Thomas Hardy (11 page)

The absence of Hardy’s parents from the wedding ceremony is also noteworthy (after all, his father Thomas II was well used to visiting his son in London), as is the absence of his sisters – Mary in particular, to whom he was closest – and his brother Henry. Could it be that the antipathy to the couple’s union came not just from the Giffords but also from Hardy’s mother? From Jemima’s point of view, she had gone to great lengths to educate her son, now an aspiring and talented young architect living in London, and she might reasonably have expected him to avail himself of all the opportunities that the capital had to offer. Now, he was throwing himself away on a nonentity of a girl from rural Cornwall, who was actively undermining her (Jemima’s) efforts by encouraging her son to give up his chosen career and embark on the much more hazardous course of becoming a writer. Despite the opposition, from whatever quarter, the couple decided to go ahead with the wedding.

After a few days spent at the Palace Hotel, Queensway, London, and then in Brighton on the south coast, the newly-weds embarked on their honeymoon (September to October 1874), heading for the Continent; to Rouen, Paris and Versailles. (Emma could write, and no doubt speak, fluent French.)
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In Paris they visited Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre Museum and the Tuileries Gardens – all that remained of the seventeenth-century Tuileries Palace which was destroyed in 1871. Emma kept a diary in which she made some rather contemptuous comments about the Parisian ‘working classes’, who were ‘very short and small altogether – pigmies in fact – men and women – the old women very ugly and dark’. These remarks were not at all in keeping with Hardy’s sentiments, which were always to champion the cause of the disadvantaged. Apart from this, there is little sentiment in Emma Hardy’s diary of events: instead, a detailed description of bedrooms, streets, children, domestic animals and, in particular, hotel menus.
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For Hardy, ever anxious to see both life and death in the round, no visit to Paris would be complete without a visit to the city’s mortuary (La Morgue). According to Emma, who accompanied him, they saw ‘Three bodies – [the] middle one pink – Their clothes hanging above them’. She found the experience ‘Not offensive but repulsive’, which was not altogether surprising.
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The visit to the Paris mortuary had led to speculation that Hardy may have had a tendency to necrophilia (a morbid, and in particular an erotic, attraction to corpses). This was probably not the case, and the likelihood is that his motives were two-fold: he was curious, but also hoped to discover new material which he could incorporate into his novels. As Sir Newman Flower explained, Hardy ‘was drawn towards Tragedy, not by any macabre interest, but by his confusion as to why these things should be. [The] implacability and mercilessness [of] life in punishment’. The way in which life appears to punish certain unfortunate individuals for no apparent reason were, said Flower, matters which affected Hardy deeply and caused him to be ‘stricken inwardly’.
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They returned to England on 1 October 1874, Emma recording in her diary: ‘Dirty London. Very wet.’

Hardy and Emma found lodgings for a time in Surbiton, Surrey, from where Hardy wrote to novelist Katherine Macquoid giving his views on ‘whether women of ordinary types should or should not be depicted as the heroines of novels’. Yes, women were ‘quite worthy enough in nature’, he said, but all too frequently they did not ‘exhibit that nature true and simply’. Again, this is a reflection of Hardy’s bemusement with the female sex. Nonetheless, he considered that Bathsheba Everdene of
Far from the Madding Crowd
was ‘not devoid of honesty’, and declared that ‘no satire on the [female] sex’ was intended by him in his portrayal of the imperfections of his heroines. Instead, he was more concerned in his art with ‘picturesqueness’ than with ‘perfect symmetry’.
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One day, Emma’s father, John Gifford, arrived unexpectedly at their Surbiton lodgings, which was curious considering he had not attended their wedding. Emma mentioned the visit in her diary but gave no explanation for it.
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The couple subsequently relocated to lodgings in Newton Road, Bayswater, London.

Meanwhile, public demand for
Far from the Madding Crowd
was so great that its publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., requested that Hardy produce another novel for them – doubtless music to his ears.

