Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk
Life, work, and his years on Wandsworth Common
Tonight's talk is one of a series of events throughout the year exploring different aspects of the common's history and heritage. Our speaker is Roz Page, a key member of our Heritage Group who edited the culture chapter of The Wandsworth Common Story and is currently working with Sue Demont on an oral history project capturing people's memories of the common over the past seventy or eighty years. If any of you would like to volunteer to take part in that project, we would be very glad to hear from you. Roz wrote the article on Thomas Hardy in The Wandsworth Common Story, and tonight she has the opportunity to expand that into a full account of his life and work.
The critic Edmund Gosse, a contemporary of Thomas Hardy, wrote of him that he wrote with such anger, despair and passion. This evening I'd like to explore his life and experiences to see if we can find out why.
Thomas Hardy came from very humble beginnings. He was born in 1840 in a remote woodland cottage in the village of Higher Bockhampton in Dorset, built by his grandfather — also named Thomas. The cottage still stands and is now owned by the National Trust.
His parents were Thomas senior, a stonemason, and Jemima, who had been a servant since the age of thirteen but harboured ambitions to become a cook. Other family members were tranters — the carrier drivers of their day — so the family was probably relatively comfortable. Thomas was a sickly infant; the midwife initially thought him dead. He was the eldest of four children, followed by two sisters and a brother.
His mother was a fiercely proud and independent woman who instilled in him a love of learning. She was strongly against marriage, advising all her children not to repeat her mistake, and her forceful opinions meant that only one of them ever did marry — Thomas himself. She is thought to be the model for Mrs Yeobright in The Return of the Native: capable of flying from a gentle mood to raging anger, cold and distant, prone to pessimism — a trait sadly shared by her son. His father was described as fine-looking, musical, and kind-hearted; both he and Thomas played the fiddle in their local church. The family were avid churchgoers and provided musical entertainment at local events. An old music book in the family collection, dated Puddletown, April 1801, is filled with the scores they would have performed.
Thomas was a quick learner with an exceptional memory. He could apparently read at the same time as he was learning to walk. He entered local school at eight and formed an intense bond with its founder, Mrs Martin. After some disruption — including a spell with relatives in Hertfordshire — he was enrolled at a more serious school in Dorchester at the age of ten. His three-mile walk to school and back every day allowed him to absorb the local landscape and nature in detail, and both appear in virtually everything he later wrote. Many of his characters are also prodigious walkers: Tess and Jude walk their way through their crises; Gabriel Oak walks to find work; Fanny Robin walks through snow to plead with her lover before dying.
Although clearly talented, Hardy's family could not fund a university education, and at sixteen he was apprenticed to an architect in Dorchester. There he befriended Horace Molle, from a prosperous intellectual local family — a brilliant Cambridge scholar whose worldly knowledge encouraged Thomas to question orthodox religion and broaden his horizons.
In a brave move, Hardy left Dorchester in 1862, aged twenty-two, and went to live and work in London, where he remained for five years. He found work with an ecclesiastical architect, visited exhibitions, museums and theatres, and began writing poetry — unsuccessfully, at this stage, in terms of publication. His health was poorly suited to the dirty city, however, and in 1867 he returned to Dorchester, still working as an architect but now determined to write.
His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, was an attack on everything he had witnessed in London: the callousness and hypocrisy of the upper and middle classes, and their indifference to those who wished to better themselves. Hardy was always committed to social justice and never lost touch with his Dorset origins. The book was never published, but about a third of the manuscript survived and was eventually reused.
A trip to Cornwall in March 1870, to oversee the restoration of St Juliot's Church, proved providential. It was here that Hardy met Emma Gifford — free-spirited, unconventional, the sister-in-law of the rector. They shared a passion for literature and both harboured ambitions to write. He fell in love with her and with the untamed Cornish landscape, which offered a newly found sense of freedom and romance.
Emma helped him with his next novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), which was praised for its vivid descriptions and skilful presentation of country folk. The following year came Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) — Emma's insistence had kept Hardy persevering after Macmillan rejected it — which was well received for its freshness and originality. Its heroine Fancy, the pretty schoolmistress who defies social expectations by choosing her humble true love over a more prosperous suitor, set the tone for much that followed.
