Poems of the Past & Present: “Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized”

Thomas Hardy was born in the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton about three miles east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, on 2nd June 1840.

Despite a fairly wide education and being an avid reader his parents thought it unlikely he would lead a successful scholarly or clerical career and he was apprenticed in 1856, at age 16, to a local architect whose speciality was in church restoration. Hardy’s only opportunity to read was in the morning before work between the hours of five and eight.

On the back of a failed love affair he moved to London and spent five years working as Arthur Blomfield’s assistant architect, also a restorer and designer of churches. Hardy though had become disillusioned with institutionalised forms of Christianity and abandoned any lingering hopes of ordination in the Anglican Church. However, his poetry was now flourishing, although it was still rejected for publication.

His novel ‘Desperate Remedies’, was published anonymously in 1871 and he now resolved to write full time though he was not yet in a position to achieve financial security or literary success. His second novel, ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, appeared in 1872 and in 1873 ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’, the most autobiographical of his works arrived. With ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ in 1874, came critical acclaim, public attention and financial success. 1878 saw more of the same with ‘The Return of the Native’, and the ensuing years saw him rise to ever greater popularity.

‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ was published in 1886. In 1891 came ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’. It only saw publication after extensive alterations to its plot and deleting long passages to lessen the shock to the prudish Victorian audience who were dismayed by the seduction and ruin of a young girl by a rakish aristocrat. His last novel, ‘Jude the Obscure’, suffered the same fate when it was published in 1895. The uproar so disturbed him that he returned to poetry. In 1898 he had an earlier poetry collection published ‘Wessex Poems’

Hardy spent the years between 1903 and 1908 writing ‘The Dynasts’, an epic poem on the Napoleonic Wars.

In his twilight years came honours and awards from the great and the good and recognition of his stature as one of the most outstanding of British authors. George V conferred on him the Order of Merit in 1910.

In 1924 a new stage production of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, was staged. Meanwhile from 1920 to 1927 he worked, in secret, on his autobiography, which was later published after his death as the work of Florence Hardy.

Thomas Hardy OM died on the 11th January 1928.

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