In 1883 during the construction of Thomas Hardy’s house, Max Gate, excavations for a well uncovered three graves. The skeletons were resting in a foetal position, two with metal clasps around their heads. Nearby, urns that appeared to be Roman in design were discovered, along with various Romano-British clasps and a sarsen stone (which later inspired one of Hardy’s poems). Hardy, who had always taken an interest in archaeology, had unwittingly chosen to build his home in the centre of a late Neolithic enclosure. It occurred to him that this might be a bad omen and he refrained from telling his wife Emma. But in the spring of 1884 his spirits lifted when the cleared plot was thickly carpeted with primroses and wild hyacinths.

The couple had been living in a succession of rented houses in London and in the country but now Hardy yearned for his beloved Dorset. Emma had never really liked Dorset and she was estranged from Hardy’s family, just as he was from hers, but he wanted to settle close to his childhood home in Bockhampton where his parents were still living.

The land that Hardy bought lay just outside Dorchester, an hour’s walk from Bockhampton. His brother built the house according to Hardy’s plans in 1883, from Broadmayne brick and slate, and their builder father drove across to give advice. The choice of name was intended to tie a very new house into an ancient landscape. He called it Max Gate after the maximum gate of the Roman settlements and also after Henry Mack, who had been the last gatekeeper of a nearby disused toll-gate.

The site had wide sweeping views with ‘rolling, massive downs, crowned with little tree coronets before and behind’ but Hardy wanted to protect it from prying eyes.  During the eleven years since his marriage to Emma in 1874, this deeply reticent man had become a renowned novelist, his stories serialised in the best literary magazines. As his fame grew, his readers intensified their interest in his private life and this increased his desire for privacy. He surrounded Max Gate with a small dense forest of cedars and Austrian pines that darkened its interior; one visitor said the dense plantation made the house look as if it was ‘sitting in a tray of vegetation’.

In spite of Hardy’s early experience as a trainee architect, he produced a turreted red brick villa that few have admired; Ronald Blythe has noted that Max Gate has drawn some of the strongest reactions ever to a writer’s house. Some have compared it to the home of aspiring Victorian gentry rather than that of an intensely creative writer. Blythe suggests its conventional appearance might have shielded Hardy from the interest in his humble background, about which he had always been sensitive. Or possibly Emma’s consciousness of their social differences was an influence: at last Hardy could provide her with a ‘respectable’ house, with two maids, a cook and a gardener. But the maids had to carry water upstairs to the bedrooms as there was no running water and without electricity, the house was bitterly cold in winter.

At first Hardy himself found the house unprepossessing and was filled with regret. He bothered very little with beautifying the interiors and  claimed never to have cared for possessions. ‘What is in this house has come together by chance. The things I have bought, I bought as I needed them, and for the use I needed them for.’ Yet in time, both he and Emma grew to love Max Gate.

Pleasures

For all their difficulties, Hardy and Emma showed a united front to the world. When they came to Max Gate they had turned forty-five and their childlessness was a great sorrow for them both. To help Emma, Hardy agreed to a visit from her young niece and nephew. This became a regular arrangement and Hardy grew fond of these children too.

For much of their marriage there had been a degree of camaraderie between them.  They entertained at home and in London, where they went every year for the season’ and attended concerts and plays. They also took frequent holidays in England and Europe. There was a succession of cats (they kept getting run over on the railway line) and a dog called Moss, on which they lavished the affection and tenderness that was increasingly missing in their own relationship.

There was an independent and spirited side to Emma that Hardy had always admired. At fifty-five she learned to ride a bicycle and she taught Hardy too. She had a special green outfit made to match her bicycle, which she called ‘The Grasshopper’. Her colour co-ordination made the local people smile as they rode past. They covered many country miles together, one evening riding seventeen miles by the light of the moon after a harvest festival.

Thomas

In his first decade at Max Gate Hardy wrote three of his darkest novels: The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). In them he questioned accepted ideas about Victorian society, ethics, morality, religion and politics. The fatalistic melancholy he had expressed in The Mayor of Casterbridge now deepened into profound gloominess: without exception his characters suffer unremitting misfortune, brought about by accident, human inadequacy or social conventions. Good men die needlessly while bad men win. Women are trapped in bad marriages, humiliated, raped or worse. At best, life is ‘a thing to put up with’.

While Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure brought him wealth and an international reputation, they polarised opinion. Some critics were disturbed by Hardy’s portrayal of ordinary people being crushed by malevolent forces. They saw Hardy as deliberately seeking to depress, shock and outrage the moral order. This streak of pessimism, the concept of human destiny being determined by a malign fate, had always been present in his works, but now the mood had turned from grey to black. Even Hardy’s friend Edmund Gosse asked in his review of Jude, ‘What has Providence done to Mr Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at the Creator?’

