THOMAS HARDY: BIOGRAPHY AND WORKS - LITERATURE - 2024

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928) was a British novelist, poet, and architect. His texts were realistic in style, but were heavily influenced by literary romanticism that preceded the Victorian period.

Thanks to the success of his pen, he abandoned his career as an architect to dedicate himself to letters. Although Hardy quickly gained popular acclaim as a novelist, he always had an interest in poetry and his work had a great impact on the generations of poets that followed.

Bain News Service, publisher, via Wikimedia Commons

The style that the author imprinted on his works was much more focused and less rhetorical than that of his contemporaries. It had a darker and more fateful tone, which contrasted with the hope that permeated the Victorian texts.

Hardy set most of his narrative work in Wessex, an imaginary country named after the kingdom that once wielded great power on the island. But during the life of the author, the actual geographical area was increasingly impoverished.

Hardy's Wessex was located in the south and south west of England. She even made maps in which she indicated the exact location of each of the fictional cities. The author was nominated 12 times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Thomas Hardy himself worked on the writing of his memoirs, although they were completed by his second wife, Florence Hardy, and they were published in two volumes that deal in detail with each stage of the life of the English author.

Biography

Early years

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in Stinsford, Dorset, England. He was the eldest of the four children of Thomas Hardy, who worked as a builder, and his wife Jemima Hand.

His childhood was humble, but his parents were always concerned about giving their children a better life than they did. Hardy's mother tried to educate young people so they could rise to the middle class and surpass the family's achievements thus far.

Although Thomas Hardy was a fragile child from birth, he was also precocious. He showed interest in literature and music; in fact, oral tradition was very important for the development of his narrative.

Chris Downer / Hardy's cottage, Higher Bockhampton

The customs and the socio-economic reality that he observed in his early years in his family, as well as in his closest neighbors, also influenced his work as an author.

In 1848 he began his formal education at the national school of the parish, where he studied geography and mathematics.

Two years later, Hardy's mother thought that he needed to receive better training and that's when she sent him to the Dorchester Young Gentlemen's Academy, run by Isaac Last, where the boy was instructed in Latin and mathematics. In 1855 Hardy studied French.

Architecture

His family did not have financial funds to send him to college, so in 1856 he became an apprentice to Dorchester architect John Hicks. Despite this, he did not abandon the study of Greek and Latin.

Hicks then employed young Hardy as his assistant. In this position he learned a lot about the restoration of religious buildings, an experience that would be very useful for his later work on the subject.

By William Strang, painting, 1893

In 1862 he traveled to London where he secured a position as an assistant architect in the office of Arthur Blomfield, one of the most prominent London ecclesiastical architects of the time. Hardy, too, took advantage of this time to enroll in King's College in London, where he won several architecture awards.

Thomas Hardy took an interest in the cultural life of the capital, but was uncomfortable with the class divisions that prevailed in this scene, as he was aware of his low social status.

In 1867 he returned to his family home in Dorset as he was in poor health. In addition, Hardy took the opportunity to pursue a career as a professional writer.

Literary beginnings

The months that followed his return to Dorset were accompanied by a concern for writing poetry. However, these texts were not published then, as Hardy preferred to make a name for himself as a novelist. In addition, he returned to work for the architect Hicks.

His first literary work was The poor man and the lady, a novel that various publishers rejected. Words of encouragement for Hardy's work came in London when George Meredith of the Chapman and Hall publishing house told him to continue writing, although he did not publish the novel either.

In 1870 Thomas Hardy was working for the architect GR Crickmay, who commissioned him to restore the parish church of St. Juliot in Cornwall and there he met Emma Gifford, with whom Hardy fell in love.

Hardy's first publication was Desperate Remedies, in 1871. The following year he returned to London and worked as an architect while writing in parallel. He managed to publish Under the Greenwood Tree, which received good comments.

But when he was offered serialized A pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy decided to abandon architecture and pursue literature full time. In 1874 he married Emma Gifford, despite the discontent of both families.

