Thomas Hardy (17 page)

At the end of July 1889, the Hardys returned to Max Gate, where Hardy settled into the daily routine of writing what would be his next novel:
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
. This was not, however, to be a straightforward project. The first two magazines to which he sent the manuscript rejected it on the grounds that it was ‘improper’, and it was only after Hardy had laboriously edited it, removing parts or all of various chapters, that it was finally accepted by the editor of the weekly newspaper
The Graphic
.

Hardy, despite the labour of writing, still found the time and energy to record his thoughts and feelings on those subjects which he found intriguing; for example, religion. He had been searching for God for fifty years, he confessed, ‘and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him’.
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He also found time to write to Hugh Thackeray Turner, secretary to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, objecting to the proposed demolition of the church in the village of Stratton, near Dorchester; in his view, ‘some judicious repair’ was all that was necessary.
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At Easter 1890, Hardy visited the grave of William Barnes at Winterborne Came. In May, when he and Emma were again in London, he sent the manuscript of
A Group of Noble Dames
to
The Graphic
, which agreed to serialise it. This was a collection of short stories – for the background of which Hardy drew heavily on
The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset
by the Revd John Hutchins (first published in 1774). For the plots of the stories, however, he relied on ‘the lips of aged people in a remote part of the country, where traditions of the local families linger on, & are remembered by the yeomen & peasantry long after they are forgotten by the families concerned’.
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A year later,
A Group of Noble Dames
was published, in book form, by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. of London.

What did the critics have to say about
A Group of Noble Dames
? In the words of one, it was a ‘pageant of disastrous marriages, confessed and unconfessed adulteries, complicated illegitimacies, sudden deaths, suspected crimes [and] bizarre cruelties … among the Wessex gentry of some generations back’.
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At the end of June 1890, Hardy said he was ‘getting tired of investigating life at music halls and police courts’, which appears to have been his principal preoccupation during that season in London. Attendance at the latter would probably have provided material for his stories, as well as satisfied his somewhat morbid curiosity; whereas the beautiful actresses and dancers with their ‘lustrous eyes and pearly countenances’, which he would have seen at the former, would doubtless have afforded him light relief and titillation.

When, in that year of 1890, Emma’s father John Gifford died, Emma left London to attend his funeral in Devon. Hardy did not accompany her. Thereafter, Hardy generously arranged an annuity for Emma’s niece and nephew, (Ethel) Lilian (Attersoll) Gifford and her brother Gordon. That August, Hardy and his brother Henry went on a visit to Paris together.

It may have afforded Hardy some amusement to consider that he, an outspoken critic (through his writings) of the upper classes, was now coming into contact more and more not only with London society, but also with the gentry of Dorset. For example, in January 1891 he attended a ball given by Mrs Brinsley Sheridan (a descendant of Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan) at her home, Frampton Court, Frampton, near Dorchester. To this, Emma arrived on horseback; horse riding being a favourite pastime of hers.

In the spring of 1891 Hardy was elected to the Athenaeum (a London gentlemen’s club), from the balcony of which he saw the German emperor, Wilhelm II, pass by.

Despite his literary success, Hardy was still unable to afford a second home in London, and he and Emma were obliged to find rented accommodation for their annual spring sojourns in the capital. At a luncheon at Mary Jeune’s (Lady St Helier, wife of a distinguished judge) in July, Hardy mentions sitting between ‘a pair of beauties’, the one with ‘violet eyes’ being ‘the more seductive’, while the other was ‘more vivacious’.
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In September Hardy and Emma visited Scotland and many of the places depicted by Sir Walter Scott in his novels. In November he gave his opinion on whether eminent men of letters should be awarded national recognition. The problem, as he saw it, was that while ‘the highest flights of the pen [by an author] are mostly the excursions and revelations of souls unreconciled to life, [the] natural tendency of a government [was] to encourage acquiescence in life as it is’.
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In that year of 1891, Emma’s mother died. It is not known if Emma attended the funeral.

When Hardy began a new book, it was his habit firstly to select a brand new pencil with which to write it, and secondly to relocate to a different room in the house. So, for
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
, he moved out of his old study and into a new one, situated at the rear of Max Gate with a window facing west.

The story commences with Parson Tringham, antiquary, addressing Jack Durbeyfield, a ‘haggler’, as ‘Sir John’, and informing him that he (Durbeyfield) was descended from the ‘ancient and knightly family of the D’Urbervilles’. (It will be recalled that the Hardys liked to think of themselves as being descended from the ancient ‘le Hardy’ family of Jersey.) Hardy describes Jack as a ‘slack-twisted fellow’ whose ‘times [of work] could not be relied on to coincide with the hours of requirement’ – another example of Hardy’s wit.

When Durbeyfield’s wife informs her husband that a great lady by the name of D’Urberville is living at nearby Trantridge (Pentridge, near Cranborne), they decide to send their daughter Tess to pay the family a visit, with the purpose of claiming kinship to them.

