Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1126 page)

‘Our house stood quite alone, and those tall firs

And beeches were not planted. Snakes and efts

Swarmed in the summer days, and nightly bats

Would fly about our bedrooms. Heathcroppers

Lived on the hills, and were our only friends;

So wild it was when first we settled here.’

to Dorset for centuries — the coasts being just opposite. Hardy often thought he would like to restore the ‘le’ to his name, and call himself’ Thomas le Hardy’; but he never did so. The Dorset Hardys were traditionally said to descend in particular from a Clement le Hardy, Baily of Jersey, whose son John settled hereabouts in the fifteenth century, having probably landed at Wareham, then a port. They all had the characteristics of an old family of spent social energies, that were revealed even in the Thomas Hardy of this memoir (as in his father and grandfather), who never cared to take advantage of the many worldly opportunities that his popularity and esteem as an author afforded him. They had dwelt for many generations in or near the valley of the River Froom or Frome, which extends inland from Wareham, occupying various properties whose sites lay scattered about from Woolcombe, Toller-Welme, and Up-Sydling (near the higher course of the river), down the stream to Dorchester, Weymouth, and onward to Wareham, where the Froom flows into Poole Harbour. It was a family whose diverse Dorset sections included the Elizabethan Thomas Hardy who endowed the Dorchester Grammar School, the Thomas Hardy captain of the Victory at Trafalgar, Thomas Hardy an influential burgess of Wareham, Thomas Hardy of Chaldon, and others of local note, the tablet commemorating the first-mentioned being still in St. Peter’s Church, Dorchester, though shifted from its original position in the ‘Hardy Chapel’, the inscription running as follows:

TO THE MEMORYE OF THOMAS HARDY OF MELCOMBE REGIS IN THE COUNTY OF DORSETT, ESQUIER, WHOE ENDOWED THIS BORROUGHE W™ A YEARELY REVENEW OF 50/.; AND APPOYNTED OUT OF IT, TO BE EMPLOYED FOR YE BETTER MAYNTENANCE OF A PREACHER, 20/.; A SCHOOLEMASTER, TWENTY POUNDES; AN HUISHER, TWENTY NOBLES; THE ALMES WOMEN FIVE MARKS. THE BAYLIVES AND BURGISSES OF DORCHESTER, IN TESTIMONY OF THEIR GRATITUDE, AND TO COMMEND TO POSTERITY AN EXAMPLE SO WORTHY OF IMITATION, HATH ERECTED THIS MONUMENT.

HE DYED THE 15 OF OCTOBER, ANNO DO: 1599.

But at the birth of the subject of this biography the family had declined, so far as its Dorset representatives were concerned, from whatever importance it once might have been able to claim there; and at his father’s death the latter was, it is believed, the only landowner of the name in the county, his property being, besides the acre-and-half lifehold at Bockhampton, a small freehold farm at Tal- bothays, with some houses there, and about a dozen freehold cottages and a brick-yard-and-kiln elsewhere. The Talbothays farm was a small outlying property standing detached in a ring fence, its possessors in the reign of Henry VTII having been Talbots, from a seventeenth- century daughter of whom Hardy borrowed the name of Avis or Avice in The Well-Beloved.

On the maternal side he was Anglo-Saxon, being descended from the Chiles, Childs, or Childses (who gave their name to the villages of Child-Okeford, Chilfrome, Childhay, etc.), the Swetmans, and other families of northwest Dorset that were small proprietors of lands there in the reign of Charles the First (see Hutchins’ History of Dorset): and also from the Hanns or Hands of the Pidele Valley, Dorset, and earlier of the Vale of Blackmore. (In the parish register of Affpuddle the spelling is Hann.) The Swetmans and the Childses seem to have been involved in the Monmouth rising, and one of the former to have been brought before Jeffreys, ‘for being absent from home att the tyme of the Rebellion’. As his name does not appear in the lists of those executed he was probably transported, and this connection with Monmouth’s adventures and misfortunes seems to have helped to becloud the family prospects of the maternal line of Hardy’s ancestry, if they had ever been bright.