Hardy was still living in London when he commenced the writing of
The Hand of Ethelberta – A Comedy in Chapters
featuring Rouen and Paris, places he had recently visited with Emma. His first novel,
The Poor Man and the Lady
, had been rejected on the grounds that it portrayed the upper classes as being uniformly bad. He now decided to write a light-hearted satirical comedy about them. However, as a person who loved solitude, he was beginning to find living in the capital a strain, and he found it difficult to accept the advice given to him by Anne, daughter of novelist William Thackeray (and sister-in-law of Leslie Stephen), that ‘a novelist must necessarily like society’. According to poet Henry Newbolt (later Sir Henry):

[Hardy] had apparently a strong feeling that a writing man should spend most of his leisure in solitude … much as he used to do in the days when he had not yet attracted the attention of the public.[However] When success comes to a writer (Hardy thought) he generally follows the opposite course – he accepts invitations and takes a place in society; he changes his habits and tastes, till he has almost lost the thread of his own life and is no longer the only begetter of his work; then his critics revise their judgement, and his public drops away, because they think they have been deceived in him, and now find him to be after all no wizard, but a manufacturer for the market, like the rest.

And when Newbolt attempted to ‘put the other side of the case’, Hardy enquired of him:

Do you find that it
gives
you anything, this going to lunch with great people? I have found most of them like farmers’ folk – they have nothing to say – nothing worth calling conversation.
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When, in early 1875, Hardy sent the introductory chapters of his new novel to his publisher, the immediate reaction was that this was no comedy in the accepted sense of the word, and he was advised to abandon the subtitle. In May he wrote to Leslie Stephen, agreeing with this proposal and explaining his purpose in writing the novel. The story, he said, ‘would concern the follies of life’, rather than ‘the passions’. He would tell it ‘in something of a comedy form, all the people [characters] having weaknesses at which the superior lookers-on smile, instead of being ideal characters’.
⁹

In the book’s preface he went into more detail. Describing the narrative as ‘somewhat frivolous’, he said he had undertaken the delicate task of exciting ‘interest in a drama’ in which ‘servants were as important as, or more important than, their masters’. He had reversed the ‘social foreground’ so that the ‘drawing room was sketched, in many cases, from the point of view of the servants’ hall’.
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For a novel written in the mid-Victorian era, this was certainly an innovative approach.

In March 1875 Leslie Stephen, who had long since taken over from the late Horace Moule as Hardy’s mentor and confidant, summoned him to witness his signature on a deed. Stephen, once a Fellow and Tutor of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, had been ordained with a view to becoming a parson. However, in 1862, finding that his religious faith had ebbed away, he had resigned his tutorship and moved to London. Now, he informed Hardy that he had belatedly decided to renounce Holy Orders. Stephen confided to Hardy that he had ‘wasted’ too much time on ‘systems of religion and metaphysics’, and instead had become fascinated by ‘the new theory of vortex rings’.
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This was a reference to the views of François Comte (the French philosopher and mathematician), who advocated ‘humanism’, believing that man had passed through the theological phase to that of the ‘positive’ in which science had taken the place of theology and philosophy. Hardy, too, had made a study of the works of Comte, and this renunciation of faith by Stephen, his dearest friend, would undoubtedly have led him to question further his own religious beliefs.

On 12 July 1875 Emma recorded in her diary: ‘Left London for Bournemouth.’ Three days later she and Hardy were in Swanage, where they found lodgings at West End Cottage on the south side of the town, adjacent to the downs and overlooking Swanage Bay. The cottage belonged to Joseph Masters, a former sea captain. Now an invalid, Masters regaled the couple with fascinating stories of the sea. This would be the first of many sojourns which Hardy and Emma would make to various locations in Dorset.

Here in Swanage, Hardy continued with the writing of
The Hand of Ethelberta
, while Emma made sketches of boats, bathing machines and a cliff-side stone quarry. In her diary she described a trip by ‘steamer’ to the Isle of Wight and a picnic at Corfe Castle, where she and Hardy were joined by his sisters Mary and Katharine, and by his brother Henry. ‘A splendid day,’ said Emma.
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Any tensions between the two families, for the younger generation at least, appear for the time being to have been resolved.

The heroine of
The Hand of Ethelberta
, Ethelberta Chickerel, is the daughter of a butler; she hopes that if she can get some poems which she has written published, then this will enable her to support her brothers and sisters, and her infirm mother. In this ambition, however, she is to be disappointed.

Ethelberta is a free spirit whose ambition is to enter an intellectual society and at the same time pursue her writing. This she can achieve by marrying a man of means who will indulge her in her vocation. Accordingly, she marries the son of the gentleman of the house in which she is employed as a governess, but he dies, leaving her a widow at the age of 21. Her aim now is to retain her position in society, which she does by concealing her lowly origins and marrying Lord Mountclere. Although she becomes a successful author, she dislikes the trumpeting of ‘drawing room’ success – just as Hardy, a man of modesty, does in real life.