Thomas Hardy (3 page)

At other times he would ‘go alone into the woods or on [to] the heath … with a telescope [and] stay peering into the distance by the half-hour …’ or in hot weather, lie ‘on a bank of thyme or camomile with the grasshoppers leaping over him’.
⁸
When one cold winter’s day he discovered the body of a fieldfare in the garden, and picked it up and found it to be ‘as light as a feather’ and ‘all skin and bone’, The memory remained to haunt him. The death of this small bird revealed not only Hardy’s love of animals, but also his understanding of the frailty of life itself.
⁹

Thomas Hardy III was born into a musical family and he himself developed a love of music and musicianship which remained with him all his life. His grandfather, Thomas I, in his early years at Puddletown, played the bass viol (cello) in the string choir of the village’s church of St Mary. He also assisted other choirs at a time when church music was traditionally produced by musicians occupying the raised ‘minstrels’ gallery’ at the end of the nave. Having married Mary Head, he moved into the house at Bockhampton, provided for him by his father. From that time onwards he attended the local thirteenth-century parish church of St Michael, situated a mile or so away at Stinsford, where he commenced as a chorister. He was also much in demand to perform at ‘weddings, christenings, and other feasts’.
¹⁰

Thomas I was dismayed, on attending Stinsford Church, that the music there was provided not, as was the case at Puddletown, by a group of ‘minstrels’, but by ‘a solitary old man with an oboe’.
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With the help of its vicar, the Revd William Floyer, he therefore set about remedying the situation by gathering some like-minded instrumentalists together to play at the church. And from the year 1801, when he was aged 23, until his death in 1837, Thomas I himself conducted the church choir and played his bass viol at two services every Sunday.

At Christmastime there were further duties for the members of Stinsford’s church choir to perform, including the onerous task of making copies of those carols which had been selected to be played. On Christmas Eve it was the custom for the choir, composed of ‘mainly poor men and hungry’, to play at various houses in the parish, then return to the Hardys’ house at Bockhampton for supper, only to set out again at midnight to play at yet more houses.
¹²

After his death in 1822, the Revd Floyer was succeeded by the Revd Edward Murray, who was himself an ‘ardent musician’ and violin player. Murray chose to live at Stinsford House instead of at the rectory, and here, Thomas Hardy I and his sons, Thomas II and James, together with their brother-in-law James Dart, practised their music with Murray on two or three occasions per week. Practice sessions were also held at the Hardys’ house. As mentioned, in late 1836, fourteen years after the arrival of the Revd Murray at Stinsford, Jemima Hand became Murray’s cook, and this is how she came to meet her husband-to-be Thomas Hardy II.

Thomas II is described as being devoted to sacred music as well as to the ‘mundane’, that is ‘country dance, hornpipe, and … waltz’. As for his wife Jemima, she loved to sing the songs of the times, including
Isle of Beauty
,
Gaily the Troubadour
, and so forth.
¹³
However, although the family possessed a pianoforte and the children practised on it, she herself did not play.

A diagram was subsequently drawn by Thomas III, with the help of his father, of the relative positions occupied by the singers and musicians of the Stinsford church choir in its gallery in about the year 1835, five years prior to Thomas III's birth. At the rear were singers (‘counter’ – high alto), together with James Dart (counter violin). The middle row consisted of singers (tenor), Thomas Hardy II (tenor violin), James Hardy (treble violin) and singers (treble). In the front row were singers (bass), Thomas Hardy I (bass viol) and singers (treble). Finally, at the rear there were more singers, stationed beneath the arch of the church’s tower.
¹⁴

What of the young Thomas Hardy III? He would never have the pleasure of meeting his grandfather and namesake, Thomas I, who died in 1837 – three years before he himself was born. Nevertheless, he inherited the family gift for making music and was said to be able to tune a violin from the time that he was ‘barely breeched’.
¹⁵

