Thomas Hardy (15 page)

While these changes were welcome, others were not. The life-hold principle of tenancy, which had given the cottager security of tenure for three generations – a period of up to 100 years – had now been replaced by weekly, renewable agreements, leading to great insecurity. ‘The Damocles’ sword which hung perpetually over the poor, said Hardy, ‘is the fear of being turned out of their houses by the farmer or squire’. For example, if an honest man’s daughter were to have an illegitimate child, or if he or his wife took to drink, then this provided grounds for the family’s instant eviction. For this and other reasons there was now a massive migration into the towns, which were not ‘fraught with such trying consequences’ as was the case in the villages. And because the labourer was forced to relocate himself to wherever a job was available, the effect on his children was deleterious. Said Hardy, in ‘shifting from school to school … their education could not possibly progress with that regularity which is essential to their getting the best knowledge in the short time available to them’.
¹⁶

As for the village, the loss of its labourers and their families meant that it declined ‘into eternal oblivion’. There was now no longer ‘continuity of information’, with the result that ‘Names, stories, and relics’ of a place were now speedily forgotten.
¹⁷

In June 1883 the Hardys moved to Dorchester, to lodgings in Shire Hall Lane. Two months later, accompanied by Edmund Gosse, they attended a church service at Winterborne Came, conducted by clergyman, poet and Hardy’s former teacher, William Barnes. (Barnes had retired from school mastering two decades earlier in 1864, when he had been offered the living of Winterborne Came-cum-Whitcombe – the rectory of which stood not half a mile from Max Gate.)

Unable to find a house in Dorchester, Hardy purchased a plot of land from the estate of the Duchy of Cornwall, situated a mile out of town to the east, on the road to Wareham. Here, he would build a house of his own; or rather design it and arrange for his brother Henry to construct it. The dwelling would be called ‘Max Gate’: the name being derived from that of the inhabitant of a nearby toll gatehouse, a Mr Mack. During the digging out of the foundations for Max Gate, some Romano-British graves containing urns and skeletons were discovered.

In June 1884, the day after Hardy’s 44th birthday, he went to see a performance of the circus in nearby Fordington Field. That month and the following found the couple again in London, meeting artists and writers, including the painter Edward Burne-Jones. In July Hardy, having returned to Dorset, visited the Dorchester Assizes, and in August he attended a performance of Shakespeare’s
Othello
, performed in the town by strolling players. August also saw Hardy and his brother visiting the Channel Islands, taking the steamer from Weymouth. In December he attended the New Year’s Eve bell-ringing ceremony at Dorchester’s church of St Peter, where he observed that the tenor bell was worn and its ‘clapper battered with its many blows’.
¹

Early in 1885 Hardy was invited to Eggesford, Devon, by his friend Lady Portsmouth, who together with her husband encouraged Hardy and Emma to move to Devonshire to be near them. Emma would have gone willingly, Hardy records, as this was the county of her birth. However, it was impracticable as the Dorchester house was now nearing completion.
²

On 19 April Hardy completed the writing of his novel
The Mayor of Casterbridge
. It had taken at least a year, during which time he had been ‘frequently interrupted’.
³

The Mayor of Casterbridge
was, in Hardy’s own words, ‘more particularly the study of one man’s deeds and character’, and in this way it differs from his other novels.
⁴
That man is Michael Henchard – a powerful, dominating person who towers above the other characters in the novel but, nonetheless, is ultimately ‘defeated by his own defects’.
⁵

Henchard, a journeyman (hired workman) hay-trusser, arrives at Weydon Fair in search of work. Here, while out of his mind through drink, he puts his wife Susan, together with their child Elizabeth Jane, up for auction. Mother and daughter are ‘bought’ by a wandering sailor called Newson. When he emerges from his drunken stupor, Henchard bitterly regrets his action and vows to abstain from drink for a period of twenty years. He settles in Casterbridge (Dorchester) where he prospers as a corn merchant and ultimately becomes the town’s mayor.

