Thomas Hardy (7 page)

Cytherea obtains employment as lady’s maid to Miss Aldclyffe of Knapwater House, whose first name also happens to be Cytherea. By now, Edward Springrove, who lives at nearby Knapwater Park, has broken off his previous engagement and has become engaged to Cytherea. Miss Aldclyffe forms a deep, emotional attachment to Cytherea (reminiscent of Julia Martin and Hardy).

Miss Aldclyffe appoints Aeneas Manston to be her steward at Knapwater House, for reasons which only become apparent later. Although he is a married man, Manston is attracted to the young Cytherea. When he becomes enraged by the taunts of his drunken wife, he strikes her and she dies instantly. He leads everyone to believe that she has perished in a fire, but in fact he has hidden her body in the oven of a disused brew house. He is now free to marry Cytherea. Manston is a musician and when he plays some ‘saddening chords’ to Cytherea on the organ, she agrees to marry him instead of Springrove, even though she does not love him.
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In this way she avoids being a burden to her brother Owen, who is not in good health.

When suspicion is aroused that Mrs Manston is still alive, Manston, to avert speculation, persuades another woman to impersonate her. However, a poem of Manston’s is discovered in which he has described the colour of his wife’s eyes as ‘azure’, whereas his ‘new’ wife – his deceased wife’s impersonator – has eyes of ‘deepest black’.

As Manston is in the act of recovering the body of his real wife and burying it, he is observed. He flees, but not before attempting to persuade Cytherea to run away with him, in the midst of which endeavour he is apprehended by Edward Springrove. Manston is detained in the county jail, where he confesses to his crime before hanging himself.

The plot is further complicated by the fact that Cytherea turns out to be the daughter of a man whom Miss Aldclyffe once loved. It is also revealed that when Miss Aldclyffe was aged 17, she was ‘violated’ by her cousin, a military officer, and the child born as a result of this untoward event was Aeneas Manston.

On her deathbed, Miss Aldclyffe confesses to Cytherea that the reason she appointed Manston as her steward was to bring him close to Cytherea; it being her dream that Cytherea, the daughter of the man she loved, and Manston, her own natural child, be married. Finally, all ends happily for Cytherea when she marries Springrove, now a qualified architect.

Hardy contrived for his novel
Desperate Remedies
to end happily, at least as far as Cytherea and Springrove were concerned. And surely, having himself fallen in love with Emma Gifford, he hoped that his own love affair would come to a similarly agreeable conclusion.

In March 1870 Hardy sent the manuscript of his second novel,
Desperate Remedies
, to Macmillan, who declined to publish it (in the same way that he had previously declined to publish
The Poor Man and the Lady
). John Morley (now editor of the
Fortnightly Review
) was particularly vitriolic about
Desperate Remedies
, saying that the story was ‘ruined by the disgusting and absurd outrage which is the key to its mystery: the violation of a young lady at an evening party, and the subsequent birth of a child’. In his opinion, this was ‘too abominable to be tolerated as a central incident from which the action of the story is to move’.
¹³

Notwithstanding this setback, the novel was accepted on 6 May 1870 by Tinsley Brothers, on condition that Hardy paid them the sum of £75 –a great deal of money for a struggling architect who possessed only £123 in the entire world. Another condition was that Hardy made some minor alterations and completed the final chapters (of which he had hitherto sent them only a précis). It is likely that these alterations included a toning down of the ‘violation’ scene. The final wording agreed for this scene was that Miss Aldclyffe, when ‘a young girl of seventeen, was cruelly betrayed by her cousin, a wild officer of six and twenty’.

Hardy’s anxious search for a publisher was finally over. What had motivated him to carry on with his writing in spite of having had so many rejections? Undoubtedly, his creative instincts were nurtured by his having read so much of other people’s work, and it was therefore only natural that now he should want to emulate these other writers by getting his own name into print. If they could leave their mark on the world of English literature, then why could not he?

On 16 May 1870 Hardy returned to London, where he assisted Blomfield and another architect, Raphael Brandon – an exponent of the English Gothic – and also spent time with Horace Moule who was in the capital at the time.
¹⁴
In August he visited Cornwall and was reunited with Emma, with whom he enjoyed a visit to King Arthur’s Castle, Tintagel. The decrepit tower and north aisle of St Juliot church was now deliberately razed to the ground, prior to its rebuilding, and when the foundation stone of the new tower was laid, it was Emma who had the honour of laying it. The pews, the Saxon north door and the chancel screen were all discarded, but, fortunately, not before Hardy had made detailed drawings of them. Crickmay and Hardy did, however, succeed in preserving many of the windows, the altar, the granite font and the Elizabethan altar rails.

