Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner, Mark Ford
by Alexandra Mullen

from Hudson Review, Spring 2017

Hardy country is wind- and rain-swept Wessex, far from the madding crowd, where life's little ironies and the grim workings of chance and fate grind themselves out in fields of punctured sheep against the uncaring arena of Stonehenge. Or so I, despite reading many hundreds of pages of Hardy, would have trotted out if asked, this despite the fact that I knew perfectly well Hardy had worked in London, had lived in London, had quite enjoyed being famous in London, and is even half-buried in London. The scholar, poet, and essayist Mark Ford has pondered these facts seriously, with the result that he presents us with a new vision of London as Hardy country too.

Hardy's movement, both physical and imaginative, between Dorset and London marks the poles of his writing. Ford believes Hardy's "oscillations as a young man between the routines and concerns of Higher Bockhampton and the excitements and dangers of London were crucial to the development of his profound personal sense of self-division, of being torn between worlds that were mutually dependent but often mutually uncomprehending." Some of Hardy's earliest surviving literary work dissects these desires. In 1866, Hardy picked apart Aesop's fable of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. In "Dream of the City Shopwoman," the title character chafed at "city people's snap and sneer." Like "Ixion in a peasouper," as Ford writes, she aches for a Wordsworthian restoration of nature:

O God, that creatures framed to feel
A yearning nature's strong appeal
Should writhe on this eternal wheel
ln rayless grime.

In the sonnet "From Her in the Country," Hardy ventriloquizes the frustrations of a woman who tries to be satisfied with her Wordsworthian landscape—"I stood / Urging new zest for bird, and bush, and tree"—but she can't stop thinking about "city din and sin, / Longing to madness I might move therein!" Ford believes these internal and external bifurcations led Hardy to explore themes of "change, loss, and uncertainty" and also fostered "the diversity of Hardy's oeuvre, his willingness to explore and to experiment."

London and Dorset might not have thought much about their connections, but they had a symbiotic relationship for all that. Ford singles out a scene in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) in which Tess and Angel Clare drive along the country miles through a rainy night to put the new milk on the train for London.

"Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts tomorrow won't they?" [Tess] asked. "Strange people that we have never seen."
   "Yes—I suppose they will. Though not as we send it. When its strength has been lowered, so that it may not get up into their heads."
   "Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and centurions, ladies and tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a cow."
   "Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions."
   "Who don't know anything of us, and where it comes from; or think how we two drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain that it might reach 'em in time?"
   "We did not drive entirely on account of these precious Londoners; we drove a little on own—"

—and thereby follows a love scene, gently tinged with irony of course. The country girl Tess is interested if ignorant; she responds imaginatively to the oddity of their milk as the link between cows to courting couples, from babies to centurions. She even imagines (as Hardy in his poems so often does) her own insignificance. Angel is more worldly, and sweet with it, but not as sophisticated as he might think. Londoners didn't dilute milk because of hangovers; milk was diluted to make a profit. The dilution—and sometimes adulteration—of London milk had, by the 1870s when Tess is set, become enough of a byword to raise questions in Parliament. Angel, an educated minister's son who is remaking himself as a dairy farmer, gently teases Tess's mistaken notion about centurions, but his own misprisions are more serious: he sentimentalizes the wholesomeness of country life. Unbeknownst to him, Tess has already been seduced—and perhaps raped—by Alec, borne and buried a child. Tess knows, and isn't telling. We know, too. If we're practiced readers of Hardy, we also know that Tess and Angel will not be sharing the milk of human kindness for long.

Negotiations might be lopsided and transactions misguided. Indeed, in this passage Ford notes Hardy's "covert reference" to London publishers, who diluted his strong copy for the sake of the Grundys. That's a reference that at the time only Hardy would have gotten. The country Hardy hid his game in a covert; the city Hardy learned when to flush it out to sell. As his career unfolded, he was only too aware of his own dependence on the country as commodity and the city as market—and indeed on his ability, learned in the city, to produce the version of the country designed to appeal to the city's tastes. As a novelist who travelled—commuted, almost—between Dorset and London, Hardy must have tingled with his awareness of how much each community was ignorant of their connectedness. And who can say where his true self lay?

