Thomas Hardy (4 page)

When Thomas III subsequently met with Julia Martin, on the occasion of a harvest supper, she reproached him with having deserted her. Whereupon he assured her that he had not done so and would never do so. It would be more than a decade before the two saw one another again; by which time the Martins had sold their Kingston Maurward Estate and moved to London.

When he was aged 16, Thomas III composed a poem about his home entitled
Domicilium
, which reads as follows:

It faces west and round the back and sides

High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs,

And sweep against the roof. Wild honeysucks

Climb on the walls, and seem to sprout a wish

(If we may fancy wish of trees and plants)

To overtop the apple trees hard by.

Red roses, lilacs, variegated box

Are there in plenty, and such hardy flowers

As flourish best untrained. Adjoining these

Are herbs and esculents, and farther still

A field; then cottages with trees, and last

The distant hills and sky.

Behind, the scene is wilder. Heath and furze

Are everything that seems to grow and thrive

Upon the uneven ground. A stunted thorn

Stands here and there, indeed; and from a pit

An oak uprises, springing from a seed

Dropped by some bird a hundred years ago.

In days bygone –

Long gone – my father’s mother, who is now

Blest with the blest, would take me out to walk.

At such time I once inquired of her

How looked the spot when first she settled here.

The answer I remember. ‘Fifty years

Have passed since then, my child, and change has marked

The face of all things. Yonder garden plots

And orchards were uncultivated slopes

O’ergrown with bramble bushes, furze and thorn:

That road a narrow path shut in by ferns,

Which, almost trees, obscured the passer-by.

‘Our house stood quite alone, and those tall firs

And beeches were not planted. Snakes and efts
²⁹

Swarmed in the summer days, and nightly bats

Would fly about our bedroom. Heathcroppers

Lived on the hills, and were our only friends;

So wild it was when first we settled here.’

The poem is quoted in full, and for two reasons. Firstly, because it would be presumptuous of any person to believe that he or she was capable of describing the Hardys’ house better than Thomas III himself; and secondly, because it sheds important light upon his character.

From the poem it is clear that Thomas III possessed an excellent vocabulary, and was capable of writing with both style and fluency. He is poetical and knows how to make his words chime pleasantly with each other. He senses how, with the passing of time, everything changes. He also has a vivid imagination, where he sees the honeysuckle (‘honeysucks’) as having a will of its own, as it reaches upwards towards the sky. On a practical level, he has an extensive knowledge of local flora and fauna.

Surely Thomas III’s poem,
Domicilium
, is an indicator of the direction which his future life will take.

Thomas Hardy I died in 1837 which, as already mentioned, was the year in which the Revd Murray was replaced by the Revd Arthur Shirley as vicar of Stinsford. Shirley was a vigorous reformer and innovator who embraced the ideas of the High Church, as advocated by the leaders of the ‘Tractarian Movement’ (the aim of which was to assert the authority of the Anglican Church). This, for the Hardys, was no less than a disaster, and the ‘ecclesiastical changes’ which were imposed by the new vicar led Thomas Hardy II to abandon (in 1841 or 1842) all connection with the Stinsford string choir, in which he had played the bass viol, voluntarily, every Sunday for thirty-five years. Nevertheless, the Hardys continued to attend church every Sunday; the ‘Hardy’ pew being situated in the aisle adjacent to the north wall.

Nor did the rift between Shirley and Thomas II dissuade the latter’s son, Thomas III, from attending the Sunday School (established by Shirley) where, in due course, he became an instructor along with the vicar’s two sons. In this way he gained an extensive knowledge of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and was said to know the morning and evening services by heart, as well as the rubrics and large portions of the psalms.
¹

There was a great deal of antipathy on the part of Anglicans towards Catholics at the time. This was apparent when Thomas II took his son to Dorchester’s Roman amphitheatre, Maumbury Rings, to see an effigy of the Pope, and of Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman (the first Archbishop of Westminster), being burnt during anti-Papist riots. As for Thomas III, despite the rigour and intensity of his Anglican upbringing, the age-old conundrum of religion was one which he would struggle with and agonise over throughout his life.

Quite apart from his infatuation with Julia Martin, and hers with him, Thomas III, like many people of artistic bent, was of a deeply romantic and impressionable disposition and likely to fall in love at any moment. However because of his natural shyness the objects of his desire were, as often as not, completely unaware of his lovelorn state. Such young ladies included one who passed him by on horseback in South Walk (one of Dorchester’s several tree-lined streets), and unaccountably smiled at him. Another was from Windsor; a third was the pretty daughter of the local gamekeeper who possessed a beautiful head of ‘bay-red’ hair – and was later to be recalled in his poem
To Lisbie Brown
.
²
Finally, there was Louisa, whom he recalled in another poem,
To Louisa in the Lane
. Thomas III would also immortalise the first romantic meeting of his own parents in his poem
A Church Romance
.

