Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner

by Mark Ford

Because Thomas Hardy is so closely associated with the rural Wessex of his novels, stories, and poems, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner. Focusing on the formative five years in his early twenties when Hardy lived in the city, but also on his subsequent movement back and forth between Dorset and the capital, Mark Ford shows that the Dorset-London axis is critical to an understanding of his identity as a man and his achievement as a writer.

Thomas Half a Londoner presents a detailed account of Hardy’s London experiences, from his arrival as a shy, impressionable youth, to his embrace of radical views, to his lionization by upper-class hostesses eager to fête the creator of Tess. Drawing on Hardy’s poems, letters, fiction, and autobiography, it offers a subtle, moving exploration of the author’s complex relationship with the metropolis and those he met or observed publishers, fellow authors, street-walkers, benighted lovers, and the aristocratic women who adored his writing but spurned his romantic advances.

The young Hardy’s oscillations between the routines and concerns of Dorset’s Higher Bockhampton and the excitements and dangers of London were crucial to his profound sense of being torn between mutually dependent but often mutually uncomprehending worlds. This fundamental self-division, Ford argues, can be traced not only in the poetry and fiction explicitly set in London but in novels as regionally circumscribed as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles .

Genres: Biography

336 pages, Hardcover

Published October 10, 2016

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting insight into the important influence London had on Hardy, skillfully illustrated with copious references to his works. Not light read but of real interest to die hard Hardy enthusiasts.

[Ashley Amos · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a satisfying read about the life of Thomas Hardy with a clear slant towards Hardy’s time spent living in London. It’s an interesting and often neglected aspect of Hardy’s life, which is often overlooked owing to the beautiful Dorset landscapes that dominate his novels as Wessex.

Mark Ford does demonstrate how London both fascinates and hurts Hardy, making him aware of how far his social mobility could take him with access to the privileged but also how strong, enduring and impassable were the social barriers of the British class system. There are periods in this book where Hardy seems to wander about the metropolis admiring and dreaming about women who were beyond his reach and bound to reject him.

For me, London features as a destructive influence on Hardy’s marriage to Emma Gifford; Emma does not seem to have been a fan of the Big Smoke, which made Hardy very ill in the winter of 1880-1. I would have liked this text to have explored that issue further.

There is much detail about where Hardy lived in London, such as Westbourne Park Villas near Paddington Station and Tooting. Ford focuses on the gradual transition from Hardy working in an architect’s firm to becoming a full time writer, initially of poetry and then novels.

However, once we get to the novels, Ford becomes distracted by the structure and characters of these novels and their reception from critics and publishers. Hardy as a part-time Londoner seems to fall from view.

Nonetheless, this is a satisfying read.

[Prisoner 071053 · Rating 5 out of 5]

That rare perfect mix of literary biography and criticism. The mark to which all criticism ought to aspire.