Hardy's Resting Places

THOMAS HARDY'S EVENTFUL and productive life that almost wasn't (his midwife mistook him for a stillborn baby and cast him aside for a time) has spawned a number of fine popular and scholarly biographies. It could be tempting to ask what could be added to the already voluminous record. Mark Ford's Thomas Hardy: Half A Londoner deftly and convincingly answers that question. The book suggests that our conception of how to situate Hardy in space has become calcified and rigid, with an excessive focus on Dorchester and the rural. Ford asks: what can be gained if we shift our gaze, if we acknowledge that Hardy's remains exist in both country and city, then and now?

Ford's fast-paced, engaging literary biography asserts that "the focus on Wessex in critical responses to Hardy's work has obscured the importance on London to his career and development." The book goes on to source Hardy's interest in the city/country divide—a divide emphasized thematically in The Mayor of Casterbridge and in several poems—within the five years in London that launched his career, and his seasonal trips to the city thereafter. Ford sees in the London forays seeds of Hardy's overlooked talents in writing the urban, particularly in his poetry. Ford's sly nod to this Wessex-centered tradition comes in the map of London that precedes his biography, in contrast to the maps of Max Gate, Dorchester and surrounds that precede other biographies and the many maps of "Wessex" that introduce Hardy's published works. The text that follows tracks Hardy through that city, with minimal detours, in order to suggest that "the spectral presence of the city" emanates through all of Hardy's oeuvre. The book traces the "social, sexual, and professional opportunities" that kept this Dorchester man from staying away from London for too long, and looks for London smells and sounds within even his most rural-facing works.

The book begins with a vivid account of Hardy's death and burial in two places—his heart in Stinsford and his ashes in Westminster Abbey. Then, it swings back to his first extended stay in London as a young adult and the mature summers spent there that led him to call himself "half a Londoner" in a letter to Edmund Gosse. The book nears its end by noting Hardy's relative rootlessness while in London (he "never felt able to afford a permanent London residence"), how the city facilitated his extra-marital frustrations and attempts, how London "exacerbated his sense of the complexities and incongruities latent in the relationship between the private and the public," and, finally, how the start of the Great War caused a shift in, but not an end to, Hardy's intimacies with the great City. In Ford's words, "Hardy's reluctance to brave the crowds and confusion of the city in his late seventies and eighties by no means resulted in an old age spent isolated from sophisticated or artistic metropolitan circles: for London, in these years, came to him."

In between, we are treated to many small details about Hardy's life in London. We read about his feelings about crowds, romantic disasters at railway stations, and London's famous architecture. We follow his writing life in and out of the city in both health and illness and convalescence. We receive an extended treatment of Hardy's lost novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, and its replacements, Desperate Remedies and A Pair of Blue Eyes. Ford does not shy away from equating Hardy with the male protagonists of his novels (from Will Strong of Poor Man and the Lady to the unfortunate Jude), which provides even more ways for Ford to supplement gaps in the biographical record.

Occasionally, Ford allows himself to stray from his main goal, which is to present Hardy as more of a cosmopolitan club-life author and man than is often considered. The detours are reflections of Ford's love...