Hardy the Architect

THOMAS HARDY’S FAMOUS OBSERVATION that “if he had his life over again he would prefer to be a small architect in a country town” may have owed more to the ruminative melancholia engendered by the date—Armistice Day (November 11) 1927, exactly two months before he died—than to any great late-life regrets about not having followed his career of first choosing. But the road not taken, or rather taken but departed from more than fifty years earlier, had remained for him a permanent reference point on the map of his life. Architects and architecture recur in the characterization, plots, narrative viewpoints, contextual detail, and imagery of his fiction. His poetry is filled with perspectival idiosyncrasies (not least in the illustrations that accompanied his first volume of poems, Wessex Poems, 1898) that suggest an architectural eye whose acuteness never dimmed. He designed his own house, to his own satisfaction if not entirely that of either of his wives. His opinion on church restoration was solicited, though not always deferred to, on many occasions by those who valued it as much for what they saw as the persuasive power of his eminence as for his technical and historical authority. Son of a stone-mason and builder, trusted pupil and junior colleague of older architects (provincial and metropolitan—most notably society architect Sir Arthur Blomfield), Hardy indubitably knew his trade with all the sophistication of a fully-trained professional. While he may by his early thirties have decided his future in favour of writing, he was by that point well past the merely preliminary pupillage stage of an evolving alternative career.

That being so, it is surprising that until Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating new study the only Hardy scholar to have paid really sustained attention to Hardy’s activities and status as an architect has been Claudius Beatty, editor of Hardy’s Architectural Notebook (1966; 1995; 2007) and authority on his work for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Rattenbury’s book, which pays generous compliment to Beatty’s pioneering research, starts from the paired propositions that Hardy deserves listing “amongst the greatest of all conceptual architects” and that his creation of Wessex “was drawn from the architectural ideas of his time, but that it predicted some of the most inventive architectural work of our own age.” In short, Wessex was in itself a life-long “architectural project.” This conviction, which becomes cumulatively more persuasive as the book advances, adds an important new dimension to Simon Gatrell’s outstanding work (see particularly, Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex, 2003) on Hardy’s conscious and constant refinement of the idea of Wessex throughout his career.

This is conspicuously the book of an architectural scholar, filled with aperçus that only a specialist training can give. Organized into three broadly conceived parts—“Vision,” “Realisation,” “Extension”—its twenty-two chapters range from consideration of Hardy’s architectural training and his use of architectural motifs in the early novels; through the uncertainties of the middle fiction years and the gradual solidifying of the idea of Wessex; and on to the fulfilment of the last great novels. With his move to poetry and increasing attention to drama, the Wessex-based architectural theme undergoes variations but remains dominant. Its extensions from literature into life (the building, and later remodelling, of Max Gate; the collaboration with photographer Hermann Lea on exploration of the real Dorset landscape that informs the imaginative Wessex; the assistance given to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; the active interest taken in stagings of dramatic adaptations of his work) all prove remarkably suggestive for the presiding architectural metaphor.

Rattenbury’s recurrent emphasis on the anticipatory modernity of many of Hardy’s architectural ideas is particularly striking in the context of the frequency with which he has been seen as a key figure— perhaps the central figure because of his creative longevity and movement from fiction to poetry—in the transition from literary Victorianism to modernism. For Rattenbury, Hardy the architect was above all a great...