It is a fair question. Hardy had climbed to the top of the literary tree without the benefit of a university education or social connections. Much of his success was due to unrelenting hard work and his own natural brilliance. But he had also been blessed with parents who, recognising his ability, introduced him to a rich cultural heritage and provided the best education they could manage (there is a story about that here). He had been supported by schoolmasters and friends, and was encouraged in his architectural career. When he was aspiring to become a writer, Emma had been prepared to wait over four years for marriage while he tried to carve out a new career and in their early years she could not have been more supportive of his literary endeavours.

Hardy’s pessimism seemed wilful but it could be attributed in part to the huge changes he was witnessing in his time. He responded with abhorrence to the growing exploitation of rural workers, the rape of the land, and a Britain increasingly and rancorously divided into a nation of rich and poor.

Claire Tomalin, one of his biographers, suggests that much of his dark view of life was innate, that

…something in his constitution made him extraordinarily sensitive to humiliations, griefs and disappointments, and that the wounds they inflicted never healed but went on hurting him throughout his life.

Certainly, his diaries from an early age show that he was prone to melancholy and apt to dwell on the macabre. As a youngster he had seen the execution of two women, one up close. This made a deep impression on him.

Hardy’s mother had instilled into the young lad a belief in a severe deity which, famously, he came to reject. While he did occasionally attend church, he would proclaim it was not because he believed in it, which he did not, but because it was ‘good for the people to get clean and come together once a week – like discipline in the army.’

But the literary scholar Irene Cooper Willis suggests he was only ever superficially emancipated from his early belief:

Hardy never cleared his mind of the notion of a ruler of the universe, and he could not reconcile this notion with the conception of that ruler’s indifference to human sorrow and suffering, above all to human virtue.

She believes this unresolved conflict about religion weakened his power as a novelist. Other critics have agreed. As Irving Howe argues:

Because Hardy remained enough of a Christian to believe that purpose courses through the universe but not enough of a Christian to believe that purpose is benevolent or the attribute of a particular Being, he had to make his plots convey the oppressiveness of fatality without positing an agency determining the course of fate…The result was that he often seems to be coercing his plots…and sometimes…he seems to be plotting against his own characters.

While he was writing these novels Hardy was experiencing the sadness of his failing marriage to Emma, which blighted the best part of his adult years (more is written about that here).

Being alone at Max Gate with Emma for any length of time had become unbearable. His growing literary fame had won him the admiration of London’s society women; their attentions were gratifying and he sought distraction in a number of friendships. Although it is believed all of these relationships were platonic, Emma felt outraged and betrayed by them.

Emma

In 1899, fourteen years after Emma had arrived at Max Gate, her friend Elspeth Thomson who was newly (and unhappily) wed to the children’s author Kenneth Graham, wrote seeking advice. Emma’s response was to warn Elspeth to expect ‘neither gratitude, nor attentions, love, nor justice, nor anything you may have set your heart on.’  She added: ‘If he belongs to the public in any way, years of devotion count for nothing.’  And while she conceded that happy marriages do exist, she suggested this was usually when both partners were Christians.

Emma’s consolation for her own barren, unhappy marriage was in religion. While her husband was losing his faith she had become increasingly devout. There are accounts of the Hardys’ relationship from various visitors to Max Gate that chart a decline in the state of their marriage. In their early days at the house there were fissures. English novelist Mabel Robinson, who stayed a week with them, was aware that Emma’s literary aspirations were largely ignored.

Max Gate was then raw-new and I never thought it showed talent in the designer, but it was pleasant…after dinner Emma lit a bright fire and he read aloud from the novel he was engaged on (The Woodlanders)…Mrs Hardy was inconsequent. Her thoughts hopped off like a bird on a bough, but never then or at any other time did the idea cross my mind that her mind (such as it was) was unhinged…as I saw her she was a perfectly normal woman without much brain power but who wanted to be a poet or novelist – I forget which. I found it hard that no one took her literary accomplishment seriously.

Later, when Hardy was being lionised and Emma increasingly sidelined, the fissures became a chasm. She grew bitter and odd in her behaviour towards him, retaliating by slighting him in public. More than thirty years after Mabel Robinson’s observation, the academic Arthur Benson (E.F. Benson’s older brother) visited Max Gate in 1912 with Edmund Gosse and recorded an account in his diary.

