From West Dorset to Westminster

Claire Tomalin is an accomplished biographer. While she recognises Hardy’s genius, this book is not an essay in literary criticism. With great skill and sensitivity she uses his poetry, novels and his extensive correspondence to illuminate the life of a man for whom she writes ‘the wounds inflicted by life never quite healed’. He never entirely forgave the vicar of Stinsford church, where his family was buried and he himself wished to be, for preaching against members of the lower orders who presumed to escape from their station in life by entering the professions. This was precisely the ambition of Hardy. As a boy of 12 he taught himself Latin, the entry ticket to a wider world beyond the confines of the Dorset village of his birth.

The great strength of this book is its treatment of the women who shaped Hardy’s life: Jemima, his mother; his first wife Emma Gifford and her successor as his wife on Emma’s death, Florence Dugdale. In 1840 Jemima gave birth to Hardy, a sickly child, the result of a brief encounter with the local builder who did the decent thing and married her. She had been a domestic servant for 17 years in the great aristocratic houses of Wessex; she hoped to better herself by becoming a cook in London, but her husband refused to leave the village of Bockhampton. She felt trapped in her marriage. Like D. H. Lawrence’s mother, an educated woman who read books, married to a miner whose familiar home was the local pub, she was determined that her son should make a respectable career.

Hardy entered professional life as an architect’s assistant in Dorchester, then worked with Blomfield, a fashionable and busy London architect who profited from the boom for restoring churches to what was conceived to be a pure Gothic style.