This success led Hardy to pursue writing full-time, working on serialisations as Dickens had done. A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) was set in Cornwall, its heroine closely based on Emma and its hero — a young ecclesiastical architect — clearly based on Hardy himself. Its success gave him the confidence to propose marriage, but Emma's parents rejected him, a class-based humiliation he never forgot. Emma ignored her parents' wishes, left home, and they married in London in September 1874. His mother refused to attend, as did Emma's family apart from her brother.
Far from the Madding Crowd appeared the same year. Its heroine Bathsheba Everdene is brave, beautiful, bold, and capable — equalling men in business — everything Hardy most admired in a woman.
Despite a long courtship, early signs of difficulty in the marriage emerged fairly quickly. A friend wrote that Emma had the makings of Bathsheba — spirit and the power of deciding for herself — but with limited opportunities. They did both enjoy travel, spending part of their honeymoon in Paris and maintaining an itinerant existence throughout their married life between Dorset, London, and the Continent. A move to Sturminster Newton in north Dorset proved to be their happiest period together; it was there that Hardy wrote The Return of the Native (1878), the novel he held in greatest affection, drawing on both imagination and boyhood recollections. It was unfavourably received and sold badly, though it is now considered one of his finest works.
Hardy was by now receiving invitations from influential London figures and mixing with clever and attractive women, which may have made Emma seem less dazzling to him. In 1878 they moved to what was then called 1 Arundel Terrace in Tooting — now on Trinity Road — where they lived for three years. The house still stands, and carries a blue plaque marking his residence from 1878 to 1881. There was a regular train service to Victoria which enabled him to attend meetings with editors, writers, and literary patrons, and he was elected to the Savile Club, where he mixed with Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold. They also enjoyed the company of an elderly Alexander Macmillan — the publisher who had earlier rejected his work — who lived in a spacious house with croquet lawns overlooking what Hardy called the then charming and countrified Tooting Graveney Common.
Hardy later wrote that it was in the Tooting house that their troubles began. The house was not well built: rain poured in through the badly fitted front door in January 1879, and in January 1881 snow drifted in to cover the inside passages and windowsills. He described the common at that time as bare, muddy, and sloppy after even a little rain — undrained and almost devoid of trees. A photograph of the common from the period shows it covered with gorse — known locally as furs — and a much wilder and more open place than we enjoy today.
During his time in Tooting, Hardy researched and wrote The Trumpet Major — an account of George III's family staying in Weymouth during the Napoleonic Wars — and began work on A Laodicean (the title referring to someone cool and indecisive), before being struck down by illness, probably exacerbated by the damp house. He was confined to bed for several months with what he later described as a bladder infection — extremely painful without antibiotics — and had to rely on Emma to nurse him and take dictation of the novel for serialisation. By April 1881 he was sufficiently recovered to take a walk alone on the common in the sunshine, but his illness had convinced him that London was bad for his health, and he and Emma moved back to Dorset.
Already before the move he had begun The Mayor of Casterbridge, set in Dorchester and centred on one strong, energetic but stubborn man who comes from nowhere but has the ambition to be somebody. Its opening scene — the drunken selling of a wife at a fair — was based on a true story Hardy had stored away in his remarkable memory, one of countless incidents he collected over a lifetime and later wove into his fiction. Only 750 copies were printed and the book was remaindered within a year; it is now one of his most celebrated works.
The Woodlanders was written in 1885 (published 1887), and by that time Hardy had also purchased a large plot just outside Dorchester where he designed and built Max Gate — the imposing Victorian house intended to signal that he now belonged to the prosperous middle class. Max Gate is now owned by the National Trust and can be visited.
Hardy frequently suffered from depression. In 1885 he described himself as enveloped in a leaden cloud. His dark view of life may have been partly inherited from his mother, but was also influenced by the loss of his Christian faith — which removed from life what had previously given it hope — and was deeply affected by the suicide of his friend and mentor Horace Molle.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) was an immediate success but deeply divided opinion; it was said to have broken up friendships and divided families. Its compassion for Tess, whose secret illegitimate child — born as a result of rape — is used by her husband Angel Clare to justify abandoning her, is accompanied by a fierce attack on the Church's response to such situations. The book made Hardy seriously rich.
