Emma’s death and second marriage

The sudden death on 27th November 1912 of Hardy’s wife Emma, with whom he had long been estranged, threw him into a complete disarray. After her funeral and burial in Stinsford churchyard, Hardy reproached himself that he had not realised how seriously ill she was. The death of his wife prompted him to write a number of poems that recalled his happy time with Emma when they were young. After Emma’s death Hardy did not remain alone at Max Gate. He was taken care of by his niece and a young woman, Florence Dugdale (1879-1937), who had been introduced to him while Emma was still alive. Florence was a Dorset schoolmaster’s daughter.

Florence Dugdale (1879-1937)

She was a shy, charming woman with some literary aspirations who had published a few books for children and also written poetry, though with little success. Occasionally she did research for Hardy in London when he could not do it himself. Hardy became infatuated with the young woman who admired him as a great writer, and on 6 February 1914, he married Florence, who was almost forty years younger than he.

Sadly, his second marriage soon proved to be disappointing as the first one, mainly due to the fact that Hardy was fond of “spending much of each day closeted in his study”. Florence wrote to Edward Clodd about life with Thomas Hardy: "His life here is lonely beyond words, and he spends his evenings in reading and re-reading voluminous diaries that Mrs H. has kept from the time of their marriage. Nothing could be worse for him. He reads the comments upon himself - bitter denunciations, beginning about 1891 and continuing until within a day or two of her death - and I think he will end by believing them." Florence told another friend that she felt towards him "as a mother towards a child with whom things have somehow gone wrong - a child who needs comforting - to be treated gently and with all the love possible

Final years

During the First World War Hardy was in his seventies. In spite of advanced age, he took an active part in campaigns defending Britain’s involvement in the war. He visited military hospitals and POW camps. In his last years Hardy rarely left Max Gate although he remained vital; he was still interested in world affairs. Regarded as the most outstanding writer of his time, he was frequently visited at Max Gate by writers, artists and politicians. His guests included James Barrie, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, A. E. Housman, Siegfried Sassoon, H. G. Wells, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, and many others.

From 1920 until 1927, he worked secretly on his autobiography, which was published in two volumes (1928 and 1930) as the work of Florence Hardy. It was later alleged that Florence had only typed the manuscript and added some minor corrections, but in fact, Florence’s emendations into the text seem to have been extensive. She probably reduced the number of references to Emma, included some anecdotes related to Hardy and added a few letters. Hardy destroyed almost all papers which he did not want to leave after his death. In 1924, he watched a dramatised version of his novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles given by the Hardy Players, an amateur group from Dorchester. The performance was so impressive that Hardy, despite his eighty years, became infatuated with the young actress who played Tess.

After his eighty-seventh birthday Hardy seemed much weaker than before. He did not leave Max Gate and stayed long in bed. He became increasingly reclusive and reticent about his past life. In the autumn 1927 he fell seriously ill. He died on the evening of 11 January 1928. Before he died he asked his wife to read a verse from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Gittings, 640):

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev’n with Paradise devise the snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blackened — Man’s forgiveness give — and take!

Strangely enough, Hardy had two simultaneous funerals. His body was cremated and placed (probably against his will) in the Poet’s Corner (image) in Westminster Abbey in London. The official funeral was attended by the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the Leader of the Opposition Ramsay MacDonald, heads of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, where Hardy was an honorary fellow, and some outstanding literary figures like James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. At exactly the same time Hardy’s heart was buried alongside his first wife in Stinsford churchyard, Dorchester. The private service at Stinsford Church was attended by his brother Henry and local people who resembled characters from Hardy’s novels. Hardy left an estate of nearly 100,000 pounds which was divided among his wife, relatives, various libraries, museums and charities. As Evelyn Hardy wrote:

Hardy’s life was not primarily one of action. He was by nature a scholar and a writer: it is what goes on in the mind that holds us, and Hardy’s was rich with stored impressions

In his long and uneventful life Thomas Hardy wrote 14 novels, more than 40 short stories published in four volumes, over 900 poems and two dramas. Apart from his prose works and poetry, Hardy left a great number of letters, notebooks, pocket-books,diaries and memoranda, but most of them were burned in accordance with his last will. Only twelve of them survived. They are the “Architectural Notebook”, the “Trumpet Major Notebook”, the “Schools of Painting” notebook, the “Studies, Specimens, etc.”, the “1867” notebook, the volumes of “Literary Notes”, “Memoranda” and the “Facts” notebook. All have been published over the last fifty years.

The Thomas Hardy Society reading from Hardy's poems in front of the Dorchester house

Dorchester house (now a Barclay's Bank) is "regarded to have been lived in by the Mayor of Casterbridge in Thomas Hardy's story of that name written in 1885."

The Hardy Tree and Plaque

St Pancras Churchyard, London

The plaque accompanying the tree explains that "before turning to writing full time," Thomas Hardy "studied architecture in London from 1862-67 under Mr. Arlhur Blomfield, an architect based in Covent Garden. During the 1860s the Midland Railway line was being built over part of the original St. Pancras Churchyard. Blomfield was commissioned by the Bishop of London to supervise the proper exhumation of human remains and dismantling of tombs. He passed this unenviable task to his protegé Thomas Hardy in. c.l865. Hardy would have spent many hours in St. Pancras Churchyard . . . overseeing the careful removal of bodies and tombs from the land on which the railway was being built. The headstones around this ashtree (Fraxinus excelsior) would have been placed here about that time. Note how the tree has since grown in amongst the stones.

"A few years before Hardy's involvement here, Charles Dickens makes reference to Old St. Pancras Churchyard in his Tale of Two Cities(1859), as the churchyard in which Roger Cly was buried and where Gerry Cruncher was known to 'fish' (a 19C term for tomb robbery and body snatching)."

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1065