I

“Thomas Hardy and his works”

Submitted to-Mr. Jeevan Sagar

Submitted by: Akansha Uboveja

Hidayatullah national law university, Naya Raipur, Chhattisgarh

DECLARATION

I hereby declare that this project title “Thomas Hardy and his works” is my own and original

work which represents my ideas culminated during the research of topic under guidance of Sir

Jeevan Sagar. I adequately cited and referenced the original sources. I also declare that I have

adhered to all principles of academic honesty and integrity and have not misrepresented or

fabricated or falsified any idea/data/fact/source in my submission.

Akansha Uboveja

Roll No- 09 sec-A

BA.LLB. Semester-II
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to Mr. Jeevan Sagar sir who has provided

me this opportunity to work on this interesting topic “Thomas Hardy and his work” and apart

from giving a chance he has constantly provided his assistance which has helped me in

understanding and carrying out the nuances of the project report.

I would like to thank my family and friends for their constant support and motivation.

I take this opportunity to also express my gratitude towards the university and the Vice

Chancellor for providing the adequate facilities and the extensive data bases resources in the

library and through internet.

I feel elated to work on the project with such support and guidance.

Akansha Uboveja

Semester-II

Section-A, Roll No-09

Contents

Introduction…………………………………………….1

Early life…………………………………………………2

Marriage and personal life……………………………..3

Late life…………………………………………………..4

Novels……………………………………………………..5-11

Poetries…………………………………………………….11-13

Conclusion………………………………………………….14

Refrences……………………………………………………. 14-15
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Introduction

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. He has career of ups and down which he first

started as an architect and restorer of church and museums and in the process of restoring and his

visit to some museum where he found some literary art works, he got his interest towards

writing. He has written several Novels, Poems, and Dramas. Initially he started his writing work

with poem but published them lately after his Novels, so he started his career with publishing

Novels.

His Novels had always been controversial, even his first Novel “The Poor Man and the Lady”

was not published by any publishing house as the book being highly critical of Victorian rule,

though lately with some more number of Novels he was able to achieve fame and goodwill in the

literary field. After being able to earn sufficiently from his writing career he left his job of an

architect and give complete devotion to writing. But lately he completely diverted his career

towards writing poems as his last novel “Jude the obscure” was received by people with great

scoff.

The last novel challenged the sensibilities of Victorian readers with situations that ruffled many

a Victorian feather: immoral sex, murder, illegitimate children, and the unmarried living

together. Heated debate and criticism over book helped Hardy decide that he would rather write

poetry. In fact, so stung was he by the criticism of his works that Hardy did not write another

novel.

So this project would deal with the same book due which the huge hue and cry was there among

readers which compelled Hardy to take such huge decision in his career. But before that the

report deals with early life of hardy and his various works.
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Early life

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840 in the village of Upper Bockhampton, located in

Southwestern England. His father was a stone-mason and a violinist. His mother enjoyed reading

and retelling folk songs and legends popular in the region. From his family, Hardy gained the

interests that would influence his life and appear in his novels: architecture and music, the

lifestyles of the country folk, and literature itself.

Hardy attended Julia Martin's school in Bockhampton between the ages of 8 and 16. However,

most of his education came from the books he found in Dorchester, the nearby town. He taught

himself French, German, and Latin. At sixteen, Hardy's father apprenticed his son to a local

architect, John Hicks. Under Hicks's tutelage, Hardy learned about architectural drawing and the

restoration of old houses and churches. Hardy loved the apprenticeship because it allowed him to

study the histories of the houses and the families that lived there. Despite his work, Hardy did

not abandon his academics; in the evenings, Hardy would study with the Greek scholar Horace

Moule.

In 1862, Hardy was sent to London to work with the architect Arthur Blomfield. During his five

years in London, Hardy immersed himself in the cultural scene by visiting museums and

theaters, and studying classic literature. He even began to write his own poetry. Although he did

not remain in London, choosing instead to return to Dorchester as a church restorer, he

maintained his newfound talent for writing.

