Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy was born, the first of four children, in Upper Bockhampton, Dorset, on 2 June 1840 - about five months after his parents married. His father, Thomas Snr, was a builder and his mother, Jemima, a former maidservant.

His father had played viol (i.e. violin) in the Stinsford Church quire, and his father, Thomas (the Hardys were famous for their originality) had played bass viol (i.e. cello). The quire were kicked out of their jobs by the Rev Shirley at about the time Thomas Hardy Jnr was born, much to Hardy's subsequent disgust - hence the libellous attack on the Rev Maybold in "Under the Greenwood Tree".  However Hardy developed a love of music himself, also playing the violin.  

Thomas trained as an architect. In this role he worked in Dorset before making the move to London.  After a few years, however, he returned to a base in Dorset, working in the Dorchester and Weymouth areas as well as the occasional foray further afield.  

He met Emma Gifford when he was on assignment at the church where her brother-in-law was the incumbent, in St Juliot, Cornwall.  They married in London on 17 September, 1874. Both were already well over thirty, and they never had children. 

His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, was rejected by the publishing houses to which he sent it.  It was perceived as being too hostile to the upper classes.  However its themes and scenes seem to have recurred in some of his later novels and short stories. The next novel, Desperate Remedies, a melodrama, was at least published.  The next, Under the Greenwood Tree, was also rejected initially - one publisher suggesting there were already too many Christmas novels - but after being published brought him to a wider audience.  It was Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) that really made his name.

Many of Hardy's novels suffered from the bowdlerising of publishers, and some of them outraged public opinion.  However several of them - The Woodlanders, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure) - are utter classics.  Eventually Hardy gave up prose and dedicated himself to poetry.  Some of his verse is quite quirky, some is utterly depressing.  However much is brilliant. The first poem we know him to have written and the last are separated by some 72 years.   

As they became older, Hardy and Emma's relationship suffered from their differing personalities.  In particular, Emma increasingly subscribed to a narrow Protestant religious view, while Hardy's religious views were quite unorthodox - especially for someone who had been quoted as saying that he would have liked to have been a country parson.  Their relationship was also strained by Hardy's habit of developing affections for much younger women - often actresses who were playing the part of Tess.  Emma's death in 1912 was however the cause of an outflowing of excellent poetry, celebrating their early romance and regretting her loss.  .

He married his second wife, Florence Dugdale, on 10 February 1914. He was 73, she was 35.

Thomas Hardy died on 11 January, 1928.  He had continued writing poetry almost to the end.  

His ashes were buried in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey. His heart was interred in Emma's grave at Stinsford, the church of his father and grandfather, and alongside them. When Florence died, in 1937, she was buried with Emma and Hardy's heart.  None of the four Hardy children had had children, and when Hardy's sister Kate died in 1940, she was the last of her family.