inadequately described or dated, and while there’s nothing in Life and Work even remotely comparable to Henry James’s wholesale rewriting, in Notes of a Son and Brother, of those letters by his brother William that provided the book with its ostensible raison d’être, it’s nevertheless clear that Hardy was from time to time perfectly willing to stretch the truth a little in order to enforce a point. Indeed, his snide assertion that Henry James had at first been excluded from the Rabelais Club because his writings lacked “virility” (LW 136) must have been made in despite of the knowledge that James had been, like himself, one of the club’s original members.

Especially disturbing is Hardy’s insistence upon the destruction of the materials used in the composition of Life and Work, including what must have been those extraordinarily interesting diary-notebooks, dating back at least to the early 1860s, of which only a few detached leaves containing penciled sketches or rough drafts of never-completed poems were allowed to survive. It is true that a good many individual entries from the diary-notebooks were copied by Hardy himself – with or without revision – into one or other of the “accumulative” notebooks (sometimes called commonplace books) that he continued to use during his highly creative final years. Hardy had also included these more substantial notebooks among the documents that were to be destroyed following his death, but while Sydney Cockerell, as one of his literary executors, was ready and even eager to comply with that directive, Florence Hardy, as the other literary executor, succeeded in preventing the destruction of at least some of them – notably “Literary Notes” I and II, “Memoranda” I and II, “Facts”, and “Poetical Matter” – on the grounds that she would need them when writing the closing chapters of “her” biography. She may also have openly or clandestinely protected one or two other notebooks – including “Studies, Specimens, &c.” – simply because she could not bear to see them consigned to the flames that had already consumed so much that had been deemed precious and vital during her husband’s last years.

These surviving notebooks are of particular and almost unique importance as allowing direct and fully authenticated access to Hardy’s thoughts and ideas – even (if to a much lesser degree) to his beliefs – and it is very helpful to the biographer to have them all accessible in satisfactory and sometimes excellent editions, specifically C. J. P. Beatty’s edition (recently revised) of The Architectural Notebook of Thomas Hardy, Richard H. Taylor’s edition of The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (including the two “Memoranda” notebooks, the brief “Schools of Painting” notebook, and the preparatory notebook for The Trumpet-Major), Lennart Björk’s two-volume edition of The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, William Greenslade’s edition of Thomas Hardy’s “Facts” Notebook, and the editions of the “Studies, Specimens &c.” and “Poetical Matter” notebooks co-edited by Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate. The Dorset County Museum, where the originals of most of the notebooks are preserved, also has pages surviving from Hardy’s early pocket-books, other scraps of paper containing notes and occasionally drawings of his plans for the building of Max Gate and – no less importantly – the largest and most significant accumulation of books from Hardy’s dispersed library. Other substantial collections of books once owned (and often annotated) by Hardy exist on both sides of the Atlantic, information as to the inclusion and location of individual titles being readily accessible through the comprehensive online reconstruction of the Max Gate library available at http://www.library.utoronto.ca/fisher/hardy/.

Although the destruction of the materials drawn upon for Life and Work was in practice somewhat less than comprehensive, it was sufficient to reinforce both the indispensability of the work itself and its effectiveness as a barrier to further and deeper knowledge – resembling as such Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir of his father, also based very largely upon unique documents that were themselves promptly and irretrievably destroyed. Whereas biographers of, say, Virginia Woolf or Robert Louis Stevenson have rich resources for the narration of their subject’s early lives, both having been born into families already highly literate (Stevenson’s mother even kept and preserved a diary of his babyhood), biographers of Hardy start out with little more than the early pages of the so largely uncheckable Life and Work, a tithe map for Higher Bockhampton, an 1853 auctioneers’ catalogue for the Kingston Maurward estate, some miscellaneous family documents (including a copy of Hardy’s father’s will, a few calculations related to the family’s building business, and the receipt for his own instruction in Latin), the official records of births, marriages, and deaths, and the successive national censuses – the first conveniently dating from 1841, a couple of months before Hardy’s first birthday, and the fourth, in 1871, unkindly revealing his fiancée, Emma Lavinia Gifford, as having claimed to be four years younger than she actually was. Also regrettably sparse are the additional Hardy family memorabilia, preserved by the family’s last representative, Hardy’s sister Kate, and now part of the Lock Collection on deposit in the Dorset County Museum. Together with the same museum’s holdings of the few books that Hardy owned as a child and a further group of family items, mostly of later date, that were originally collected by Hardy’s cousin James Sparks and are now in the library at Eton College, these comprise very nearly the totality of what physically survives from Hardy’s early background. Although genealogists – Brenda Tunks above all – have successfully traced both sides of his family back through several Dorset generations, almost nothing is known of them as individuals.