Doubtless the young man was destined one day for a great but more tangible romance. When it came, however, the question was, would it live up to his expectations?

Despite the seemingly idyllic and tranquil surroundings of the Hardys’ Bockhampton abode, woe betide anyone who dared to transgress the law or to flout the authorities; for if they did, harsh penalties awaited them. Thomas III’s fascination with hanging may have been the result of his father telling him that in his day he had seen four men hanged for setting fire to a hayrick, one of whom, a youth of 18, had not participated in the burnings but had merely been present at the scene. As the youth was underfed and therefore frail, the prison master had ordered weights to be tied to his feet in order to be sure that his neck would be broken by the noose. ‘Nothing my father ever said,’declared Thomas III, ‘drove the tragedy of life so deeply into my mind’ as this account of the unfortunate youth.
³
Thomas II also told his son that when he was a boy and there was a hanging at Dorchester Prison, it was always carried out at 1 p.m. in case the incoming mail-coach subsequently brought notice of a reprieve of sentence. Another piece of information that Thomas III gleaned was that the notorious hangman, Jack Ketch, used to perform public whippings by the town’s water pump, using the cat-o’-nine-tails.

As a youth himself, Thomas III was to witness two executions. The first was of a woman, when he stood ‘close to the gallows’ at the entrance to Dorchester Gaol.
⁴
The night before he had deliberately gone down to Hangman’s Cottage, situated at the bottom of the hill below the prison beside the River Frome, and peered through the window, where he observed the hangman inside as he ate a hearty supper.
⁵
The woman to be hanged was Elizabeth Martha Brown, who paid the ultimate penalty for murdering her husband. ‘I remember what a fine figure she [Brown] showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain,’ wrote Thomas III later, and ‘how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round & back [on the end of the rope]’ – an indication that perhaps the incident induced in him not revulsion, but a measure of sexual excitement.
⁶

The second hanging occurred one summer morning two or three years later. Having heard that it was to take place, Thomas III took his telescope to a vantage point, focused the instrument on Dorchester’s prison, and as the clock struck eight, witnessed the public execution of another murderer, this time a male.

Again, images of these harrowing events made a permanent impression on the sensitive mind of the young Thomas III.

Thomas III had been brought up to believe that his family was connected, albeit distantly, with other more illustrious ‘Hardy’ personages in the county – past and present – such as Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, his namesake; Thomas Hardy, who had endowed Dorchester’s grammar school in Elizabethan times; and several others including, of course, the Channel Island Hardys and in particular one Clement le Hardy, Baillie of Jersey. From this it may be inferred that his family was desperately anxious for the young Thomas III to succeed in the world and make something of himself; to reverse what was seen as the trend, in their case, of a family in decline. However, before he embarked upon the journey of life, his mother Jemima issued him with a warning. Said he, it was ‘Mother’s notion (and also mine) that a figure stands in our van [path] with arm uplifted, to knock us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in’.
⁷

While Thomas II was working on the Earl of Ilchester’s Woodford Castle, it so happened that an associate of his, one John Hicks, architect and church restorer, was present there with him. Thomas II duly introduced Hicks to his son Thomas III – who also happened to be present on the day – and on the strength of this meeting Hicks invited Thomas III to assist him in a survey. Hicks liked what he saw, and the outcome was that he invited Thomas III to be his pupil. Thomas II duly agreed to pay Hicks the sum of £40 for his son to undergo a three-year course of architectural drawing and surveying. So, in 1856, when he was aged 16, the young Thomas started work at Hicks’ office in Dorchester’s South Street.

By now, Thomas III had progressed from the frailness and fragility of his childhood into a vigorous manhood. He threw himself with gusto into his new apprenticeship, but at the same time, this did not prevent him from pursuing his study of the Latin language, which enabled him to read the New Testament, Horace, Ovid and Virgil in the original. Likewise, by teaching himself Greek, he was able to read Homer’s epic poem
Iliad
. This necessitated him rising at 5 a.m., or 4 a.m. in the summer months, in order to fit everything into the day. Hicks, being a classical scholar himself, was well-disposed to Thomas III’s efforts in this respect.

With fellow-pupil Robert Bastow and two other youths – both recent graduates of Aberdeen University, who were the sons of Frederick Perkins, Dorchester’s Baptist minister – Thomas III had furious arguments as to the merits and de-merits of ‘Paedo-Baptism’ (the baptism of infants). This led the latter to consider whether, having himself been baptised as an infant at Stinsford’s church of St Michael, he should now be re-baptised as an adult.

Adjacent to Hicks’ office in South Street was the school of poet and philologist William Barnes, who would often be called upon to adjudicate in matters of dispute between Thomas III and Bastow on the subject of classical grammar. Barnes, a Latin and oriental scholar of great distinction, had compiled
A Philological Grammar
in which more than sixty languages were compared.