Hardy the Londoner

Ford is a poet and critic who recently published a large anthology of writings about London. The “Half a Londoner” subtitle here marks the division between the man who spent his youth and most of his later age in Wessex—Hardy’s name for the rural patch of England where so many of his novels and poems are rooted—and the urban metropolis where much of his formative life as a writer was spent. Ford justly terms his book “the first comprehensive account of Hardy as a ‘London man,’ ” and his claim is richly documented by the variety of ways, in life and letters, where the great city matched the country in enabling the writer’s astonishing career.

Hardy came to live in London in 1862 when he was 21 and, two weeks after his arrival, began to work with the architect Arthur Blomfield, whose practice specialized in church repair. During the next five years of working with Blomfield, Hardy carried on an extraordinary regime of self-education in literature and the fine arts. In the biography of him published after his death—under his wife Florence’s name but written, except for the final pages, by Hardy himself—he describes his frequenting of the National Gallery:

He recommended this habit of aesthetic education, rather than what could be derived from guidebooks. Back in Dorset, it had been his habit to read the Iliad and Aeneid before heading off to work with a local architect. In London, he upped the ante dangerously when, for a prolonged period, “he had been accustomed to shut himself up in his rooms in Westbourne Park Villas every evening from six to twelve, reading incessantly, instead of getting out for air after the day’s confinement.”

Meanwhile, Hardy was writing poems and sending them off to be rejected by the magazines. A number of them would subsequently form a substantial part of the volume that signaled the conclusion to his career as a novelist. Wessex Poems, published in 1898 and illustrated with 32 of his own drawings, began the 30-year stretch until his death during which he would publish seven further volumes to make a total of 948 poems. This achievement, coming after 14 novels and numerous short stories, stands as one unsurpassed by any other writer in English, past or to come. Ford is extremely resourceful in his selection of Hardy poems that bear close relation to his experience as an uprooted man in his twenties, attempting to come to terms with what one poem refers to as “the crass clanging town.” It was London, Ford declares, that “drove Hardy in on himself for long stretches,” even as it encouraged him in the “dramatic and personative” poems that Hardy said characterized his first volume.

A poignant instance of the “personative” effects Hardy was striving for occurs in a poem dated July 4, 1872, but published only decades later. Its first section describes the evening sun casting its rays on the busy commerce of Oxford Street; in its second, a Hardy-like figure confronts it:

In fact, by the time he wrote “Coming Up Oxford Street: Evening,” Hardy’s career as a novelist was fully launched with his just-published second book, Under the Greenwood Tree. The novel came to the attention of Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, one of the chief men of letters of the 19th-century’s later years. Stephen arranged for the publisher Smith, Elder to publish Hardy’s next novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, the book that would make his reputation and remains today one of his best. It appeared in installments in Stephen’s Cornhill Magazine and it was Stephen who (Ford writes) initiated Hardy into the mysteries of “the fine line between the acceptable and the offensive that mid-Victorian upholders of morality policed so vigorously.”

Despite the huge popular success of Far from the Madding Crowd, some critics were unconvinced—notably Henry James, who declared that everything human in the book was “factitious and insubstantial.” “The only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs,” added James, twisting the knife. Another influential London reviewer found its “dose of sensation” a “bastard substitute” for true art. Ford brings up these negative responses to explain why, in his next novel, Hardy turned away from a bucolic setting to dramatize a provincial heroine who invents herself in high society by “deploying every artifice at her command.” The result was The Hand of Ethelberta, a novel that, for good reason, only the confirmed reader of Hardy is likely to pick up. Along with The Well-Beloved, published in 1897 after he had turned his attention to poetry, they are (as Ford calls them) “experimental,” but to this reader at least they feel like fanciful improvisations that add little to Hardy’s achievement.

As Hardy became an ever more popular novelist, he mingled with an extraordinary number of people: writers such as James, Robert Browning, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, plus a number of younger women whom he found strongly interesting. As Ford writes, the erotic and the literary began to collide, and as his wife carried out her domestic routines at Hardy’s Dorset home—her piety “curdling into evangelism,” as Ford neatly puts it—Hardy succeeded in escaping on a number of occasions to the city for social recreation. The younger married woman in whom he invested much of his affection, Florence Henniker, withdrew from anything beyond friendship, and one of Hardy’s most heartfelt poems sadly registered that fact. “A Broken Appointment” begins: You did not come, / And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. Later he laments, You love not me, / And love alone can lend you loyalty.

Ford is adept at finding passages in the fiction and the biography that show Hardy as a writer about the city to be compared with Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or T. S. Eliot. His “stylization of the urban,” as in The Well-Beloved, produced dreamlike fantasies like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Here is an entry dated 1888:

What is most valuable about Ford’s study is the number of poems he selects to illustrate the London narrative. In the critical rediscovery and reappraisal, during the later part of the 20th century, Hardy’s poems about his recently dead first wife, Emma, have taken up the bulk of attention: From Poems of 1912-1913, works such as “The Going,” “After a Journey,” “The Voice,” and “At Castle Boterel” have received much appreciation. But the surprising thing about rereading Hardy’s poems is how many of them in previous readings, one somehow neglected. Even though I have taught and written about Hardy for decades, I was moved by Ford’s encouragement to take up ones read before, but overlooked. Some, though not all, are poems Hardy wrote as a young man in the city but didn’t publish till later on.

A list of those I suspect other readers are unfamiliar with would include “Postponement,” “The Musing Maiden,” “The Woman I Met,” “The Change,” “In the British Museum,” “In a Whispering Gallery,” and “In St. Paul’s a While Ago.” One of the most poignant is “In the Seventies,” from which I quote the opening and final stanzas that portray a young man with an as-yet-unrealized vision:

William H. Pritchard is the author, most recently, of Writing to Live: Commentaries on Literature and Music.