Years later, Susan appears in Casterbridge. She believes her husband Newson to be drowned and is therefore in need of support for herself and her daughter. She and Henchard are reunited and they remarry, but Henchard does not realise, and Susan does not apprise him of the fact, that their original daughter, Elizabeth Jane, is dead and this Elizabeth Jane is, in fact, her daughter by Newson. On a previous business visit to Jersey, Henchard had met one Lucetta Le Sueur, whom he intended to marry. He writes to inform her that this is now no longer possible.

When a young and able Scotsman, Donald Farfrae, arrives on the scene, Henchard appoints him as his business manager. However, jealous of Farfrae’s success and of his popularity in the town, Henchard subsequently dismisses him. Susan dies, but leaves a letter for her husband informing him of the truth about Elizabeth Jane. Henchard, who knew no better at the time, has already told Elizabeth Jane that it is he who is her father and not Newson, as she had previously understood.

Lucetta arrives from Jersey and takes Elizabeth Jane on as her companion. But instead of paying court to the widower Henchard, Lucetta transfers her affections to Farfrae, which makes the former even more jealous of the Scotsman. Henchard threatens Lucetta with revealing the truth about her former attachment to him, and thereby blackmails her into promising that she will marry him. He comes to grief, nevertheless, when sitting as a magistrate he is exposed in court as a one-time wife-seller. His credibility is now lost, leaving Lucetta free to marry Farfrae, which she does. The weather now takes a hand.

In Hardy’s own words, ‘the home Corn Trade … had an importance that can hardly be realised’.
⁶
The entire population depended on the harvest and ‘after mid summer they [the farmers] watched the weather-cocks as men waiting in antechambers watch the lackey’.
⁷
With this in mind, Henchard purchases enormous quantities of grain. If the weather is bad and the harvest poor, as he believes, then the price of grain will rocket. However, the sun shines, the harvest is an excellent one, the price plummets and he becomes bankrupt. And the final indignity for him is when Farfrae purchases his former house.

When a certain ‘Royal Personage’ passes through Casterbridge and Henchard makes a foolish exhibition of himself, Farfrae – now mayor of the town in Henchard’s stead – is forced to intervene. Henchard challenges Farfrae to a fight to the death, but relents, having got the Scotsman at his mercy. Henchard also relents about making use of some love letters once sent to him by Lucetta (who is now pregnant by her husband), and instead of taking revenge on her and Farfrae, he agrees to return them to her. The plan misfires and the love letters become public knowledge. The shock of witnessing the townspeople parading an effigy of herself and Henchard through the streets causes Lucetta to miscarry and die.

When Newson reappears, having ‘come back from the dead’, Henchard lies to him and tells him that Elizabeth Jane is also dead; although Newson subsequently discovers the truth. Henchard then disappears from the scene, revisiting Casterbridge only briefly for Elizabeth Jane’s marriage to Farfrae. He then dies in an abandoned house in the presence of his former employee, Abel Whittle.

Described as a ‘smouldering, volcanic fellow’, Henchard’s pattern is ‘to cheat himself of success, companionship, happiness, love’. He is ‘a confusing mixture of good and evil’, but despite his ‘negative qualities’, he also possesses ‘courage, generosity’ and ‘forthrightness’.
⁸
This is a man ‘driven by inner destructive forces beyond his comprehension and control’.
⁹
In short, Henchard illustrates the Darwinian Theory of Evolution (with which Hardy was familiar), in that being unable to adapt, he is therefore incapable of surviving. Also, Henchard’s bitter experiences in life bear out the notion held by Hardy’s mother, Jemima, that there is always a figure standing in our path to ‘knock us back’. In this case, the figure was Henchard himself.

As usual with Hardy,
The Mayor of Casterbridge
is rooted in fact. There was a case in real life of a man selling his wife, and a ‘Royal Personage’ – namely Prince Albert – did actually visit Dorchester in July 1849.

