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 he gave serious thought
to attending university and entering the church, a struggle he would
dramatize in his novel Jude the Obscure, declining
religious faith and lack of money led Hardy to pursue a career in
writing instead. He spent nearly a dozen years toiling in obscurity
and producing unsuccessful novels and poetry. Far from the
Madding Crowd, published in 1874,
was the author’s 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 of his contemporaries,
he first published his novels in periodic installments in magazines
or serial journals, and his work reflects the conventions of serialization.
To ensure that readers would buy a serialized novel, writers often
structured each installment to be something of a cliffhanger, which
explained the convoluted, often incredible plots of many such Victorian
novels. But Hardy cannot solely be labeled a Victorian novelist.
Nor can he be categorized simply as 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 in the middle ground between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, between Victorian sensibilities and more modern ones,
and between tradition and innovation.
Soon after Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
was published, its sales assured Hardy’s financial future. But the
novel also aroused a substantial amount of controversy. In Tess
of the d’Urbervilles and other novels, Hardy demonstrates
his deep sense of moral sympathy for England’s lower classes, particularly
for rural women. He became famous for his compassionate, often controversial
portrayal of young women victimized by the self-righteous rigidity
of English social morality. Perhaps his most famous depiction of
such a young woman is in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. This
novel and the one that followed it, Jude the Obscure (1895),
engendered widespread public scandal with their comparatively frank
look at the sexual hypocrisy of English society.
Hardy lived and wrote in a time of difficult social change,
when England was making its slow and painful transition from an
old-fashioned, agricultural nation to a modern, industrial one.
Businessmen and entrepreneurs, or “new money,” joined the ranks
of the social elite, as some families of the ancient aristocracy,
or “old money,” faded into obscurity. Tess’s family in Tess
of the d’Urbervilles illustrates this change, as Tess’s
parents, the Durbeyfields, lose themselves in the fantasy of belonging
to an ancient and aristocratic family, the d’Urbervilles. Hardy’s
novel strongly suggests that such a family history is not only meaningless
but also utterly undesirable. Hardy’s views on the subject were
appalling to conservative and status-conscious British readers,
and Tess of the d’Urbervilles was met in England
with widespread controversy.
Hardy was frustrated by the controversy caused by his
work, and he finally abandoned novel-writing altogether following Jude
the Obscure. He spent the rest of his career writing poetry.
Though today he is remembered somewhat more for his novels, he was
an acclaimed poet in his time and was buried in the prestigious
Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey following his death in 1928.
