Thomas Hardy (14 page)

What was the identity of this rival to Hardy for Emma’s hand? A clue is given by Hardy in his poem
The Young Churchwarden
(part of his
Moments of Vision
collection), which reads as follows:

When he lit the candles there,

And the light fell on his hand,

And it trembled as he scanned

Her and me, his vanquished air

Hinted that his dream was done,

And I saw he had begun

To understand.

When Love’s viol was unstrung,

Sore I wished the hand that shook

Had been mine that shared her book

While that evening hymn was sung,

His the victor’s, as he lit

Candles where he had bidden us sit

With vanquished look.

And originally attached to this poem (and subsequently crossed out) was a note which read: ‘At an Evening Service/August 14. 1870.’ So where was Hardy on this occasion? The answer appears in a note which he wrote in his copy of the Prayer Book, next to the 73rd Psalm, which reads: ‘Lesnewth, Evening Prayer, Aug. 14, 1870’ – a reference to the village of Lesnewth, situated ¾ mile from St Juliot and its church of St Michael & All Angels.
⁷

Henry Jose was the son of William Jose and his wife Ann, who farmed 64 acres of land at Trebiffin, situated ¾ mile south of St Juliot, across the Valency Valley in the parish of Lesnewth.
⁸
Five years younger than Emma, Henry, in August 1870, was aged 25. A clue that Henry was the person in question was provided by his great-nephew, Walter Henry Jose, whose father had once told him that ‘Uncle Henry had a great fancy for Emma Gifford’.
⁹
Another clue is given by Emma herself when, referring to ‘the Cornish working orders’, whom in general she disliked, she affirmed that:

Only one stands out amongst them with worth of character and deep devotion, though rather dumb of expression, a man gentle of nature, musical, christlike in guilelessness, handsome of face and figure, David-like farming his own land: he never married and told after I had left [the area] of his disappointment, and attraction on first seeing me.
¹⁰

And what clinches the matter is that Henry (in addition to being a farmer like his father) was indeed, at the time in question, a churchwarden at Lesnewth’s church of St Michael & All Angels.
¹¹
Finally, as Emma stated, Jose remained unmarried; he died in March 1928 aged 83.

Hardy’s poem, therefore, refers unquestionably to himself, Emma and Henry Jose. But instead of being joyful that he had emerged victorious in the battle for the hand of Emma, the poem is one of deep regret. For by the time it was written (which was some time after the occasion to which it refers), the love between its author (Hardy) and the subject of his love (Emma) had become ‘unstrung’. Furthermore, as the second verse of the poem indicates, Hardy is now regretting that he, and not the ‘young churchwarden’ (Jose), had been the ‘victor’ in the battle for Emma’s affections. So what was the story behind this sad fact? All would be revealed in due course.

Henry Jose’s younger brother Digory also did not marry. (His elder sister Jane Pearse Jose, however, married Richard Prout of Peventon.) Had Hardy not been assigned to St Juliot by architect Crickmay in the March of 1870, then it is possible that Emma would have married Jose, despite his more lowly position in society, and that Hardy would have married someone else. How different his life might then have been.

Other poems of Hardy’s are less easy to decipher. Sometimes he deliberately alters the time when a particular event happens; at other times, he transposes the male and female roles, or disguises the location in which the scene is set. Nevertheless, in virtually everything he ever wrote, subsequent to his first meeting with Emma, there are allusions not only to his love for her, but also to their problematical relationship.

Hardy divulged that his novel,
A Laodicean
, contained ‘more of the facts of his own life than anything else he had ever written’.
¹²
This, as will be seen, became an increasing tendency with him in the succeeding novels and poems which he produced.

The novel also shows that far from being entrenched in the past, Hardy was quite willing to recognise and embrace the advances of science, as long as the effect was not to enslave the people, drive them off the land or destroy the landscape. Threshing and ploughing machines driven by steam traction engines were therefore
not
welcome. In
A Laodicean
, that ‘old chestnut’, the subject of infant baptism, is revived; church minister Mr Woodwell being the reincarnation of Frederick Perkins of Dorchester – the real-life Baptist minister and father of the two youths with whom Hardy used to have deep discussions on the subject in his younger days.

The novel appeared in
Harper’s Magazine
between December 1880 and December 1881, and was published in December 1881 by Sampson Low of London.

On 26 April 1882, during a stay in London, Hardy attended the funeral of Charles Darwin whose book
The Origin of Species
he had embraced and long admired, and which had posed serious philosophical questions for him when he had first read it many years previously.

