Thomas Hardy, born on this day in 1840, spent a lifetime attacking and deriding the established values of Victorian England—beginning with laughing in church. How did he end up as the establishment’s favorite writer?
.” Yet when he died, thirty-three years later—after embarking on a second career as a poet, and creating a body of work at least as important as his fiction—all was more than forgiven. Contrary to his own wishes, he was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey, where his ten pallbearers included the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and the heads of Cambridge and Oxford colleges, as well as Rudyard Kipling and A. E. Housman.
Tomalin, like Hardy, sees his mother as the most important influence on the withdrawn and bookish boy. Thanks to Jemima, who dominated her charming, unambitious, music-loving husband, Thomas was sent to the best school in the neighborhood, in the nearby county town of Dorchester. By the age of sixteen, he had received a grounding in Latin and mathematics—if not quite enough to qualify for admission to Oxford or Cambridge, which the family could not have afforded in any case.
In the intoxicated summer of 1870, however, the match seemed an ideal one to both Thomas and Emma. She was decidedly a step up for him socially, while he might have been her last chance to escape spinsterhood. But Hardy was poor, and Emma’s relatives snobbish, and the marriage didn’t happen for another four years. Not by coincidence, it was during those years of suspense that Hardy made himself into a professional writer.
The name of this world, of course, is Wessex, an Anglo-Saxon term for southwest England that Hardy was largely responsible for popularizing. One of the pleasures of Hardy’s novels, which makes them so lovely in spite of their harshness, is his reconstruction of the folkways and landscapes of Dorset and surroundings, whose place-names he translated into Wessex equivalents: Dorchester becomes Casterbridge, and so on.
In an instant the atmosphere was transformed to Bathsheba’s eyes. Beams of light caught from the low sun’s rays, above, around, in front of her, well-nigh shut out earth and heaven—all emitted in the marvellous evolutions of Troy’s reflecting blade, which seemed everywhere at once, and yet nowhere specially. These circling gleams were accompanied by a keen rush that was almost a whistling—also springing from all sides of her at once.
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