At the D’Urbervilles, Tess meets Alec, the young man of the house, who confesses to her that his family are not genuine ‘D’Urbervilles’ but that they obtained the title of this ‘old, extinguished family’ simply by purchasing it. Nevertheless, Alec’s mother offers Tess a job managing her poultry farm. The old lady is deeply attached to her fowls and, despite being blind, is able to recognise each one of them individually by their comb, beak and claws.

On hearing from Tess that her family’s horse has died, Alec generously provides them with a replacement. He then takes advantage of Tess while she is sleeping, forcing himself upon her. She falls pregnant, and after being mistress to him for a period of four months, she returns home to have his baby. When the vicar arrives to baptise the infant, Tess’s father forbids it – his family having suffered such disgrace. When the child dies, Tess informs the vicar that she herself had previously baptised it. Nevertheless, the vicar refuses to allow it a Christian burial. Here, Hardy is venting his anger against prejudice and religious dogma.

Tess then finds employment with Farmer Crick, described as a ‘kindly man who has his own pew in church’. Among his employees is Angel Clare (Hardy having obtained the name ‘Angel’ from a memorial plaque in Stinsford church), a parson’s son who wishes to become a farmer. When in the dairy the butter refuses to set, this is taken to mean that someone is in love – Hardy’s appreciation of folklore – and in this case the loving couple are Tess and Angel. Angel proposes to Tess, she accepts and they marry.

When Angel confesses to having had a brief relationship with an older woman, Tess forgives him. However, when, despite her mother warning her against it, Tess confesses to having had a similar relationship with Alec, which resulted in the birth of a child, now deceased, Angel takes this as proof that she is the ‘the belated seedling of an effete aristocracy’ and departs for Brazil. Tess returns home. She now has to endure jeering and being referred to as a ‘trollope’. Here is Hardy railing against hypocrisy.

Tess now endures great hardship working in the fields, uprooting turnips and feeding wheat into the threshing machine which works, remorselessly, from dawn to dusk. Meanwhile, she resists the overtures of Alec, who tells her that had he known her circumstances he would have done his duty by the child. Aware that Tess’s father is ill and that her family are liable to be evicted, Alec offers his help, but is again rejected. Alec also offers to marry Tess, but she declines because she does not love him. Finally, Jack Durbeyfield dies and the family is rendered homeless.

Angel returns from Brazil to find letters of desperation from Tess which have not been forwarded. He goes looking for her, eventually finding her in Sandbourne (Bournemouth). He asks her forgiveness, but she tells him it is too late. Tess is now living with Alec, who has been good to her family and won her back to him. A distraught Angel catches the train home, only to have Tess jump into the carriage and join him. She has murdered Alec.

The couple flee; Angel determined to save her from the forces of the law. However, at the ‘pagan temple’ of Stonehenge she is captured.

In
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
, Hardy’s heroine’s brief dalliance with Alec sets her on a course of destruction, culminating with her being hanged for murder at Wintonchester (Winchester). Her second ‘mistake’ was being honest. She wanted to have no secrets from Angel, who must know the truth about her past.

Tess showed immense qualities of endurance in resisting Alec, who, by proposing marriage, offered her an easy escape from a life of toil and hardship. But she did not love him and remained true to Angel, even though he had forsaken her. The forces which crushed Tess were enshrined by an establishment which condemned adultery and ‘bastardy’. For this, Tess was punished by being jeered at and by being denied a Christian burial for her child. The impact of this on her life would not have been so catastrophic had it not been for Angel’s intolerance in assessing her ‘lapse’ to be of greater significance than his. In short, Tess was literally hounded to death by the combined harshness of the establishment and the bigotry of those around her.

The notion that they are descended from a distinguished family leads the Durbeyfields to ruination, as they make desperate but futile efforts to live up to the ‘knightliness’ of their ancestors. As for Hardy, The fact that this is a recurring theme implies that what he perceived as his lack of ‘pedigree’ was a source of deep regret to him. This, of course, is a paradox, in one who invariably championed the cause of the lower orders of society.

Tess provided Hardy with a vehicle for yet another outburst against the victimisation of the weak and oppressed, perpetrated by the upper classes and enforced by a callous and impersonal legal system. Tess acknowledges this, in an almost masochistic way, when, having struck Alec on the mouth, she invites him to punish her. ‘Whip me, crush me,’ she cries. ‘I shall not cry out. Once victim, always victim, that’s the law.’ And the scene where Tess is hanged was, for Hardy, reminiscent of a similar scene: the hanging of Elizabeth Brown at Dorchester, which he had witnessed personally in the year 1856 when he was 15.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles
was published in late November 1891 by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. The novel became a talking point throughout the land and was quickly translated into several languages, including Russian. Despite this, many libraries refused to stock it. Its review in
The Quarterly
was to offend Hardy deeply. The article, he said, was smart and amusing, but at the expense of truth and sincerity. ‘If this sort of thing [criticism] continues,’ he said, there would be ‘no more novel writing for me’.
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