Jude the Obscure, written in the 1890s, shocked readers even further when it was published in 1895. The orphan Jude's repeated attempts to improve himself are derailed by a loveless marriage, his love for his cousin Sue, and his eventual descent into itinerant alcoholism. Emma was horrified, both by the attacks on the Church and on marriage, and by the discovery that Hardy had sought advice on it from his admired friend Florence Henniker rather than from her. The resentment never left her. By 1898 the couple were so estranged that Emma had moved into the attic rooms at Max Gate.
The Well-Beloved (1897), about a sculptor who repeatedly falls in love with women who seem to meet his ideal only to quickly lose their attraction, was Hardy's last novel — transparently autobiographical in its subject matter.
By the time of his London success, Hardy was attracting and attracted by a circle of clever, vivacious women. Florence Henniker, an American with a few published novels of her own, was one with whom he became infatuated; she declined to turn their friendship into an affair on religious grounds, but they remained close. He romanticised the sculptor Agatha Thornycroft, calling her the most beautiful woman in England and claiming she was the physical model for Tess. He also became attached to the actress Gertrude Bugler, who later played Tess on stage — to the concern of his second wife.
Emma died in November 1912, with Hardy at her bedside. He had apparently been largely unaware of how ill she had become, or perhaps turned a blind eye. When she died he was completely heartbroken — keeping her coffin at the foot of his bed for three days before she was buried — and, one senses, riddled with guilt. He may have been further shaken by a letter she left entitled What I Thought of My Husband, whose contents he never revealed and quickly destroyed.
In 1913 he made a pilgrimage to Cornwall to visit the scenes of their courtship. In 1914 he married Florence Dugdale, thirty-nine years his junior, who had first come into his orbit in 1906 as an elementary school teacher in Enfield with literary ambitions. She had become Emma's companion and then Hardy's mistress, handled much of his correspondence, and later oversaw his memoirs and reputation after his death — describing herself as the helpmate of genius. His continuing to write poems about Emma, however, consumed her with jealousy throughout their marriage.
Hardy always maintained that poetry, not prose, was his true vocation. He wrote some 900 poems over his lifetime and said he was prouder of them than of anything in his prose. He turned decisively back to poetry after The Well-Beloved, partly in response to the criticism his novels had attracted, and partly because he had, as he said, never intended to be a prose writer at all.
His earliest surviving poems date from around 1857–60 and address themes of place, time, and change that remained constant throughout his writing life. He had tried and failed to get poetry published during his first spell in London, and by 1866 had stopped attending church regularly, finding in the loss of Christian faith something intellectually honest but also profoundly melancholy. Death, discouragement, regret, loss, and loneliness are consequently recurring subjects.
He also wrote poems about both the Boer War (1899–1902) — including an elegy for a young soldier killed in that conflict — and the First World War. The government invited him, along with other eminent literary figures, to make public statements supporting the British case for war, and he wrote Men Who March Away in response, though many of his other war poems are considerably more ambivalent.
The collection Poems of 1912–13, written in the immediate aftermath of Emma's death and following his return to Cornwall, is generally considered among the finest love poetry in the English language — the more affecting for being, in part, an act of expiation for the neglect and unkindness of their later years. The Going, The Voice, At Castle Boterel, and Without Ceremony are among the best known. His poem Snow in the Suburbs, written during his time at the Tooting house, is a beautifully observed vignette of a snowfall ending with a black cat climbing the blanketed front steps to be taken in — a small, characteristic act of compassion rendered in precise, tender detail.
His final poem, dictated to Florence on his deathbed, was a brief and bitter epitaph on two men — G.K. Chesterton and George Moore — whose personal remarks had given lasting offence. He never forgot anything. His poem He Never Expected Much, written for his eighty-sixth birthday and published posthumously, offers a more measured retrospect: life, he reflects, had kept faith with him and proved to be much as it had promised — not ecstatic, but not that sad either.