Marriage and Personal life

In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, 1

Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Gifford, whom he married in Kensington in the autumn of

1874.2

In 1885 Thomas and his wife moved into Max Gate, a house designed by Hardy and built by his

brother. Although they later became estranged, Emma's subsequent death in 1912 had a

traumatic effect on him and after her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places

linked with their courtship; his Poems 1912–13 reflect upon her death. In 1914, Hardy married

his secretary Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. However, he remained

preoccupied with his first wife's death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry. In

his later years, he kept a dog named Wessex, who was notoriously of ill temperament. Wessex's

grave stone can be found on the Max Gate grounds. 3In 1910, Hardy had been awarded the Order

of Merit and was also for the first time nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

New readers had also discovered his novels though the publication of the Wessex Editions,

definitive versions of all Hardy's early works. As a result of this increased popularity, Max Gate

became a literary shrine and a tourist attraction.

1
Gibson, James (ed.) (1975) Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan Education; p.9.
2
Hardy, Emma (1961) Some Recollections by Emma Hardy; with some relevant poems by Thomas Hardy; ed. by
Evelyn Hardy & R. Gittings. London: Oxford University Press
3
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/sep/30/biography.thomashardy
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Late Life

Thomas hardy becomes ill in 1927 and dies in Max Gate on 11 January 1928, and the cause of

death was cited, on his death certificate, as "cardiac syncope", with "old age" given as a

contributory factor. He had also dedicated his last poem to his wife on his dead bed. His funeral

was on 16th of January in Westminster Abbey which also proved to be a controversial event as he

wanted his body to be buried with his first wife, Emma.

His family and friends had agreed with his last wish but his executor Sir Sydney Carlyle

Cockerell, insisted that he be placed in the abbey's famous Poets' Corner. A compromise was

reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets' Corner. 4

This also show how attached he was with his wife even the relationship was not that healthy one

but still he was attached.

The popularity of Hardy could also be inferred from the fact that he left a large estate behind

him. According to journal on Thomas Hardy - Hardy's estate at death was valued at £95,418

(£5276015 in 2015 sterling).5

Soon after his death Mrs. Hardy had published a compilation of his notes, oral conversation

under the name “The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1841–1891” gsiving information about his

personal life and some insights about his attitude towards life and the way of living.

4
Bradford, Charles Angell (1933). Heart Burial. London: Allen & Unwin. p. 246.
5
From Probate Index for 1928: "Hardy O. M. Thomas of Max Gate Dorchester Dorsetshire died 11 January 1928
Probate London 22 February to Lloyds Bank Limited Effects £90707 14s 3d Resworn £95418 3s 1d
 5

Novels

In 1867–68 he wrote the class-conscious novel The Poor Man and the Lady, which was

sympathetically considered by three London publishers but never published. George Meredith, as

a publisher’s reader, advised Hardy to write a shapelier and less opinionated novel. So Hardy

followed his advice and he did not try further to publish it. He subsequently destroyed the

manuscript, but used some of the ideas in his later work.6

Then after his First novel when failed to get publisher he tried more commercial kind of novels

whose result was the densely plotted Desperate Remedies (1871), which was influenced by the

contemporary “sensation” fiction of Wilkie Collins. In his next novel, however, the brief and

affectionately humorous idyll Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy found a voice much

more distinctively his own. In this book he evoked, within the simplest of marriage plots, an

episode of social change (the displacement of a group of church musicians) that was a direct

reflection of events involving his own father shortly before Hardy’s own birth. In the novel a

church musician Dick falls for school mistress Fancy day and being conscious that Fancy’s

father would not agree so they secretly get engaged Later the vicor Maybold when proposes her

to get marry with him as he would be able to help her to lead a luxurious life she being in guilt

and tempted accepted his offer but the plot got twisted she being realized of her mistake decided

to move with Duke only who also accepted her and forgive her for this small infidelity.

While he was writing “Under the greenwood tree” he met Emma with whom he later got

married and also he got the inspiration for his next novel from her.

6
J. B. Bullen (24 June 2013). Thomas Hardy: The World of his Novels Frances Lincoln. p. 143
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A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) drew heavily upon the circumstances of their courtship for its wild

Cornish setting and its melodramatic story of a young woman (somewhat resembling Emma

Gifford) and the two men, friends become rivals, who successively pursue, misunderstand, and

fail her.

In his next novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), introduced Wessex for the first time and

made Hardy famous by its agricultural settings and its distinctive blend of humorous,

melodramatic, pastoral, and tragic elements. The book is a vigorous portrayal of the beautiful

and impulsive Bathsheba Everdene and her marital choices among Sergeant Troy, the dashing

but irresponsible soldier; William Boldwood, the deeply obsessive farmer; and Gabriel Oak, her

loyal and resourceful shepherd.

