Thomas Hardy was born on
June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton in Dorset,
a rural region of southwestern England that was to become the focus
of his fiction. The child of a builder, Hardy was apprenticed at
the age of sixteen to John Hicks, an architect who lived in the
city of Dorchester. The location would later serve as the model
for Hardy’s fictional Casterbridge. Although Hardy gave serious
thought to attending university and entering the church, a struggle
he would dramatize in his 1895 novel Jude
the Obscure, his declining religious faith and lack of
money encouraged him to pursue a career in writing instead. Hardy
spent nearly a dozen years toiling in obscurity and producing unsuccessful
novels and poetry. Far from the Madding Crowd, published
in 1874, was his first critical and financial
success. Finally able to support himself as a writer, Hardy married
Emma Lavinia Gifford later that year.
Although he built a reputation as a successful novelist,
Hardy considered himself—first and foremost—a poet. To him, novels were
primarily a means of earning a living. Like many novelists of his
day, he wrote according to the conventions of serialization (the process
of publishing a work in periodic installments). To insure that readers
would buy a serialized novel, writers often left pressing questions
unanswered at the end of each installment. This practice explains
the convoluted, often incredible plots of many nineteenth-century
Victorian novels. But Hardy cannot be labeled solely a Victorian
novelist. Nor can he be categorized as purely a modernist, in the
tradition of writers like Virginia Woolf or D. H. Lawrence who were
determined to explode the conventions of nineteenth-century literature
and build a new kind of novel in its place. In many respects, Hardy
was trapped between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between
Victorian and modern sensibilities, and between tradition and innovation.
The Mayor of Casterbridge reveals Hardy’s
peculiar location in this shifting world, possessing elements of
both the Victorian and modernist forms. It charts the course of
one man’s character, but it also chronicles the dramatic change
of an isolated, rural agricultural community into a modern city.
In The Mayor of Casterbridge, as well as in his
most popular fictions, such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude
the Obscure, Hardy explores the effects of cultural and economic
development: the decline of Christianity as well as folk traditions,
the rise of industrialization and urbanization, and the unraveling
of universally held moral codes.
Hardy himself abandoned Christianity. He read the writings
of Charles Darwin, accepted the theory of evolution, and studied
the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s notion of
the “Immanent Will” describes a blind force that drives the universe
irrespective of human lives or desires. Though his novels often end
in crushing tragedies that reflect Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Hardy
described himself as a meliorist, one who believes
that the world tends to become better and that people aid in this
betterment. Humans can live with some happiness, he claimed, so
long as they understand their place in the universe and accept it.
Hardy died in 1928 at his estate in Dorchester.
True to the rather dramatically romantic fantasies of his fiction,
Hardy had his heart buried in his wife’s tomb.
