The ‘Hardy Monument’ near Weymouth is often assumed to commemorate Thomas Hardy, and it does … but not the writer Thomas Hardy. ‘All comedy is tragedy, if you only look deep enough into it,’ he opined in a letter to John Addington Symonds in April 1889.ĥ. But it might be more accurate to say that, like many great English writers, Hardy enjoyed the fine line that separates comedy from tragedy. Instead, Hardy had concentrated on poetry in his later life (he had started out as a poet before taking up novel-writing in the early 1870s). He has a reputation for being something of a gloomy author, and it’s true that his favoured – and, it must be said, more artistically successful – mode was the tragic rather than the comic, putting him at odds with many of his fellow Victorian novelists, whose books often end in union and marriage rather than death and isolation. He had become part of the literary establishment, although he hadn’t written a novel for over thirty years, after the adverse criticism his 1895 novel Jude the Obscure received from reviewers – and the Bishop of Wakefield, who reportedly burned the book for being immoral. Barrie, Edmund Gosse, the Leader of the Opposition, and even the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. At his funeral in 1928, Hardy’s pallbearers included Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, A. Lawrence, probably means simply that none of them went to boarding school or Oxbridge.’Ĥ. As Raymond Williams sardonically points out, the patronizing adjective “autodidact”, which has been used alike of Hardy, George Eliot and D.

As Terry Eagleton puts it in his witty and informative The English Novel: An Introduction, ‘Far from being self-taught, he was considerably better educated than the great majority of men and women of his age. He was hardly an ‘autodidact’, or wholly self-taught, man. They were hardly on the breadline. Whilst it’s true that Hardy’s family lacked the funds to send him to university – instead, he left school at sixteen to train as an architect – he had had a perfectly sufficient school education prior to this. Whilst his upbringing was certainly rural rather than metropolitan, he wasn’t exactly poor: his father was a successful builder who had six men working for him. Much of the common perception of Thomas Hardy is incorrect, or, at the very least, inaccurate. Many people, if asked to describe Hardy’s background, would probably paint us a picture of a rustic, poor, and self-educated man who worked his way up the social ladder to become a celebrated author. (Seventeen years later to the day, composer Edward Elgar would be born.) Let’s raise a glass of something (cider?) to one of the great poets and novelists of English literature.ġ.

Thomas hardy obscure