Several traditions survived in the Swetman family concerning the Rebellion. An indubitably true one was that after the Battle of Sedge- moor two of the Swetman daughters — Grace and Leonarde — were beset in their house by some of the victorious soldiery, and only escaped violation by slipping from the upper rooms down the back stairs into the orchard. It is said that Hardy’s great-grandmother could remember them as very old women. Part of the house, now in the possession of the Earl of Ilchester, and divided into two cottages, is still standing with its old Elizabethan windows; but the hall and open oak staircase have disappeared, and also the Ham-Hill stone chimneys. The spot is called ‘Townsend’.

Another tradition, of more doubtful authenticity, is that to which the short story by Hardy called The Duke’s Reappearance approximates. Certainly a mysterious man did come to Swetman after the battle, but it was generally understood that he was one of Monmouth’s defeated officers.

Thomas Hardy’s maternal grandmother Elizabeth,1 or Betty, was 1 [She married George Hand (or Hadd). Her daughter Jemima used the former spelling.]

the daughter of one of those Swetmans by his wife Maria Childs, sister of the Christopher Childs who married into the Cave family, became a mining engineer in Cornwall, and founded the West Briton newspaper, his portrait being painted when he was about eighty by Sir Charles Eastlake. The traditions about Betty, Maria’s daughter, were that she was tall, handsome, had thirty gowns, was an omnivorous reader, and one who owned a stock of books of exceptional extent for a yeoman’s daughter living in a remote place.1

1 A curious reminiscence by her daughter bears testimony to her rather striking features. She was crossing the fields with the latter as a child, a few years after Waterloo, when a gentleman shouted after her: ‘ A relation of Wellington’s? You must be! That nose!’ He excitedly followed them till they were frightened, jumping over stiles till they reached home. He was found to be an officer who had fought under Wellington, and had been wounded in the head, so that he was at times deranged.

She knew the writings of Addison, Steele, and others of the Spectator group almost by heart, was familiar with Richardson and Fielding, and, of course, with such standard works as Paradise Lost and The Pilgrims Progress. From the old medical books in her possession she doctored half the village, her sheet-anchor being Culpepper’s Herbal and Dispensary; and if ever there was any doubt as to the position of particular graves in the churchyard, the parson, sexton, and relatives applied to her as an unerring authority.

But alas for her fortunes! Her bright intelligence in a literary direction did not serve her in domestic life. After her mother’s death she clandestinely married a young man of whom her father strongly disapproved. The sturdy yeoman, apparently a severe and unyielding parent, never forgave her, and never would see her again. His unbending temper is illustrated by the only anecdote known of him. A fortune-telling gipsy had encamped on the edge of one of his fields, and on a Sunday morning he went to order her away. Finding her obdurate he said: ‘If you don’t take yourself off I’ll have you burnt as a witch!’ She pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, and threw it into her fire, saying, ‘If that burn I burn’. The flames curled up round the handkerchief, which was his best, of India silk, but it did not burn, and she handed it back to him intact. The tale goes that he was so impressed by her magic that he left her alone.

Not so long after the death of this stern father of Elizabeth’s — Hardy’s maternal great-grandfather — her husband also died, leaving her with several children, the youngest only a few months old. Her father, though in comfortable circumstances, had bequeathed her nothing, and she was at her wit’s end to maintain herself and her family, if ever widow was. Among Elizabeth’s children there was one, a girl, of unusual ability and judgment, and an energy that might have carried her to incalculable issues. This was the child Jemima, the mother of Thomas Hardy. By reason of her parent’s bereavement and consequent poverty under the burden of a young family, Jemima saw during girlhood and young womanhood some very stressful experiences of which she could never speak in her maturer years without pain, though she appears to have mollified her troubles by reading every book she could lay hands on. Moreover she turned her manual activities to whatever came in her way; grew to be exceptionally skilled in, among other things, ‘tambouring’ gloves; also was good at mantua-making, and excellent in the oddly dissimilar occupation of cookery. She resolved to be a cook in a London clubhouse; but her plans in this direction were ended by her meeting her future husband, and being married to him at the age of five-and- twenty.

