CONTENT

1. CONTENT • Thomas Hardy’s life • Victorian age • Naturalism • His literary themes • His religious beliefs • His novels • His poetry • His works • His death

2. THOMAS HARDY’S LIFE

4. THOMAS HARDY • Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset, England on June 2, 1840 to Jemima Hand and Thomas Hardy Sr. • His father worked as a stonemason and local builder. • His mother was ambitious and well read, supplementing his formal education, which ended at the age of 16. • He was the oldest of four children who included Mary, Henry and Kate.

5. Thomas Hardy was born in this cottage.

6. Hardy attended school for only eight years between 1848 and 1856. • While at school he developed a love for architecture as well as for writing. • He was restorating the churches. • While working for the architect John Hicks as his assistant he never stopped studying writing and even practiced Latin every morning for three hours before work. • He enrolled as a student at King’s College London.

7. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. • He never truly felt at home in London and when he returned five years later to Dorset he decided to dedicate himself to writing. • In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he married in 1874.

8. Emma Gifford

9. Although he later became estranged from his wife, her death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him. • Emma suddenly fell ill, and she died before Hardy got a chance to say goodbye to her. • Two years after Emma’s death Hardy married with her secretary, Florence Emily Dugdale.

10. He wrote many different types of poems but a more common subject he likes to write about was true love and romance in the realities of life. • His final short story, A Changed Man is an example of how Hardy wrote about the realities of life through his experiences. • Hardy wrote personal knowledge and experiences, his characters were real people of the time and settings consisted of places he had been.

11. Many Things influenced Hardy’s writings throughout his life including his early life, work experiences and his first wife Emma Gifford. • He lives his life to the fullest and takes control of ever opportunity possible. • Even though he lives a more wealthy life then others he works hard at everything he possibly could.

12. Because of his hard work and constant persistence it made him an amazing writer. • Because of his hard work many other poets and writers thought of him as a role model and a very influential person in their careers as writers.

13. VICTORIAN AGE • Thomas Hardy wrote in the late Victorian age. • The last decade of the nineteenth century saw the development of a number of movements which amounted to a rejection of the principles of Victorianism. • Hardy created an important artistic bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. • The influence of Charles Darwin's recently published Origin of Species (1859) on his thought, and his subsequent loss of orthodox religious faith affected all of his writings.

14. He is credited with introducing fatalism into Victorian literature -- a pessimistic assessment of humanity's ability to cope with a changing social environment. • In two of Hardy's final novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896), his bleak and open treatment of sexuality and marriage caused such an outrage among the puritanical Victorian public that he was deeply disillusioned. • Hardy abandoned fiction, and for the rest of his life wrote only poetry.

15. NATURALISM • At about the time Hardy was active as a novelist, the French writer Emile Zola formulated a branch of literary realism called naturalism, which reflected many of Hardy's concerns as a novelist. • The terms naturalism and realism are often used almost interchangeably, but there is a significant distinction between them: while naturalists supported the realists' aim of careful observation and mimetic depiction of the outer world, their view of the human condition and specific method of writing was strongly indebted to advances in the natural sciences, specifically the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution.

16. In their biologistic view, the human animal was a creature conditioned by influences beyond his or her control and therefore largely devoid of free will or moral choice; a creature shaped by external factors such as heredity, environment, and the pressure of immediate circumstances. • In this respect, the premises of the naturalists have gained a reputation for pessimism.

17. A further formative influence on naturalism can be found in the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. • The misery of the working classes in urban slums became one of the naturalists' favorite themes in analyzing the human condition. • The setting Hardy uses portrays how seemingly dull, routine events can often not be as simple as they seem.

18. HIS LITERARY THEMES • Although he wrote a great deal of poetry, mostly unpublished until after 1898, Hardy is best remembered for the series of novels and short stories he wrote between 1871 and 1895. • His novels are set in the imaginary world of Wessex.

19. Hardy was part of two worlds; on the one hand he had a deep emotional bond with the rural way of life, but on the other he was aware of the changes which were under way, and the current social problems from the innovations in agriculture - he captured the epoch just before the railways and the industrial revolution changed the English countryside - to the unfairness and hypocrisy of Victorian sexual behaviour.

20. Hardy critiques certain social constraints that hindered the lives of those living in the 19th century. • Considered a Victorian Realist writer, Hardy examines the social constraints that are part of the Victorian status quo. • Hardy seeks to take a stand against these rules and sets up a story against the backdrop of social structure by creating a romantic story of love that crosses the boundaries of class.

21. Hardy’s stories take into consideration the events of life and their effects. • Fate plays a big role as the thematic basis for many of his novels. • He tends to emphasize the impersonal and, generally, negative powers of fate over the mainly working class people he represented in his novels. • His mastery, as both an author and poet, lies in the creation of natural surroundings making discoveries through close observation and acute sensitiveness.

22. He notices the smallest and most delicate details, yet he can also paint vast landscapes of his own Wessex in melancholy or noble moods.

23. RELIGIOUS BELIEFS • Hardy's religious life seems to have mixed agnosticism and spiritism. • Nevertheless, Hardy frequently conceived of and wrote about supernatural forces that control the universe, more through indifference or caprice than any firm will. • Also, Hardy showed in his writing some degree of fascination with ghosts and spirits.