Hardy was born in 1840 in a country parish a mile or so outside the small city of Dorchester about 130 miles from London. At his birth, a trip to London would have begun, as it had from time almost immemorial, on foot or, if you were luckier, by horse, market-wagon, coach, or carriage. When he was seven, the railway came to Dorchester where you could catch a train to Southampton and change for London. It was primitive—the cars were open, Hardy recalled in a later short story so that country people in transit meeting with typical English weather "resembled people who had been out all night in an open boat on a rough sea, rather than inland excursionists for pleasure."

When he was nine, he got on the train to London. He and his mother were off to help his pregnant aunt and had to spend the night in town before transferring to a different line. London already existed in his head as a place of literary imagination. His favorite book—"the most powerful literary influence of his boyhood," he once reportedly said—was a melodramatically absurd historical novel by William Harrison Ainsworth, Old Saint Paul's (1841). John Sutherland calls it a cross between Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, it is, Ford says, "so turgid and inept and repetitive as to be almost unreadable." They're both right, but Ainsworth obviously knew his audience—it was serialized three times between 1841 and 1846, and the nine-year-old Hardy knew it well enough to use it as a kind of map on his overnight stay.

But why did Hardy get dragged through London at all? Although he wouldn't have known it then, his role was probably to have been a mini-chaperone to prevent his mother from being accosted on the streets as a prostitute. His mother would have known all about London dangers, for Jemima Hand, as she then was, had spent a bit of time in London in her twenties accompanying one of the churchy families she worked for as a household servant. She presumably also knew about where some of those prostitutes came from—about half had been household servants. In his twenties, Hardy wrote a knockabout music hall turn of a poem about a Ruined Maid. It begins with a chance meeting between a countrywoman on a London visit running into an old acquaintance:

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?"—
"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.
…
—"I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about town!"—
"My dear—a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

It's hard to say which woman in this interchange should gloat and which repine. Hardy wrote this poem in 1866, the same year as the revised Contagious Diseases Act. As a mother, Jemima went to extreme measures to prevent her four children from being ruined. She envisaged them chastely pairing off with each other, Thomas with his younger sister Mary for example.

Nonetheless, at twenty-one, in 1862, Hardy went to London to make his way as a draughtsman for an architect specializing in ecclesiastical architecture. As a homesick son of a master mason, Hardy noticed the grand buildings faced with white Portland stone—stone that came from Dorset. Did he take that as an analog for how rough-hewn country material could be polished? When his father visited him just a few months later, young Thomas saw him with new eyes and ears. In a letter to his sister Mary, he describes his father's already clichéd tourist's trip to climb the stairs inside the Monument—made of Portland stone, naturally—commemorating the Great Fire of London: "He said he [should] not have gone up only 'he zid a lot of other voke guane up."' Ford notes his "somewhat patronizing humor that calls to mind Pip's attitude to Joe Gargery when he appears in his London rooms in Dickens' Great Expectations." Hardy's accent might have changed, but, as it happens, London's effects on him were far more than superficial.

Arthur Blomfield's office was just off the Strand, looking out over the Thames. From his office window, Hardy would have been able to see the beginning of the great engineer Joseph Bazalgette's work on the Thames Embankment; presumably Hardy usually kept the window closed because Bazalgette's work on the sewers for London after the Great Stink of 1858 had not yet begun. In the year of the Great Stink, Trollope published a novel about three clerks who worked just down the street from Hardy's office, at Somerset House. (Trollope had spent a fair few unhappy years—bored at work, aimlessly in debt at leisure—as a London clerk at the General Post Office.) Trollope writes feelingly about "the dullness" of the bachelor clerk's life of tedious work in stuffy offices. Certainly Hardy, whose firm focused on restoration rather than creation, thought his work "monotonous and mechanical." Trollope's clerks find dull work "is fully atoned for by the excitement of that which follows it in London"—they carouse in dives over gin-and-water, get over-familiar with barmaids (even calling them by their Christian names), and skip church. Hardy was not precisely this kind of clerk.

Hardy did experience some of London's more obvious pleasures: he went to the opera and wandered through, without lingering too long among the prostitutes, pleasure grounds like Cremorne Gardens. He had the ordinary daydreams: "Wondered what woman, if any, I should be thinking about in five years' time." He was also unusually scholarly and studious. Even by Victorian standards of self-improvement, he kept his free hours earnestly occupied by attending improving exhibitions, working in the reading room at the Kensington Museum, taking notes on painters at art galleries, learning shorthand, practicing the violin, taking a French class at King's College London, and even, for a time, attending his mother's former church, St. James Piccadilly. For a time he had a roommate, a fellow clerk at Blomfield's, who would read out loud from Modern Painters. But much of the time he was on his own, reading, thinking, taking notes, writing poetry and fiction, brooding.

