In life divided

The ten pallbearers at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on 16 January 1928 included Kipling, Barrie, Housman, Gosse, Galsworthy, Shaw and both the prime minister and leader of the oppposition. This distinguished gathering was not strictly necessary for the job at hand, because Hardy’s coffin merely contained his ashes — all that there was room for in Poets’ Corner. At exactly the same time in Dorset, at a smaller funeral, a casket containing Hardy’s unincinerated heart was being borne to its final resting place alongside his parents and his first wife in the churchyard at Stinsford. As Mark Ford observes, this macabre compromise between the nation’s and the author’s wishes seems appropriate for a writer whose life and career was divided between the capital and the countryside.

It also neatly reflected Hardy’s poetic ‘obsession with the physical and imaginative afterlives of the dead’, a persistent and disturbing theme inspired by graveyards in Old St Pancras as well as ‘Mellstock’.