When he was aged 4, Thomas III’s father gave him a toy concertina inscribed with his name and the date. Thomas III was said to have an ‘ecstatic temperament’ and music could have a profound effect on him. For example, of the numerous dance tunes played by his father of an evening, and ‘to which the boy danced a “
pas seul
” in the middle of the room’, there were always ‘three or four that always moved the child to tears’. They were
Enrico
,
The Fairy Dance
,
Miss Macleod of Ayr
and
My Fancy Lad
. Thomas III would later confess that ‘he danced on at these times to conceal his weeping’, and the fact that he was overcome by emotion in this way reveals just what an immensely sensitive and emotional person he was.
¹⁶

As Thomas III grew older he learned, under the instruction of his father, to play the violin and soon, like his forefathers before him, was much in demand on this account. He always referred to the instrument as a ‘fiddle’, and to those who played it as ‘fiddlers’.
¹⁷
It was the rule, laid down by his mother, that he must not accept any payment for his services. Nonetheless, he did on one occasion succumb to temptation, and with the ‘hatful of pennies’ collected, he purchased a volume entitled
The Boys’ Own Book
, of which his mother Jemima disapproved, since it was mainly devoted to the light-hearted subject of games.

Hardy’s maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Hand, was well-read and the possessor of her own library of thirty or so books (which was unusual for one who occupied a relatively low station in life). She was familiar with the writings of Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, and others of the so-called ‘
Spectator
group’ (those who contributed to the
Spectator
magazine, founded in 1828): also with John Milton, Samuel Richardson and John Bunyan. The ten volumes of Henry Fielding’s works which she possessed would one day pass to her grandson, Thomas Hardy III.
¹⁸

Elizabeth’s daughter, Jemima, inherited her mother’s love of books, together with a desire to read every one that she could lay her hands on. Under Jemima’s influence, therefore, it seemed inevitable that her own offspring, including the young Thomas III, would follow in her footsteps. And there were others, including Thomas III’s godfather, Mr King,
¹⁹
who encouraged the boy in his reading; for example, by presenting him with a volume entitled
The Rites and Worship of the Jews
by Elise Giles, even though he had not, as yet, attained the age of 8.
²⁰
In fact, according to his sister Katharine, Thomas III had been able to read since the age of 3, and on Sundays, when the weather was considered too wet for him to attend church, it was his habit to don a tablecloth and read Morning Prayer while standing on a chair, and recite ‘a patchwork of sentences normally used by the vicar’.

Thomas III was considered by his parents to be a delicate child, and for this reason he was not sent to school until he was aged 8 (instead of 5, which was the normal practice). And so it was not until the year 1848 that he arrived at school for his first day of lessons. He was early, and he subsequently recalled awaiting, ‘tremulous and alone’, the arrival of the schoolmaster, the schoolmistress and his fellow pupils.

The Bockhampton National School, which had been newly opened in that same year, was situated a mile or so from his house, beside the lane which led from Higher to Lower Bockhampton. The school was the brainchild of Julia Augusta Martin, who, together with her husband Francis, owned the adjoining estate of Kingston Maurward. This they had purchased from the Pitt family three years earlier, in 1845. The couple inhabited the manor house, built in the early Georgian period, not to be confused with the estate’s other manor house nearby, which dated from mid-Tudor times. A benefactress of both Stinsford and Bockhampton, Julia had built and endowed the Bockhampton National School at her own expense; collaborating with the Revd Arthur Shirley (who in 1837 had succeeded the Revd Murray as vicar of Stinsford) on the project.