From the notebooks he kept at the time that survive, it seems as if he spent every nonworking wakeful moment absorbing culture in, if not necessarily of, London. He would even read while walking to and from work, as he recalled in a fan letter to Swinburne, "to my imminent risk of being knocked down." The year after Swinburne's death in 1909, he turned this London memory from forty-five years before into "A Singer Asleep," an elegy dedicated to Swinburne:

O that far morning of a summer day
When, down a terraced street whose pavements lay
Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes,
I walked and read with a quick glad surprise
New words, in classic guise.

It's no surprise that a young person, alone in a city, would be susceptible to the romance of melancholy, imagining himself a creature apart, uniquely special among the uniform streets and pavements. What is surprising in this late poem is the older Hardy's recollection of his earlier self's "quick glad surprise." Did nostalgia color his view? A similar persona in a London poem felt no such dawn. Indeed, he felt he was walking in the opposite direction. It records a gloomier commute with no kindred spirit, even in book form, to accompany him.

"Coming Up Oxford Street: Evening"

The sun from the west glares back,
And the sun from the watered track,
And the sun from the sheets of glass,
And the sun from each window-brass;
Sun-mirrorings, too, brighten
From show-cases beneath
The laughing eyes and teeth
Of ladies who rouge and whiten.
And the same warm god explores
Panels and chinks of doors;
Problems with chymists' bottles
Profound as Aristotle's
He solves, and with good cause,
Having been ere man was.

Also he dazzles the pupils of one who walks west,
A city-clerk, with eyesight not of the best,
Who sees no escape to the very verge of his days
From the rut of Oxford Street into open ways;
And he goes along with head and eyes flagging forlorn,
Taking no interest in things, and wondering why he was born.

Hardy was no longer a city-clerk when he wrote this poem in 1872; in fact he had two published novels under his belt, the sensationalistic Desperate Remedies and the cheerful Under the Greenwood Tree. But the emotion of this poem clearly comes from what he recalled as the dreary course of just a few years before—in one draft, Hardy cast this poem in the first person: e.g., "wondering why I was born."

Perhaps reading backwards from the later poem, I see glimmers of Swinburne in the "warm god" of the unnamed Apollo here, but this sun is glaring—blinding even. The clerk's head is lowered not because he is entranced by an illuminating book but out of despair, "taking no interest in things," as he trudges, flagging, along the straight flagged miles of Oxford Street. The poem tries to break itself out of a rut—it's unable to settle into a stanza or meter or even a rhyme scheme, temporarily breaking out of couplets for a bit at the fifth line—but the conclusion claps inexorably shut.

Mark Ford finds the first half of the poem more glorious than I—a "hymn  to some urban Apollo, a paean to a 'warm' metropolitan god of light and plenty and erotic possibility," like the Londoner Keats's "conspiring sun" in "To Autumn." But Ford stresses "the contrast between its first and second sections [which] vividly embodies the conflicted polarities of Hardy's feelings about the city": "this disjunction between the two sections' meters and genres reflects the personal Rubicon that Hardy reached in the summer of 1872"—what Hardy identified as a "parting of the ways," where he returned to London ready to commit himself fully as a professional writer. This was a very different parting of the ways from five years before, when unsatisfying work plus incessant autodidacticism plus frustrated dreams of authorship led past anomie to a breakdown. In 1867, health and religious faith gone, Hardy left London to return to the small architectural practice where he'd previously worked. It might very well have seemed that London had beaten him.

Instead, Ford argues, London had been half the making of him. The novel that Hardy failed to get published during that last year in London he called The Poor Man and the Lady. It no longer exists even in manuscript, although he ransacked bits of it for a novella called An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress. But Ford sees a long arc of creative energy coming from its implosion: "It is perhaps ill-judged to figure a book that caused Hardy such grief and humiliation as a supernova, but his first three published works of fiction all contain significant amounts of material displaced from this lost ur-novel, and its influence can even be detected in as distant a star as Jude." (Jude the Obscure was Hardy's final novel, appearing in 1895.) London continued to live in the poetry he wrote to the end of his life in 1928.