Subsequently, the Hardy’s moved from London to Yeovil, and then to Sturminster Newton,

where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878).7 Hardy published Two on a Tower in 1882, a

romance story set in the world of astronomy. Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

Incorporates recognizable details of Dorchester’s history and topography. The busy market-town

of Caster bridge becomes the setting for a tragic struggle, at once economic and deeply personal,

between the powerful but unstable Michael Henchard, who has risen from workman to mayor by

sheer natural energy, and the more shrewdly calculating Donald Farfrae, who starts out in

Casterbridge as Henchard’s protégé but ultimately dispossesses him of everything that he had

once owned and loved. In Hardy’s next novel, The woodlanders (1887), socioeconomic issues

again become central as the permutations of sexual advance and retreat are played out among the

very trees from which the characters make their living, and Giles Winterbourne’s loss of

livelihood is integrally bound up with his loss of Grace Melbury and, finally, of life itself.
7
"Curiosities of Sturminster Newton - Dorset Life - The Dorset Magazine" www.dorsetlife.co.uk. Retrieved 9 March
2018
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Wessex Tales (1888) was the first collection of the short stories that Hardy had long been

publishing in magazines. His subsequent short-story collections are A Group of Noble Dames

(1891), Life’s Little Ironies (1894), and A Changed Man (1913). Hardy’s short novel The Well-

Beloved (serialized 1892, revised for volume publication 1897) displays hostility to marriage that

was related to increasing frictions within his own marriage.

His later novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), the last of which attracted criticism for its

sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was initially refused publication. Its subtitle, A

Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented, was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle

classes. Then Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, met with an even stronger negative response

from the Victorian public because of its controversial treatment of sex, religion and marriage.

Though technically belonging to the 19th century, these novels anticipate the 20th century in

regard to the nature and treatment of their subject matter. Tess profoundly questions society’s

sexual mores by its compassionate portrayal and even advocacy of a heroine who is seduced, and

perhaps raped, by the son of her employer. She has an illegitimate child, suffers rejection by the

man she loves and marries, and is finally hanged for murdering her original seducer. In Jude the

Obscure the class-ridden educational system of the day is challenged by the defeat of Jude’s

earnest aspirations to knowledge, while conventional morality is affronted by the way in which

the sympathetically presented Jude and Sue change partners, live together, and have children

with little regard for the institution of marriage. Both books encountered some brutally hostile

reviews, and Hardy’s sensitivity to such attacks partly precipitated his long-contemplated

transition from fiction to poetry.

So here in the project report we would briefly discuss his two novels- Firstly his first successful

novel and second his last novel due which he gave up on writing novels.

1. Far from the Madding Crowd

At the beginning of the novel, Bathsheba Everdene is a beautiful young woman without a

fortune. She meets Gabriel Oak, a young farmer, and saves his life one evening. He asks her to

marry him, but she refuses because she does not love him. Upon inheriting her uncle's

prosperous farm she moves away to the town of Weatherbury.

A disaster befalls Gabriel's farm and he loses his sheep; he is forced to give up farming. He goes

looking for work, and in his travels finds himself in Weatherbury. After rescuing a local farm

from fire he asks the mistress if she needs a shepherd. It is Bathsheba, and she hires him. As

Bathsheba learns to manage her farm she becomes acquainted with her neighbor, Mr. Boldwood,

and on a whim sends him a valentine with the words "Marry me." Boldwood becomes obsessed

with her and becomes her second suitor. Rich and handsome, he has been sought after by many

women. Bathsheba refuses him because she does not love him, but she then agrees to reconsider

her decision.

That very night, Bathsheba meets a handsome soldier, Sergeant Troy. Unbeknownst to

Bathsheba, he has recently impregnated a local girl, Fanny Robin, and almost married her. Troy

falls in love with Bathsheba, enraging Boldwood. Bathsheba travels to Bath to warn Troy of

Boldwood's anger, and while she is there, Troy convinces her to marry him. Gabriel has

remained her friend throughout and does not approve of the marriage. A few weeks after his

marriage to Bathsheba, Troy sees Fanny, poor and sick; she later dies giving birth to her child.
 9

Bathsheba discovers that Troy is the father. Grief-stricken at Fanny's death and riddled with

shame, Troy runs away and is thought to have drowned.