The Martins had no children of their own and Julia came to regard Thomas III as her surrogate child. In fact, she had singled him out as the object of her affection long before he had even started school. Passionately fond of ‘Tommy’, Julia was ‘accustomed to take [him] into her lap, and kiss [him] until he was quite a big child!’Thomas III, in turn, ‘was wont to make drawings of animals in water-colours for her, and to sing to her’. That he reciprocated Julia’s sentiments is borne out by his statement, made some years later, that she was ‘his earliest passion as a child’.
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One of Thomas III’s songs contained the words, ‘I’ve journeyed over many lands, I’ve sailed on every sea’,
²²
which would, no doubt, have amused Julia, who must have realised that Thomas III had never ventured beyond his native Dorset. It transpired, however, that the boy was shortly to widen his horizons when he and his mother Jemima paid a visit to her sister in Hertfordshire, and on the return journey caught the train from London’s Waterloo Station to Dorchester. This was Thomas III’s first experience of rail travel – the railway having come to Dorchester only as recently as the previous year, 1847.

At school, Thomas III excelled at arithmetic and geography, though his handwriting was said to be ‘indifferent’.
²³
Meanwhile, his mother encouraged him with the gift of John Dryden’s translation of Virgil, Dr Samuel Johnson’s
Rasselas
and a translation of St Pierre’s
Paul and Virginia
. A friend gave the young Thomas III the
New Guide to the English Tongue
by Thomas Dilworth
²⁴
and he also possessed
A Concise History of Birds
. Perhaps, however, his greatest joy was to discover, in a closet in his house, a magazine entitled
A History of the (Napoleonic) Wars
.
²⁵
This would one day inspire him to write two books of his own, namely
The Trumpet Major
and
The Dynasts
.

When a year later, in 1849, Thomas III’s parents decided that their son should transfer to a day school in Dorchester, Julia Martin was offended, not only at the loss of her ‘especial protégé little Tommy’, but also because this new school was Nonconformist. This may have been a deliberate gesture of defiance by the Hardys who had developed a great antipathy towards Stinsford’s vicar, the Revd Shirley. This was because, as will shortly be seen, Shirley had been instrumental in destroying not only the fabric of their cherished medieval parish church of St Michael, but also its cherished tradition of providing live music for its congregation.

And so, at the age of 9, Thomas III commenced the second stage of his formal education, walking to and from his new school in Dorchester – a distance of 6 miles in total. Here he flourished, winning at the age of 14 his first prize: a book entitled
Scenes and Adventures at Home and Abroad
.
²⁶
The headmaster, Isaac Last, was by repute ‘a good scholar and teacher of Latin’, but because this subject was not part of the normal curriculum, Thomas III’s father was obliged to pay extra for it. Nevertheless, his confidence in his son was amply rewarded when, in the following year, the boy was awarded Theodore Beza’s
Latin Testament
for his ‘progress in that tongue’.

Other authors with whom Thomas III was familiar were William Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Alexander Dumas, Harrison Ainsworth, James Grant and G.P.R. James.
²⁷
He also commenced French lessons, and at the age of 15 began to study German at home, using a periodical called
The Popular Educator
for the purpose. He was clearly a prodigious worker, and it is difficult to imagine that any other child in the county of Dorset (or anywhere else for that matter) was better read than he.

From whence did the impetus come that led Thomas III to drive himself so hard? From his father? Probably not, for Thomas III did not deny that the Dorset Hardys had ‘all the characteristics of an old family of spent social energies’, and it was the case that neither his father nor his grandfather had ever ‘cared to take advantage of the many worldly opportunities’ afforded them.
²⁸
Instead, the likelihood is that the drive came from his mother, the provider of books, who had insisted on him changing school in order to better himself; she, having experienced abject poverty as a child when her mother was left destitute, had no desire to see any child of hers in the same predicament.

Thomas III’s move to Dorchester was not without its repercussions. So annoyed was Julia Martin at having her protégé removed from her own school, that she forthwith deprived the boy’s father of all future building contracts connected with her Kingston Maurward Estate. Fortunately, Thomas II was able to obtain such contracts elsewhere, such as one for the renovation of Woodsford Castle – owned by the Earl of Ilchester and situated 5 miles to the east of Dorchester, by the River Frome.