Particularly when you're young, cities allow you to explore yourself, lose yourself, re-invent yourself, discover you can't stop being yourself. . . London did all this for Hardy. It allowed him to become more himself as he tried on different selves, many of which we can still see despite the fact that late in life, after ghosting his autobiography through his second wife, Florence, he burned almost all his private material. Only five letters from his first sojourn in London survive, but he wrote many poems in those five formative years, none published at the time but thirty-one of which still exist. When he finally—more than thirty years later—published his first book of poetry he opened with thirteen of them; he dotted others throughout later volumes. To an extraordinary degree, the young man in Westbourne Park Villas W2 was suffused in the proleptic nostalgia of the young. The poems speak of once radiant feelings that have dimmed, of the grim pointlessness of our struggling life, of the inevitability of decay, death, and thus even more decay. This is the Hardy we all know and love.
The sonnet "Hap" already imagines "some vengeful god" personally causing and mocking the speaker's suffering—and then imagines the possibility that there is not even a vengeful god to blame, merely the "purblind Doomsters" of "Crass Casualty" and "dicing Time." Love—predominantly its absence but occasionally its presence—worries at Hardy. In one sonnet the (male) speaker asks never to feel "the fateful thrilling," "the hot ado of fevered hopes," the agonized "chilling" of disappointed love. (If this was an authentic hope, it was doomed to fail—even in old age Hardy was susceptible to falling in love.) The fate of female beauty occupies him—curiously, Hardy doesn't seem as interested in the ravages of time on the male physiognomy; at least four sonnets variously inhabit a woman imagining the reactions of both her lover and herself when she is aged or dead. He takes on the masks of an older man, too. In "The Bridal" (subtitled "Nature's Indifference"), he imagines the "rare" and "sovereign" children that will never be born to him and his now fashionably married former love; he is "grieved that lives so matched should miscompose," but the Great Dame Nature, like Pierre, "does not care." Another persona laments the effects of "Time the tyrant" on the woman he had loved:

I marked her ruined hues,
Her custom-straitened views,
And asked, "Can there indwell
My Amabel?"

These poems as a group are odd. They can be callow and metaphysical, simple and virtuosic. Mark Ford reads them with unusual suppleness and seriousness. With London spectacles on, he spots tiny details embedded in and under these poems. If you're just reading the poem on the page, for instance, "Amabel" has no obvious connection to London at all. Ford points an important one out: the poem commemorates a London reunion between Hardy and Julia Augusta Martin, an older woman who, Miss Havisham-like, had taken up the young Thomas in Dorset before moving to town. Ford notes too that the very name "Amabel" comes from Hardy's childhood favorite, Ainsworth's Old Saint Paul's; the novel and the generous Mrs. Martin perhaps had parallel associations of former adoration and current disillusion. There is also a tinge of irony, originally apparent only to Hardy and perhaps even aimed at himself: "By giving the ageing Amabel of the poem the name of the desirable young heroine of the novel that made such an impression on him when young, Hardy . . . combines female freshness and beauty with an awareness of the skull beneath the skin." In these poems Hardy explores aspects of himself, becoming variously comfortable in the guises of others, working through ideas and situations that interest him. The schooling he gave himself in London stayed with him.

For Hardy did not leave London behind. After his marriage and his burgeoning success, he made annual lengthy trips to London, renting places from suburban Surbiton to Bloomsbury and the fringes of Mayfair accepting invitations to fashionable dinners, and becoming a clubbable man at the Athenaeum. He also revisited the themes and subjects of these early poems. With the passing of time, cheerfulness occasionally broke in upon him. Take the 1866 London poem "Postponement," about a man in winter overhearing a bird so shy of others seeing him display his love by building a nest that he never mates at all. It is a distant ancestor of another wintry poem, the remarkable "Darkling Thrush," written on the New Year's Eve of the millennium. There, the "full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited" pouring forth from the thrush gives "the fervourless" man listening "some blessed Hope," which is better than nothing.

Other late poems excavate the silted-up layers of a lifetime of London memories. Fifty-two years after he wrote about 'Melia in "The Ruined Maid," for example, Hardy wrote about another encounter between innocence and experience in "The Woman I Met," his longest London-themed poem, which he explicitly dated London 1918. This time the subjects are a streetwalking ghost who, alive, "went tempting frail youth nightly / To their death" and the older version of the "fresh bland boy" who, in her lifetime, she says, had smilingly, and naively, "deemed me chaste—me, a tinseled sinner!" She well understands the irony: "your very simplicity made me love you / Mid such town dross." "The Ruined Maid" gains part of its energy through its unmediated dialogue; in "The Woman I Met," Hardy chose instead an uncertain first-person narrator, the bland adult who has wandered back into old "haunts." He begins haltingly:

A stranger, I threaded sunken-hearted
          A lamp-lit crowd;
And anon there passed me a soul departed,
          Who mutely bowed.
In my far-off youthful years I had met her,
Full-pulsed; but now, no more life's debtor,
          Onward she slid
     In a shroud that furs half-hid.