Race

Thomas Hardy's most productive years were yet to come. In 1885 they moved to Max Gate, a house designed by Hardy himself and built by his brother in Dorchester.

DeFacto, from Wikimedia Commons

The amount of published works increased as well as his fame. In 1895 he published Juda the Obscure as a serial novel and the first compilation of Thomas Hardy novels appeared that same year by Osgood McIlvane. Also in 1910 the British author was made a member of the Order of Merit.

Although Hardy's relationship with his wife had grown cold and distant, Emma's sudden death in 1912 greatly affected the writer, who was trying to drain his emotions by writing poetry about his relationship with her.

In 1914 Hardy married his secretary, Florence Dugdale, who was 38 years his junior. Although it was difficult for her to live in the shadow of Hardy's late wife, she was always by his side and her care was fundamental for the author in his later years.

Death

Thomas Hardy died on January 11, 1927 at his residence in Dorchester. The cause of death that was established was cardiac syncope and advanced age, but the writer had suffered from pleurisy since December of the previous year. On his deathbed he dictated one last poem to his wife.

Hardy's funeral was held five days after his passing at Westminster Abbey with national pomp. There they buried his remains after being cremated, except for his heart, which was transferred to his native Stinsford parish.

Literary work

Style

Thomas Hardy approached writing by taking elements from the romantics and bringing them to the realm of the Victorian realists; with a much more fatalistic approach and with less hope in the strength of morality and a caring god. However, keeping destiny as a primary axis of the story.

He did not want to begin his career as a poetry writer, although in this matter Hardy became one of the greatest exponents of the twentieth century, just as he was in prose narration during the late nineteenth century.

Thomas Hardy was nominated 12 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first in 1910 and the last in 1927.

Published works

Novels

- Desperate Remedies (1871).

- Under the Greenwood Tree (1872).

- A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873).

- Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).

- The Hand of Ethelberta (1876).

- The Return of the Native (1878).

- The Trumpet-Major (1880).

- A Laodicean: A Story of To-day (1881).

- Two on a Tower: A Romance (1882).

- The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886).

- The Woodlanders (1887).

- Wessex Tales (1888), collection of stories.

- Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891).

- A Group of Noble Dames (1891), collection of stories.

- Life's Little Ironies (1894).

- Jude the Obscure (1895).

- The Well-Beloved (1897).

, via Wikimedia Commons

Poetry

- Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898).

- Poems of the Past and the Present (1901).

- Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909).

- Satires of Circumstance (1914).

- Moments of Vision (1917).

- Collected Poems (1919).

- Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses (1922).

- Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925).

- Winter Words in Various Moods and Meters (1928).

Short stories

- "How I Built Myself A House" (1865).

- "Destiny and a Blue Cloak" (1874).

- "The Thieves Who Couldn't Stop Sneezing" (1877).

- "The Doctor's Legend" (1891).

- "Our Exploits At West Poley" (1892–93).

- "The Specter of the Real" (1894).

- "Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer" (1911).

- "Old Mrs. Chundle" (1929).

- "The Unconquerable" (1992).

Drama

- The Dynasts, Part 1 (1904).

- The Dynasts, Part 2 (1906).

- The Dynasts, Part 3 (1908).

- The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse (1923).

References

1. Millgate, M. (2018). Thomas Hardy - Biography, Books, Poems, & Facts. Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: britannica.com.
2. Hardy, T., Irwin, M. and Hardy, F. (2007). The life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.
3. Academy of American Poets. (2018). Thomas Hardy. Available at: poets.org.
4. En.wikipedia.org. (2018). Thomas Hardy. Available at: en.wikipedia.org.
5. Millgate, M. (2006). Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6. Holmes, J., Sood, A. and Durant, D. (2018). Hardy and Education. Gettysburg College. Available at: public.gettysburg.edu.
7. En.wikipedia.org. (2018). Thomas Hardy's Wessex. Available at: en.wikipedia.org.
8. University of St. Andrews. (2003). Maps of Wessex. Available at: web.archive.org.