The inconsistency between how they lived their own lives — the sort of people that they seemed to be — and the virtues they championed in their heroes and heroines, so much greater in male than in female authors (from which category I exclude George Eliot) is possibly nowhere more marked than in the case of Thomas Hardy. The creator of Marty South, Giles Winterborne and Gabriel Oak was himself a stinker.
‘ ’E didn’t ’ave nothing to say to the likes o’ we,’ our old gardener used to say. Born in Bockhampton, and familiar in his boyhood with the presence of the great man if not his notice, he had no opinion of him. I was ‘doing’ The Woodlanders in the sixth form at Clifton at the time, and used to pump him about Thomas Hardy — not a word of praise or warmth could I get. I have met the same reaction elsewhere: the begetter of Joseph Poorgrass was not widely loved among people of that sort.
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What is more, Hardy, as a young architect, had a hand in the ‘restoration’ of our church, and he was an anti (opposed to hunting) — amazing how tender-hearted about animals predatory adulterers can be. Yet, for the sake of Tess et al, one strives to like him. What does this, latest to be edited and last item to leak from his private archive, clearly marked ‘To be destroyed uncopied’, tell us about him?
It is in effect a scrapbook, compiled by the ‘mean old so-and-so’ and his much put-upon first wife Emma, started when at the age of 43 he finally returned from London to live in Dorchester. It principally, but not exclusively, comprises extracts from back numbers of the Dorset County Chronicle of 1826-30, copied in his own or Emma’s hand.
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