Ford places this poem in a line of "urban poetic spectres" and Victorian prostitute poems including Thomas Hood, Baudelaire, James Thomson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and T. S. Eliot—Hardy had copied out lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" into one of his notebooks the year before he wrote this poem. The poem also includes shades of Dante, the Nicene Creed, and even some of the principles of Gothic architecture Hardy had practiced in his youth. Drawing on this lifetime of cultural possibilities, Hardy raises revenants of his past, from his first apotropaic appearance in London, to his youthful daily commutes through Seven Dials, to later visits where once a woman of the night held up a narcissus for him to smell.

Tonally, this poem is far from the rollicking "Ruined Maid." Eschewing the possibilities for sensationalism and grostesqueries, Hardy keeps the mood subdued, dream-like. The uncanny settles familiarly at home, "layering . . . the otherworld and the banal." The stroll and "dreamy dialogue" that the two figures engage in wanders through an unusual form of stanza which Hardy fills with enjambments and internal rhymes—with what casual aural art he drops "shroud" in the last line of that opening stanza. Hardy's choices are not jarring, but we're never quite sure where our next foot might fall. In one way Hardy has made the woman in the poem as stereotypical as 'Melia—this one is a harlot with a heart of gold. And the fate Hardy gives her is interesting: death in a hospital—one quite close to Westbourne Park Villas where the young Hardy had written about 'Melia—that treated venereal diseases. And yet, as Ford says, she is instinct with the "queer, suspended semi-livingness that animates so many of Hardy's ghosts"—indeed, she is far more vivid than the living man who passively listens, mutely estranged from his own past.

Hardy, of course, inhabits both figures—or should I reckon four figures, as their past and present selves walk the streets?—translating between the quick and the dead, the past and present, the mystical and the quotidian. He choreographs the Human Show and pulls the curtain back on the Moments of Vision, he scripts some Satires of Circumstance and includes himself as one of Time's Laughingstocks. As these titles from his collections of poetry indicate, Hardy's sensibility, early and late, was drawn to sharp contrasts and the dramatic ironies arising out of random eddies of interaction. Although he usually chose to write his novels and poems in a realistic register, they contain as many coincidences, fortuitous reappearances, and ghostly apparitions as anything by Dickens, sometimes even bordering on the surreal. London intensified the possibilities of hap.

It is rare that a book of literary biography and criticism opens so many divergent paths for new readings, but this is one of those books. What Mark Ford has taught me to look for is how both the idea of London and the actual London whose streets Hardy walked accentuated and solidified his thoughts on work, vocation, love, fame, and the fatefulness of temperament.

To my enormous pleasure, Ford spends as much time reading Hardy's works as he does tracing his steps and cast of mind. Although I have spent my time in this essay looking at Hardy's poems, Ford reads the novels with the same acuity and subtlety he brings to the poems—I particularly profited from the sections on The Hand of Ethelberta. Ford's learning and insight unfold in prose that is expressive as well as analytic. I should perhaps add that this book traversing Hardy's impressive oeuvre is short.

Hardy the former architect enjoyed life at Max Gate, the comfortable country house he designed—faux Queen Anne built over neolithic and Roman ruins—on the outskirts of Dorchester; Hardy the famous writer enjoyed extended stays in London where he rented rooms in all parts of town, sampling each neighborhood's flavors. In this picture, Ford finds yet another disjunction: "There is a striking separation between Hardy in his study at Max Gate, dreaming up novels that seemed to many unthinkably outrageous assaults on the orthodoxies of the day, and his conventional, professional demeanor as a London club man." Hardy the creative genius, hovering over all, relishes the irony.

*     *     *

About the Author
Alexandra Mullen is a writer living in Connecticut.

Hudson Review
New York

Editor: Paula Deitz
Founding Editor: Frederick Morgan (1922-2004)
Managing Editor: Ronald Koury
Associate Editor: Zachary Wood
Assistant Editor: Eileen Talone