In September 1882 Hardy and Emma set out on a journey which took them to three counties. As they travelled from Axminster in Devon to Lyme Regis in Dorset, Hardy noticed how: ‘The horse (pulling the coach) swayed [and] leant against the pole … his head hung like his tail. The straps and brass rings of the harness seemed barbarously harsh on his shrinking skin.’ Throughout his life, a concern for animals was one of Hardy’s trademarks. Emma would apparently have intervened had it not been for the ‘anger of the other passengers, who wanted to get on [to their destination]’.
¹³
In early October the pair set out once more, this time for France, where they explored Paris and visited that city’s Louvre Museum and its Luxembourg Museum of Art.

The Revd Holder, rector of St Juliot and husband of Emma’s sister Helen, died in November 1882, aged 79. He had always been on friendly terms with Hardy, whom he was in the habit of regaling with amusing stories. Holder had also permitted Hardy to read the lesson at church services when he himself had been ‘not in vigour’.
¹⁴
He was buried (presumably) in the churchyard at St Juliot in the same grave as his first wife Ann.
¹⁵
Hardy himself designed his memorial plaque.

The novel
Two on a Tower
deals ostensibly with the subject of astronomy, but beneath the surface lies a more powerful and compelling theme. This theme, which Hardy describes in the Preface, was ‘the outcome of a wish [of his] to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe’.

To achieve this, a knowledge of astronomy was necessary, and Hardy therefore sought permission from the astronomer royal to visit the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. In particular, he required an answer to the following question: was it possible to site a telescope with which to study the stars in an old tower, despite the fact that the tower in question had not been built for the purpose? In his mind was the great eighteenth-century tower which, as previously mentioned, stood in the grounds of Charborough Park near Wimborne, Dorset.

In the story, the aristocratic Lady Viviette Constantine, believing that her husband Sir Blount has died in Africa and that she is now a widow, falls in love with curate’s son and budding astronomer Swithin St Cleeve, who is considerably younger than herself. She provides him with astronomical instruments and sets him up in a tower on her estate, which he uses as an observatory.

Hardy now inserts the proverbial spanner in the works. Having married Swithin and become pregnant by him, her ladyship discovers that her late husband, Sir Blount, although now dead, was actually still alive at the time of her second marriage, and because of this fact, her marriage to Swithin is invalid. Anxious to avoid adversely affecting Swithin’s career as an architect, and in order not to jeopardise his inheritance from his uncle, Lady Constantine now marries the Bishop of Melchester. Meanwhile, Swithin goes abroad to pursue his studies.

By the time Swithin returns, the bishop has died. He realises that he no longer loves Lady Constantine, who is now ‘worn and faded’, but nonetheless proposes to her a second time. Overwhelmed with joy at her reunion with him, she dies in his arms.

Two on a Tower
was published by Sampson Low in late October 1882.

In 1883 an article written by Hardy, entitled ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, was published in
Longman’s Magazine
. Such a person as the labourer, said he, was hitherto personified as having an image of:

uncouth manner and aspect, stolid understanding, and snail-like movement [who spoke with a] chaotic corruption of regular language, that few persons … consider it worth while to enquire what views, if any, of life, nature, or of society, are conveyed in these utterances. He hangs his head and looks sheepish when spoken to, and thinks Lunnon [London] is a place paved with gold. Misery and fever lurk in his cottage. He has few thoughts of joy, and little hope of rest.

For Hardy, a champion of his Dorset heritage whose sentiments lay always on the side of the poor and the oppressed, this was an over-simplification. He pointed out that the language of the Dorsetshire labourers was, in fact, an agglomeration of English as taught at the National Schools which they attended, and the ‘unwritten, dying, Wessex English that they had learnt from their parents’. Far from being uniformly joyless and dull, some were happy, many serene and a few depressed. Some were clever ‘even to genius, some stupid, some wanton, some austere’. Their political views were equally varied and it was therefore a mistake to roll them all together into one. It was also a mistake to think that the ‘grimiest families’ were the poorest.

Years later, in March 1902, in a letter to author Henry Rider Haggard, Hardy developed his theme still further. Up until about 1855, he said, the labourers’ condition was one of great hardship. For instance, he had heard when young of a ‘sheep-keeping boy’ (whose father’s wages were a mere 6
s
a week) who had died of hunger; at autopsy the boy’s stomach was found to contain nothing but undigested, raw turnip. Since then, matters had improved, noted Hardy. Now, it was not unusual to see a cottage with carpeting; with brass rods going up the staircase to keep the carpet in place. A piano might be found within and a bicycle by the doorway. At night, a paraffin lamp was available.