He described Hardy, who greeted them warmly, as small and lean, with features ‘curiously worn and blurred and ruinous’. In the dining room ‘distempered in purple, much streaked and stained’ they were served a strange, but plentiful rustic meal while Emma ‘rambled along in a very inconsequential way’. Afterwards Gosse teasingly suggested she try a cigarette. She took one and coughed all the way through it, causing Hardy to shoot her fiercely dark looks. In the garden, she became wholly absorbed in pinching yellow pods of balsam to eject their seeds. She ‘went on doing it with little jumps and elfin shrieks of pleasure’.

Benson noticed that Hardy was ‘not agreeable’ to Emma but he surmised that her ‘odd behaviour’ must have tested his patience.

It gave me a sense of something intolerable the thought of his [Hardy’s] having to live day & night with the absurd, inconsequent, huffy, rambling old lady…His patience must be incredibly tried. They don’t get on together at all. The marriage was thought a misalliance for her, when he was poor & undistinguished, and she continues to resent it.

Emma was now seventy-three and this was the year of her death. She had become decidedly eccentric although not insane, as was imputed even in her own time, much to her horror. Her isolation, rage and sense of redundancy resulted in a loss of bearings at times. But she channeled her rage into a cause, and as Michael Millgate states, ‘to her long-standing grievance against what she considered the socially demeaning aspects of her marriage were now added an enthusiasm for women’s rights’. Her interest in the women’s suffrage movement (to which Hardy also agreed in principle) motivated her to attend marches and rallies in London.  At sixty-eight she took a solo cycling trip all around Dorset, stopping for meals at cottages along the way. A year later she compiled Some Recollections, a fine piece of writing. She painted, sewed and engaged in a social life separate to Hardy’s. But she was never able to recover the tender feelings of their first love and, while she was alive, nor could he.

Fourteen years before her death Emma asked Hardy to build two rooms in the attic. One became a bedroom, the other a sitting room. She referred to them as ‘a sweet solace and refuge’, spending much of her time and eating most of her meals there, except for tea which she still shared with Hardy downstairs. After her death Hardy discovered her diaries with their ‘bitter denunciations’ about his behaviour. It was only then that he began to experience profound grief, and remorse for his neglect of her. A visit to St Juliot’s in Cornwall, where they first met, inspired a suite of brilliant poems about their love.

Florence

One of Hardy’s friendships during his marriage to Emma had been with Florence Dugdale, thirty-nine years his junior, who was to become his second wife. They had become acquainted after she wrote him a fan letter. She was quiet, gentle, eager to please, with a tendency to idolise people. Her circumstances obliged her to make her own living as a school teacher and then as a lady’s companion, and she quickly made herself indispensable to Hardy. She learned to type and began working for him, an arrangement that allowed them valid opportunities for contact. One early observer of their relationship said that Hardy seemed ‘very much taken in hand and “run”’ by Florence who seemed ‘an efficient, business-like young woman’. She came to live at Max Gate (a house she never liked) for the rest of her life.

While Emma had been still alive, Florence had spent extended periods of time at Max Gate and in November 1910 she wrote:

Mrs Hardy seems to be queerer than ever. She has just asked me whether I have noticed how extremely like Crippen, Thomas Hardy is in personal appearance. She added darkly, that she would not be surprised to find herself in the cellar one morning. All this in deadly seriousness.

Dr Crippen, a wife murderer, was due to be hanged that very year. Both he and Hardy were mild and unassuming types, with small eyes, grey moustaches, neatly cropped hair. While Emma’s comment might be interpreted as paranoia, her comparison also seems to allude to Hardy’s shadow. He donned a chipper face to the world and was unfailingly polite, but what Claire Tomalin described as the ‘raging wounded inner self’ that motivated his fiction tended to enervate those closest to him.

Florence Dugdale, heir apparent to his affections, was to become similarly disillusioned by her union with Hardy. After his second marriage friends had noticed a softening in Hardy’s facial expression. But looking back on her decision to throw in her lot with him, Florence said that she had ‘taken a leap from youth into dreary middle-age.’

Hardy was deeply distraught and haunted by Emma for many years after her death, and Florence felt betrayed by his Poems of 1912-13  in which he immortalised her. Although Hardy set most of these  poems in Cornwall, where he and Emma had first met, some were closer to home. He had had the sarsen stone that was discovered during the excavations for the house moved to the bottom of the garden, and this is part of the poem he wrote in Emma’s memory:

The Shadow on the Stone

  I went by the Druid stone 

   That broods in the garden white and lone,   

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows   

   That at some moments fall thereon

   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,   

   And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders   

   Threw there when she was gardening.