With Troy supposedly dead, Boldwood becomes more and more emphatic about Bathsheba

marrying him. Troy sees Bathsheba at a fair and decides to return to her. Boldwood holds a

Christmas, to which he invites Bathsheba and again proposes marriage; just after she has agreed,

Troy arrives to claim her. Bathsheba screams, and Boldwood shoots Troy dead. He is sentenced

to life in prison. A few months later, Bathsheba marries Gabriel, now a prosperous bailiff.

2. Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure focuses on the life of a country stonemason, Jude, and his love for his cousin

Sue, a schoolteacher. From the beginning Jude knows that marriage is an ill-fated venture in his

family, and he believes that his love for Sue curses him doubly, because they are both members

of a cursed clan. While love could be identified as a central theme in the novel, it is the

institution of marriage that is the work's central focus. Jude and Sue are unhappily married to

other people, and then drawn by an inevitable bond that pulls them together. Their relationship is

beset by tragedy, not only because of the family curse but also by society's reluctance to accept

their marriage as legitimate.

The novel starts with Jude Fawley dreams of studying at the university in Christminster, but his

background as an orphan raised by his working-class aunt leads him instead into a career as a

stonemason. He is inspired by the ambitions of the town schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, who
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left for Christminster when Jude was a child. However, Jude falls in love with a young woman

named Arabella, is tricked into marrying her, and cannot leave his home village. When their

marriage goes sour and Arabella moves to Australia, Jude resolves to go to Christminster at last.

However, he finds that his attempts to enroll at the university are met with little enthusiasm.

Jude meets his cousin Sue Bridehead and tries not to fall in love with her. He arranges for her to

work with Phillotson in order to keep her in Christminster, but is disappointed when he discovers

that the two are engaged to be married. Once they marry, Jude is not surprised to find that Sue is

not happy with her situation. She can no longer tolerate the relationship and leaves her husband

to live with Jude.

Both Jude and Sue get divorced, but Sue does not want to remarry. Arabella reveals to Jude that

they have a son in Australia, and Jude asks to take him in. Sue and Jude serve as parents to the

little boy and have two children of their own. Jude falls ill, and when he recovers, he decides to

return to Christminster with his family. They have trouble finding lodging because they are not

married, and Jude stays in an inn separate from Sue and the children. At night Sue takes Jude's

son out to look for a room and the little boy decides that they would be better off without so

many children. In the morning, Sue goes to Jude's room and eats breakfast with him. They return

to the lodging house to find that Jude's son has hanged the other two children and himself.

Feeling she has been punished by God for her relationship with Jude, Sue goes back to live with

Phillotson, and Jude is tricked into living with Arabella again. Jude dies soon after.

Jude the Obscure focuses on the life of a country stonemason, Jude, and his love for his cousin

Sue, a schoolteacher. From the beginning Jude knows that marriage is an ill-fated venture in his

family, and he believes that his love for Sue curses him doubly, because they are both members
 11

of a cursed clan. While love could be identified as a central theme in the novel, it is the

institution of marriage that is the work's central focus. Jude and Sue are unhappily married to

other people, and then drawn by an inevitable bond that pulls them together. Their relationship is

beset by tragedy, not only because of the family curse but also by society's reluctance to accept

their marriage as legitimate.

Poetries

In 20th century Hardy only published poems. While some suggest that Hardy gave up writing novels

following the harsh criticism of Jude the Obscure in 1896, the poet C. H. Sisson calls this "hypothesis"

"superficial and absurd".8

Hardy seems always to have rated poetry above fiction, and Wessex Poems (1898), his first

significant public appearance as a poet, included verse written during his years as a novelist as

well as revised versions of poems dating from the 1860s. As a collection it was often perceived

as miscellaneous and uneven—an impression reinforced by the author’s own idiosyncratic

illustrations—and acceptance of Hardy’s verse was slowed, then and later, by the persistence of

his reputation as a novelist. Poems of the Past and the Present (1901) contained nearly twice as

many poems as its predecessor, most of them newly written. Some of the poems are explicitly or

implicitly grouped by subject or theme. There are, for example, 11 “War Poems” prompted by

the South African War (e.g., “Drummer Hodge,” “The Souls of the Slain”) and a sequence of

disenchanted “philosophical” poems (e.g., “The Mother Mourns,” “The Subalterns,” “To an

Unborn Pauper Child”). In Time’s Laughingstocks (1909), the poems are again arranged

under headings, but on principles that often remain elusive. Indeed, there is no clear line of
8
"Introduction" to the Penguin edition of Jude the Obscure (1978). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984, p.13.
 12

development in Hardy’s poetry from immaturity to maturity; his style undergoes no significant

change over time. His best poems can be found mixed together with inferior verse in any

particular volume, and new poems are often juxtaposed to reworking of poems written or drafted

years before. The range of poems within any particular volume is also extremely broad—from

lyric to meditation to ballad to satirical vignette to dramatic monologue or dialogue—and Hardy

persistently experiments with different, often invented, stanza forms and metres.