There is a significant if sometimes superficial enhancement of biographical resources as Hardy grows older, produces successful novels, attracts attention, becomes the subject of journalistic articles and interviews, makes famous friends, and writes personal and business letters that are kept by their recipients. Such letters are of particular importance as bearing demonstrably authentic witness to Hardy’s thoughts, feelings, and relationships throughout his adult life, and they are copiously available in The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, published in seven volumes with a supplementary eighth volume currently in progress. Sadly, this plenitude, though biographically crucial, sometimes yields less than might have been hoped: no more than fourteen Hardy letters dating from before his thirtieth birthday are currently known to exist – one of the most important of them, to his sister Mary, having been reproduced in facsimile in The Early Life of Thomas Hardy – and there are few enough from any period of his life that could be described as genuinely intimate or self-revelatory. Hardy’s transcriptions of two fragments from letters received from Emma Gifford are all that remains of the active correspondence they evidently maintained during their long and mostly long-distance courtship – Emma having apparently burned both sets of letters one angry afternoon well into their marriage. Florence for her part seems to have burned, if in a somewhat different spirit, the bulk of the exceptionally relaxed and interesting letters that Hardy was writing to her during the later stages of their pre-marital friendship, and although the collected edition includes all that survive of Hardy’s sometimes painful letters to Florence Henniker it’s possible to suspect that others may have been thrust into the fire by Mrs. Henniker at the time of their arrival – or even by Hardy himself in 1923 after they had been sent to Max Gate under the terms of Mrs. Henniker’s will.

Hardy in his late seventies certainly disposed of many of the incoming letters he had thus far preserved, with the result that few items of substantial biographical importance are to be found among the 5,000 or so letters written to Hardy that are now in the Dorset County Museum (see Weber and Weber 1968). Appearing on a good many of those letters, however, are draft replies in Hardy’s hand – subsequently to be typed and sent by Florence or by May O’Rourke, the part-time typist sometimes employed at Max Gate – and the correspondence as a whole usefully supplements the Collected Letters in documenting his dealings with publishers and witnessing to the character and importance of some of his personal friendships. Beyond Hardy’s power to control or destroy – presumably beyond his knowledge – were the thoroughly indiscreet letters written by Emma Hardy (especially to Rebekah Owen) and, later, by Florence Hardy (especially to Edward Clodd and Sydney Cockerell). Extensively – though by no means exhaustively – represented in Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, these are useful documents for understanding life at Max Gate, the many hours that Hardy spent working alone in his study having supplied his wives with both motive and opportunity for the writing of long letters of domestic complaint. Such missives were often regretted afterwards – “I hope you burn my letters,” Florence wrote rather unhopefully to Rebekah Owen, “Some are, I fear, most horribly indiscreet” (Millgate 1996: 114) – but likely to be followed by others equally indiscreet. The secret diaries to which Emma confided her resentments against her husband are now beyond reach, having been discovered and destroyed by Hardy following her death, but her autobiographical Some Recollections, including an account of her first meeting with her future husband, has been published (subsequently to Hardy’s having adapted a portion of it for inclusion in Life and Work) and her capacity for outspokenness is reflected in the extraordinary letter in which she accused Hardy’s sister Mary of being “a witch-like creature & quite equal to any amount of evil-wishing & speaking – I can imagine you, & your mother & sister on your native heath raising a storm on a Walpurgis night” (Millgate 1996: 8).

The diaries kept by Emma during some of the Hardys’ European holidays, including the honeymoon in France in 1874, are among the important papers of hers, apparently overlooked by both Hardy and Florence, that Florence’s executor, Irene Cooper Willis, discovered in an ...