There is usually a rock solid and utterly dependable character in each of Hardy’s novels, and in this case it is Elizabeth Jane, who continues to demonstrate her concern for Henchard, despite all, right to the bitter end. If Hardy had ever had a daughter, how he would have loved her to be like Elizabeth Jane.

The Mayor of Casterbridge
was published on 10 May 1886 by Smith, Elder & Co.

April 1885 found the Hardys again in London, viewing paintings at the Royal Academy and attending a party given by Lady Carnarvon, wife of the 4th Earl, at which they met Conservative politician Lord Salisbury. When June came, it was time to transfer the furniture from their Dorchester lodging house to their new house, Max Gate: described as an unpretentious, red-brick structure of moderate size, standing on a 1½-acre plot of land. Hardy was soon to plant in excess of 2,000 trees around it. This would afford greater privacy, together with protection from gales. One of the first visitors to Max Gate was Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, who was then living in Bournemouth in a house called ‘Skerryvore’. In the drawing room of Max Gate, Hardy would write his next novel,
The Woodlanders
.

A ‘careful observer’ described Hardy at this time as being ‘below the middle-height’ (he was actually 5ft 7in tall), of ‘slight build’, with a ‘pleasant, thoughtful face, exceptionally broad at the temples and fringed by a beard’. He always wore a moustache and his eyes were ‘a clear, blue-grey’.
¹⁰

In October 1885 William Barnes related to Hardy how, when Prince Louis Napoleon of France was resident in England, he had visited the Darner family at nearby Winterborne Came House. Hardy had already written one book set in Napoleonic times –
The Trumpet Major
. One day, his fascination with the period would lead him to write another:
The Dynasts
.

The termination of the year 1885 made Hardy ‘sadder than many previous New Year’s Eves have done’. He asked himself whether the building of Max Gate was ‘a wise expenditure of energy’, but hinted that there may have been darker forces at work which had undermined his spirits.

In London once again, in the spring and summer of 1886, he spent time in the British Museum’s Reading Room, and attended the House of Commons where the Home Rule Bill for Ireland was being debated. In May he describes meeting a ‘Hindu Buddhist’ who spoke English fluently, was remarkably well educated and was a ‘coach’ of the Theosophical Society (which professes that knowledge of God may be gained by intuitive insight into the nature of the divine). He went to his club, observed criminal trials at the law courts, and with Emma attended dinners at various private houses to which they had both been invited.

October 1886 found Hardy in an aggrieved frame of mind, and he wrote to Edmund Gosse describing how he had suffered previously at the hands of certain critics; in particular, the ‘anonymous’ ones who chose not to reveal their names. The ‘crown of my bitterness’, he says, ‘has been my sense of unfairness in such impersonal means of attack’. Such attacks mislead the public into thinking that there is ‘an immense weight of opinion’ behind the criticism, which one such as he, Hardy, can only oppose with his ‘own little solitary personality’.
¹¹
Two months later, he makes use of this word again in a letter to journalist William H. Rideing, in which he says: ‘My life when a boy was singularly uneventful & solitary.’
¹²
But he does admit that there is a positive side to the ‘slow, meditative lives of people who live in habitual solitude’, for such lifestyles render ‘every trivial act … full of interest’.
¹³

That same month, William Barnes died at the age of 85.

It was in the study above the drawing room at Max Gate that Hardy wrote
The Woodlanders
. However, the plot caused him considerable anxiety and he complained of a ‘sick headache’ and ‘a fit of depression’ in which he seemed to be ‘enveloped in a leaden cloud’.
¹⁴

In
The Woodlanders
, many of Hardy’s favourite themes resurface. They include the problems encountered when two persons of different social status fall in love, and when two men compete with one another for the hand of one woman, together with the problems men and women may have of understanding one another. Hardy also stresses that qualities such as loyalty, devotion and steadfastness in a male suitor, ought always to triumph over wealth, property and title.