In 1903, 1905, and 1908 Hardy successively published the three volumes of The Dynasts, a huge

poetic drama that is written mostly in blank verse and subtitled “an epic-drama of the War with

Napoleon”—though it was not intended for actual performance. The sequence of major historical

events—Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and so on—is diversified by prose episodes involving

ordinary soldiers and civilians and by an ongoing cosmic commentary from such personified

“Intelligences” as the “Spirit of the Years” and the “Spirit of the Pities.” Hardy, who once

described his poems as a “series of seemings” rather than expressions of a single consistent

viewpoint, found in the contrasted moral and philosophical positions of the various Intelligences

a means of articulating his own intellectual ambiguities. The Dynasts as a whole served to project

his central vision of a universe governed by the purposeless movements of a blind, unconscious

force that he called the Immanent Will. Though subsequent criticism has tended to find its

structures cumbersome and its verse inert, The Dynasts remains an impressive—and highly

readable—achievement, and its publication certainly reinforced both Hardy’s “national” image

(he was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1910) and his enormous fame worldwide.

Some of Hardy's most famous poems are from "Poems of 1912–13", part of Satires of

Circumstance (1914), written following the death of his wife Emma in 1912. They had been
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estranged for twenty years and these lyric poems express deeply felt "regret and remorse". 9 In a

recent biography on Hardy, Claire Tomalin argues that Hardy became a truly great English poet

after the death of his first wife, Emma, beginning with these elegies, which she describes as

among "the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry." 10

Late in his eighth decade he published a fifth volume of verse, Moments of Vision (1917), and

wrote in secret an official “life” of himself for posthumous publication under the name of his

widow. In his ninth decade Hardy published two more poetry collections, Late Lyrics and

Earlier (1922) and Human Shows (1925), and put together the posthumously published Winter

Words (1928)

Conclusion

9
Axelrod, Jeremy. "Thomas Hardy" The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 18 march 2018

10
Tomalin, Claire. "Thomas Hardy." New York: Penguin, 2007
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Hardy had established his own legacy. Thought initially his career as writer and poet was full of

ups and down but he managed to create his era. The continuing popularity of Hardy’s novels

owes much to their richly varied yet always accessible style and their combination of romantic

plots with convincingly presented characters. Equally important—particularly in terms of their

suitability to film and television adaptation—is their nostalgic evocation of a vanished rural

world through the creation of highly particularized regional settings. Hardy’s verse has been

slower to win full acceptance, but his unique status as a major 20th-century poet as well as a

major 19th-century novelist is now universally recognized.

References

 Axelrod, Jeremy. "Thomas Hardy" e Poetry Foundation. .

 Tomalin, Claire. "Thomas Hardy." New York: Penguin, 2007

 "Introduction" to the Penguin edition of Jude the Obscure (1978). Harmondsworth:

Penguin Books, 1984,

 Curiosities of Sturminster Newton - Dorset Life - The Dorset Magazine"

www.dorsetlife.co.uk. Retrieved 9 November 2017.

 J. B. Bullen (24 June 2013). Thomas Hardy: The World of his Novels Frances Lincoln.

 Gibson, James (ed.) (1975) Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan

Education; p.9.

 Hardy, Emma (1961) Some Recollections by Emma Hardy; with some relevant poems by

Thomas Hardy; ed. by Evelyn Hardy & R. Gittings. London: Oxford University Press

 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/sep/30/biography.thomashardy
 15

 Bradford, Charles Angell (1933). Heart Burial. London: Allen & Unwin. p.  246.

 From Probate Index for 1928: "Hardy O. M. Thomas of Max Gate Dorchester Dorsetshire

died 11 January 1928 Probate London 22 February to Lloyds Bank Limited Effects

£90707 14s 3d Resworn £95418 3s 1d

 www.jstor.com

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy#cite_note-Axelrod-35