1894
Hardy was born in 1840, at Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester. His father and grandfather were master-stonemasons; his father had a fierce passion for music, leading some to speculate that this may have been an important influence on Hardy’s writing. After being schooled at Lower Bockhampton, his mother transferred him to a school in Dorchester. Here he trained to become an architect.
Hardy’s cottage
Hardy was apprenticed to John Hicks, a Dorchester architect. At around this time, Hardy began writing verse and met his friend Horace Moule. He moved to London to work for the ecclesiastical architect Arthur Blomfield, and exploited the culture around him, visiting art galleries and reading widely, but was forced to return to Dorset due to illness. Hardy questioned his religious faith; he worked with Hicks again, and then his friend Crickmay, on church restoration. His decreasing faith is interesting when considering that superstition is an element of many of Hardy’s novels.
In 1868, he completed his first draft of the novel ‘The Poor Man and the Lady’, which was too controversial for publishing. From the title, we can deduce that this was his first work that would raise the theme of cross-class relationships. ‘Desperate Remedies’ was published in 1871.
Crickmay sent him to St Juliot to restore a church in this parish; here he met his future wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford. She is said by some to have inspired ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’. ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ was commissioned by Leslie Stephen, due to his interest in Hardy’s earlier novels, and became a best-seller, allowing Hardy to become a full-time writer. Hardy named his novels the Wessex Novels, after the Anglo-Saxon kingdom. As his wife, Emma became increasingly estranged from Hardy. Between 1878 and 1881, they lived in London, and later moved back to Dorchester to live in Max Gate house, which Hardy had built himself. This house may have been a statement to show him as one of the wealthy, middle-class people of the area.
Max Gate
‘Jude the Obscure’ was published in 1895 or 1896, and went on to be banned by circulating libraries. By this point, Hardy became prolific in writing poetry, starting with ‘Wessex Poems’ in 1898. His wife suddenly died in 1912, causing him to journey back to St Juliot and his wife’s birthplace, as well as writing poems ‘in expiation’.
In 1914, Hardy married Florence Dugdale and joined writers writing for the Allied Cause at the outbreak of WW1. Hardy has gone on to inspire poets such as Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin and Dylan Thomas. Yeats, Sassoon, Virginia Woolf visited him, and he talked of poetry with Ezra Pound. He died in 1928, and his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey next to Charles Dickens, while his heart was buried with his first wife.
Ididn'twantanyflowers 