As the relationship between Hardy and Emma progressed from one of ‘acquaintance’ to one of ‘affection’,
¹⁵
she found him ‘a perfectly new subject of study and delight, and he found a “mine” in me’.
¹⁶

As a keepsake to ameliorate the pain of their long separations, Emma gave Hardy a lock of her hair. Subsequent visits by him would see the pair talking ‘much of plots, possible scenes, tales [presumably for stories], and poetry and of his [Hardy’s] own work’.
¹⁷
Said Emma: ‘After a little time I copied a good deal of manuscript [of Hardy’s] which went to-and-fro by post, and I was very proud and happy doing this, which I did in the privacy of my room, where I read and wrote also the letters [to and from Hardy].’
¹⁸

On 25 March 1871
Desperate Remedies
was duly published, anonymously, in three volumes. The book received excellent reviews in the
Athenaeum
and in the
Morning Post
, but it was vilified by the
Spectator
magazine, which saw it as an ‘idle prying into the ways of wickedness’, and also objected to it being published anonymously. Moule advised Hardy to ignore such criticism and, in an effort to counter it, reviewed
Desperate Remedies
himself for the
Saturday Review
. Unfortunately, however, there was a six-month delay before Moule’s article was published.

Under the Greenwood Tree
, written when Hardy was aged 31, was to be his second published novel. In it, he did what many aspiring writers do: he wrote about what he knew best – in this case, his childhood.

The alternative title to
Under the Greenwood Tree
was
The Mellstock Quire
: ‘Mellstock’ being the collective name for the hamlets of Higher and Lower Bockhampton, the village of Stinsford and their surroundings. The ‘Quire’ refers to the choir of Stinsford Church, both instrumental and vocal. As for the names of his characters, Hardy obtained them from a study of the tombstones in Stinsford churchyard. John Morley, who had read Hardy’s
The Poor Man and the Lady
, had commented in regard to that novel that ‘the opening pictures of Christmas Eve in the tranter’s house are really of good quality’. Drawing strength from this, Hardy decided to begin his new novel with the tranter’s Christmas party.

The themes of the novel are twofold: the love of Dick Dewy (an honest yeoman) for Fancy Day (a certified teacher), and the destruction of the quire, brought about by the advent of a new vicar, the Revd Maybold – who, of course, is a facsimile of the real-life Revd Arthur Shirley, vicar of Stinsford. Dick proposes to Fancy and she accepts his offer. Nonetheless, she has a momentary flirtation with Farmer Shiner; then accepts a second proposal of marriage from the new vicar. Finally, she confesses to Maybold that she has acted hastily, and she and Dick get married amidst celebratory dances – under the greenwood tree – to the music of the quire.

Alongside this romance runs the story of the quire, whose members number such colourful characters as the tranter, the shoemaker and the simpleton. Having fallen asleep during a church sermon, they awake and, believing themselves still to be at the local dance which they had attended the night before, spring into life and play not a hymn, but a jig. Episodes like this show the lighter, vibrant side of Hardy’s character, and reveal his keen sense of humour. Subsequently, however, and for reasons soon to become apparent, Hardy’s works would assume a more serious, sombre and introspective dimension.

The quire have played their music since time immemorial; their previous vicar having left them undisturbed, allowing them to participate in the choosing of the hymns and never troubling them with a visit ‘from year’s end to year’s end’. Now, they have to endure the Revd Maybold who never allows them ‘a bit o’ peace’. When Maybold announces that the musicians are to be replaced with an organ, they see it as a catastrophe; yet they resolve to fall gloriously ‘with a bit of a flourish at Christmas’, rather than be ‘choked off quiet at no time in particular’.

In view of the real-life trauma which the Revd Shirley had brought to the Stinsford choir, it must have given Hardy enormous pleasure and satisfaction to have Fancy Day turn down the proposal of marriage by the Revd Maybold in favour of Dick Dewy.

Hardy sent the manuscript to Macmillan, who would probably have published it but for a misunderstanding. When the manuscript was returned to him, Hardy was of a mind to give up writing altogether, but was persuaded by a letter from Emma to persevere with it as she felt sure that authorship was his true vocation. In this, she demonstrated an unselfish side to her nature; after all, a career in architecture would have provided greater security for herself and Hardy in the event of them one day marrying.

In the spring of 1872, Hardy returned again to London with the aim of furthering his architectural career. He found work with a Mr T. Roger Smith, Professor of Architecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects, and assisted in the design of schools for the London School Board.