Thomas hardy biography dorchester pub
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Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
By Dr. Hannah Simpson
Attribution 4.0 International (CC bygd 4.0)
Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. His prolific writing career spanned the end of the Victorian period and the early decades of modernism. His novels, including Tess of the d’Ubervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure, are markedly naturalist in tone, focused on the sufferings occasioned bygd Victorian social inequality and by an inexorable, impersonal fate. Hardy’s poetry fryst vatten written in a vast range of poetic forms and makes frequent experimentation with metre and stanza form, indicating his engagement with the formal upheavals of the literary modernist period.
Hardy was born in Dorset and, apart from a brief period of times spent working in London as an architect, spent most of his life there; the geography of the area and its local dialect terms are frequent features of his published work. He married Emma Glifford in 1874 and,
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Discover Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy’s Dorchester
Real life Casterbridge
The novelist was inspired by local places and happenings in the town. You can still visit these places and imagine how Hardy may have seen them over 100 years ago.
The Mayor of Casterbridge alludes to many well-known parts of Dorchester. Such as Antelope Walk, a traditional cobblestone shopping arcade situated off Cornhill Road. The walk was once an 18th century Coaching Inn and was written about by Hardy in his novel.
Further down Cornhill Road is the Mayor of Casterbridge’s (Henchard’s) House, the building now holds Barclays Bank but from the outside you can see why the elegant building would be fit for the mayor. Hardy wrote “Henchard’s house was one of the best, faced with dull red-and-grey old brick.” The building has a blue plaque for its cameo in the book.
Maumbury Rings was the secret meeting place of Henchard and his long-lost wife. Hardy shows off Dor
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Timeline
1840: 2 June Thomas Hardy born at Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, eldest child of a builder, Thomas Hardy, and Jemima Hand, who had been married for less than six months. Younger siblings: Mary (b. 1841), Henry (b. 1851), and Katherine (Kate) (b. 1856).
1848-1856: Schooling in Dorset.
1856: Hardy watches the hanging of Martha Browne for the murder of her husband (thought to be remembered in the death of Tess Durbeyfield on the gallows).
1856-1862: Articled to Dorchester architect John Hicks, later to become his assistant. During the late 1850s developed his important friendship with Horace Moule (eight years older, middle-class, and Cambridge educated) who becomes his intellectual mentor and encourages his self-education in the Classics.
1862: Employed as a draughtsman by London architect Arthur Bloomfield. Hardy's self-education continues, incorporating earlier English writers, lectures, art galleries and operas.
1867: Returns to Dorset as a jobbing architect