Hardy received an honorary doctorate from Aberdeen University in 1905 and was awarded the Order of Merit, cementing his place in the literary establishment. He continued to write poetry well into his eighties — "I never let a day go by without using a pen," he said — and remained physically active, cycling into the local village. He was reluctant to embrace modern conveniences: when a telephone was finally installed at Max Gate in 1920 he refused to answer it, and hot water was still brought in jugs. He did, however, enjoy meeting the new generation of writers, including Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare, Virginia Woolf, and T.E. Lawrence.
In 1927 he became ill with pleurisy and died of a heart attack at Max Gate on the 11th of January 1928. His wish had been to be buried with his family and Emma in the churchyard at Stinsford, but influential figures including J.M. Barrie, the editor of The Times, and the Dean of Westminster lobbied for a funeral at Westminster Abbey, where he now lies in Poets' Corner. As a compromise, his heart was buried at Stinsford in the church he attended as a boy.
Hardy left a long and prolific body of work: fourteen novels, fifty short stories, more than 900 poems, and two largely forgotten plays. He remains something of an enigma — reticent about his background, the biography he composed in his later years (completed and published as Florence's work) revealing very little of the inner man. He seemed always to feel the gap between his origins and the world he had entered, and retained a keen sense of how little those of his class were thought to matter.
He was twice married to women he both desired and valued, yet seemed unable to be a loving husband, leaving both wives bitter and lonely. He never had children — apparently Emma's choice, though not his — and children are correspondingly almost absent from his fiction.
His works engage with the central themes of human experience: time, memory, loss, love, fear, grief, anger, uncertainty, and death. His delight in the natural world, absorbed during those daily walks to school in Dorset, runs through everything he wrote. He championed the rural poor, railed against the narrow-mindedness of the Church, and consistently gave voice to the forgotten and ignored in society. In Claire Tomalin's biography — probably the definitive life — he is described as the time-torn man: someone who lived largely within the constraints of Victorian morality while possessing what now reads as a strikingly modern outlook. That tension, perhaps, is at the heart of his enduring appeal.
Roz began reading Claire Tomalin's biography on holiday in November and found herself immersed. She has read many of Hardy's novels, some recently revisited — finding them still enjoyable, though his florid style is very much of its period and would not be written in the same way today.
Two things seem to have been decisive. The first was his friendship with Horace Molle, whose cosmopolitan intellectual outlook opened Hardy's eyes to a world beyond the very parochial life of a small Dorset hamlet. The second was his own voracious reading — he was a prolific autodidact who taught himself several languages — which led him to J.S. Mill and the Socialists, and to the conclusion that the Church's very prescriptive and narrow readings of the world deserved to be questioned. His own open-mindedness did the rest.
He remained close to his mother, who died in 1904. He also maintained close ties with his two sisters, both of whom remained unmarried, and he bought them a house in Dorchester. His relationship with his father is less documented. For those wishing to explore further, Eton College Library holds a large Hardy collection — including his mother's purse and glasses, and a bottle of specially brewed Dorchester beer produced to mark a performance of Far from the Madding Crowd — which is open to the public by appointment. Dorchester Museum also has a room devoted to Hardy, with portraits of both parents in old age.
Roz, by her own admission not a poetry reader, prefers the novels. The prose and poetry are both stylistically florid by modern standards, she noted, but have to be read in the context of the time in which they were written — a style that reflected Victorian literary conventions and would not be replicated today.
Several characters have striking or unusual names — Bathsheba, Fancy, Jude. Some names appear to have been chosen for their resonance with nature or the landscape, consistent with Hardy's practice of using weather, setting, and nomenclature to reflect mood and character. Many were drawn from the Bible, which was widely read by country people and whose names would have carried resonance for his readership.
An audience member mentioned Snow in the Suburbs as a poem written during Hardy's time in Tooting, and read it aloud to the group. It describes a heavy snowfall with precise, almost scientific observation — flakes losing their way and drifting upward, branches bowed, a sparrow toppled by a falling lump — before ending with a black cat climbing the blanketed steps to be taken in. It drew warm applause as a perfect example of Hardy's tender feeling for the natural world.
The next talk in the series is on the 26th of April: Philip Bye will give a presentation on the history of the common through maps. Further details will be circulated through the Friends newsletter.