24. Despite these sentiments, Hardy retained a strong emotional attachment to the Christian liturgy and church rituals, particularly as manifested in rural communities, that had been such a formative influence in his early years. • Some attributed the bleak outlook of many of his novels as reflecting his view of the absence of God.

25. Biblical references can be found woven throughout many of Hardy’s novels as he became friends with a Dorchester minister, Hourace Moule. • Moule also influenced Hardy’s point of view by introducing him to scientific studies and ideas that questioned the literal meaning of the Bible. • These new ideas, along with Darwinism, and a series of unsettling events in Hardy’s life may be the reason for his pessimistic attitude that is perceived by many critics and readers alike.

26. HIS NOVELS • Hardy's first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher and Hardy destroyed the manuscript so only parts of the novel remain. • He was encouraged to try again by his mentor and friend, Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith. • In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a story drawing on Hardy's courtship of his first wife, was published under his own name. • It was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career.

27. Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, met with even stronger negative outcries from the Victorian public for its frank treatment of sex, and was often referred to as "Jude the Obscene". • Heavily criticized for its apparent attack on the institution of marriage, the book caused further strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy was concerned that Jude the Obscure would be read as being autobiographical. • In all of Hardy's great novels there are frustrating, imprisoning marriages that may reflect his own first marriage.

28. Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags, and the Bishop of Wakefield is reputed to have burnt a copy. • Despite this criticism, Hardy had become a celebrity in English literature by the 1900s, with several blockbuster novels under his belt, yet he felt disgust at the public reception of two of his greatest works and gave up writing novels altogether.

29. Several critics have commented, however, that there was very little left for Hardy to write about, having creatively exhausted the increasingly fatalistic tone of his novels. • The characteristics of Hardy's fiction evident in what was probably a re-working of his first effort:

30. 1. Its stage is chiefly set in rural Wessex. • 2. It is topographically specific, to a degree unparalleled in English literature. • 3. It deals with Dorset farmers, and shows sympathetic insight into the life of this class. • 4. It does not avoid an impression of artificiality whenever "polite society" is involved.

31. 5. The dialogue is often unreal, and there is occasional stiffness of language, with involved sentences, awkward inversions, split infinitives, etc. 6. In marked contrast with these rhetorical defects, there is frequent felicity of phrase, particularly in descriptive passages, and the author's alert senses, all of them, often leave their mark. 7. Nature interests him for her own sake, and his treatment of her is often poetic. 8. There are many literary allusions and quotations, and references to painters, musicians, and architects [in imitation of George Eliot].

32. 9. The use of coincidents and accidents is overdone; and plausibility is often stretched to the extreme. 10. There is a secret marriage. 11. There is a pervading note of gloom, only momentarily relieved. 12. It all comes to a tragic end (sudden death).

33. HIS POETRY • He started writing poetry seriously in 1865, and began sending it round to various magazines in 1866. • In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. • Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and published collections until his death in 1928.

34. Although not as well received by his contemporaries as his novels, Hardy's poetry has been applauded considerably in recent years, in part because of the influence on Philip Larkin. • However, critically it is still not regarded as highly as his prose.

35. Thomas Hardy wrote many different types of poems but a more common subject he likes to write about was true love and romance in the realities of life. • Most of his poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and life, and mankind's long struggle against indifference to human suffering. • Some, like The Darkling Thrush and An August Midnight, appear as poems about writing poetry, because the nature mentioned in them gives Hardy the inspiration to write those.

36. A vein of regret tinges his often seemingly banal themes. • His compositions range in style from the three-volume epic closet drama The Dynasts to smaller, and often hopeful or even cheerful ballads of the moment such as the little-known The Children and Sir Nameless, a comic poem inspired by the tombs of the Martyns, builders of Athelhampton.

37. A few of Hardy's poems, such as The Blinded Bird (a melancholy polemic against the sport of vinkenzetting), display his love of the natural world and his firm stance against animal cruelty.

38. HIS WORKS Prose • Hardy divided his novels and collected short stories into three classes: • Novels of Character and Environment • Romances and Fantasies • Novels of Ingenuity

39. Novels of Character and Environment • The Poor Man and the Lady (1867, unpublished and lost) • Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) • Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) • The Return of the Native (1878) • The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) • The Woodlanders (1887) • Wessex Tales (1888, a collection of short stories) • Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) • Life's Little Ironies (1894, a collection of short stories) • Jude the Obscure (1895)

40. Romances and Fantasies • A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) • The Trumpet-Major (1880) • Two on a Tower (1882) • A Group of Noble Dames (1891, a collection of short stories) • The Well-Beloved (1897) (first published as a serial from 1892).

41. Novels of Ingenuity • Desperate Remedies (1871) • The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) • A Laodicean (1881 )

42. HIS DEATH • Hardy fell ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died in January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed. His funeral, on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, proved a controversial occasion: Hardy, his family and friends had wished him to be buried at Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma. However, his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted he be placed in the abbey's Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets' Corner.

44. Shortly after Hardy's death, the executors of his estate burnt his letters and notebooks. Twelve records survived, one of them containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s. Research into these provided insight into how Hardy kept track of them and how he used them in his later work. • Hardy's cottage at Bockhampton and Max Gate in Dorchester are owned by the National Trust.