He carried on an old-established building and master-masoning business (the designation of ‘builder’, denoting a manager of and contractor for all trades, was then unknown in the country districts). It was occasionally extensive, demanding from twelve to fifteen men, but frequently smaller; and the partner with whom she had thrown in her lot, though in substantial circumstances and unexceptionable in every other way, did not possess the art ofenri ching himself by business. Moreover he was devoted to church music, and secondarily to mundane, of the country-dance, hornpipe, and early waltz description, as had been his father, and was his brother also. It may be mentioned that an ancestral Thomas Hardy, living in Dorchester in 1724, was a subscriber to ‘Thirty Select Anthems in Score’, by Dr. W. Croft, organist of the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, which seems to show that the family were interested in church music at an early date.

Jemima’s husband’s father, our subject’s grandfather (the first Thomas of three in succession), when a young man living at Puddle- town before the year 1800, had expressed his strong musical bias by playing the violoncello in the church of that parish. He h?d somewhat improvidently married at one-and-twenty, whereupon his father John had set him up in business by purchasing a piece of land at Bock- hampton in the adjoining parish of Stinsford, and building a house for him there. On removing with his wife in 1801 to this home provided by his father John, Thomas Hardy the First (of these Stinsford Hardys) found the church music there in a deplorable condition, it being conducted from the gallery by a solitary old man with an oboe. He immediately set himself, with the easy-going vicar’s hearty concurrence, to improve it, and got together some instrumentalists, himself taking the bass-viol as before, which he played in the gallery of Stinsford Church at two services every Sunday from 1801 or 1802 till his death in 1837, being joined later by his two sons, who, with other reinforcement, continued playing till about 1842, the period of performance by the three Hardys thus covering inclusively a little under forty years.

It was, and is, an interesting old church of various styles from Transition-Norman to late Perpendicular. In its vaults lie many members of the Grey and Pitt families, the latter collaterally related to the famous Prime Minister; there also lies the actor and dramatist William O’Brien with his wife Lady Susan, daughter of the first Earl of Ilchester, whose secret marriage in 1764 with the handsome Irish comedian whom Garrick had discovered and brought to Drury Lane caused such scandal in aristocratic circles. ‘Even a footman were preferable’ wrote Walpole. ‘I could not have believed that Lady Susan would have stooped so low.’

Though in these modern days the ‘stooping’ might have been viewed inversely — for O’Brien, besides being jeune premier at Drury, was an accomplished and well-read man, whose presentations of the gay Lothario in Rowe’s Fair Penitent, Brisk in The Double Dealer, Sir Harry Wildair in The Constant Couple, Archer in The Beaux’ Stratagem, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the Prince in Henry the Fourth, and many other leading parts, .made him highly popular, and whose own plays were of considerable merit. His marriage annihilated a promising career, for his wife’s father would not hear of his remaining on the stage. The coincidence that both young Hardy’s grandmothers had seen and admired O’Brien, that he was one of the Stinsford congregation for many years, that young Thomas’s great-grandfather and grandfather had known him well, and that the latter as the local builder had constructed the vault for him and his wife (according to the builder’s old Day-books still in existence his workmen drank nineteen quarts of beer over the job); had been asked by her to ‘ make it just large enough for our two selves only’, had placed them in it, and erected their monument, lent the occupants of the little vault in the chancel a romantic interest in the boy’s mind at an early age.

In this church (see the annexed plan, which is reproduced from a drawing made by Hardy many years ago under the supervision of his father) the Hardys became well known as violinists, Thomas the Second, the poet and novelist’s father aforesaid, after his early boyhood as chorister beginning as a youth with the ‘counter’ viol, and later taking on the tenor and treble.

They were considered among the best church-players in the neighbourhood, accident having helped their natural bent. This was the fact that in 1822, shortly after the death of the old vicar Mr. Floyer, the Rev. Edward Murray, a connection of the Earl of Ilchester, who was the patron of the living, was presented to it. Mr. Murray was an ardent musician and performer on the violin himself, and the two younger Hardys and sometimes their father used to practise two or three times a week with him in his study at Stinsford House, where he lived instead of at the Vicarage.

Thus it was that the Hardy instrumentalists, though never more than four, maintained an easy superiority over the larger bodies in parishes near. For while Puddletown west-gallery, for instance, could boast of eight players, and Maiden Newton of nine, these included wood-wind and leather — that is to say, clarionets and serpents — which were apt to be a little too sonorous, even strident, when zealously blown. But the few and well-practised violists of Stinsford were never unduly emphatic, according to tradition.