Poems such as these made Florence feel like an imposter in her own home. She told the poet Siegfried Sassoon that she felt the name Mrs Hardy belonged to ‘someone else, whom I knew for several years, and I am oppressed by the thought that I am living in her house, using her things…’

Florence felt increasingly confined to Max Gate. In his dotage Hardy tended to become anxious at the prospect of her absence, even for a brief visit to London, and would sometimes prevent her by feigning illness at the last minute. This was especially hard during the winter months ‘when the dead leaves stick on the window-pane and the wind moans and the sky is grey and you can’t even see as far as the high road’. The trees had grown thicker and higher, walling in the house and making it difficult for flowers to grow. Florence wondered whether they may have contributed to the ‘sombre hue’ of Hardy’s work.

In his last years came the awards and accolades. Hardy received five honorary doctorates, although the Nobel Prize for Literature eluded him, going to George Bernard Shaw instead.

The burden of answering the enormous load of correspondence usually fell to Florence. She was expected to protect Hardy from people he did not wish to see and in the evenings she would read aloud to him. ‘We are reading Jane Austen’, she wrote in 1920.

We have read ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Northanger Abbey’, and are now in the midst of ‘Emma’. T.H. is much amused at finding he has many characteristics in common with Mr. Woodhouse.

An important addition to the household was a terrier that Florence and Hardy named Wessex. He developed a passion for the wireless, apparently preferring music to talk shows. An aggressive beast, he terrorised the servants and savaged various guests, including John Galsworthy, but he was kissed and spoiled by the Hardys. He was even allowed on the dining table during meal times. Presumably he was kept away on the afternoon when the Prince of Wales (who had never read a word of Hardy’s writing) came for lunch.

Even when Hardy became an almost immovable octogenarian, set in his ways, his attraction to women was undiminished. He became besotted with Gertrude Bugler, who played Tess in a local production in Dorchester. Gertrude was intelligent and beautiful (see the picture above of her portrait above a doorway at Max Gate), and she seemed to embody for Hardy the very image of his beloved fictional Tess. She made regular visits to the house and at one point Florence flew into a jealous rage. She felt humiliated as she suspected that people would be gossiping about them (indeed they were). It was not lost on her that Emma, too, had endured the experience of being in the way of Hardy’s objects of love.

What Florence failed to recognise was that Gertrude represented for Hardy only a symbol of love, not reality. Word of Gertrude’s vivid portrayal spread and a theatre manager sought her out to star as Tess in a London production. But Florence brought this to an abrupt end when she visited Gertrude privately and begged her not to take the role, claiming that Hardy would likely follow her to London, jeopardising his health. Gertrude relented. She wrote Hardy a letter of apology and never saw him again.

Paying Homage

In the years before he died a steady stream of visitors, up to sixteen a day, came to Max Gate to pay homage to the grand old man of English letters. Among them were Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, Rudyard Kipling, Yeats, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and Rupert Brooke (who asked for Hardy’s poems to be sent to him while fighting in France during the First World War).

E.M. Forster described Hardy as ‘a very vain, conventional, uninteresting old gentleman … but perhaps at 82 one rots a little. His great pride is that the county families ask him to tea.’

Leonard Woolf was impressed:

I saw him last spring (in fact July) in the house which he had built for himself at Dorchester, and which, with its sombre growth of trees, seemed to have been created by him as if it were one of his poems translated into brick, furniture and vegetation. He talked about his poems, and London as he had known it in his youth, and about his dog ‘Wessex’, all with great charm and extraordinary simplicity. He was a human being, not ‘the great man’.

The Woolfs’ visit in 1926 was documented by Virginia in her diary. She had met Hardy a number of times as a girl. He had been a friend of her father Leslie Stephen who, in his capacity as editor of the Cornhill magazine, had serialised Far from the Madding Crowd. Virginia admired the ‘sorrowful and brooding spirit’ of Hardy’s novels, regarding him as a vital link between nineteenth century realism (the world of her parents), and twentieth century modernism (her own world).

When they arrived for tea, Virginia initially mistook the small, thin parlourmaid for Hardy. She made conversation with Florence, who wore a sprigged voile dress and a resigned air as if she had ‘learnt her part by heart’. Florence seemed only to become animated when talking about her dog Wessex, who ‘was the real centre of her thoughts’.

Virginia said Hardy was spruce, cheerful, affable (he took pains to exert himself for the benefit of all his visitors). He addressed them like an old doctor or solicitor with ‘Well now…’ before shaking hands. He reminisced about Virginia’s father and the time he had seen her in her cradle at Hyde Park Gate. Virginia tried to entice him to talk about his novels but he refused: ‘The whole thing – literature, novels &c – all seemed to him an amusement, far away, too, scarcely to be taken seriously. Yet he had sympathy and pity for those still engaged in it.’

What impressed me was his freedom, ease and vitality. He seemed a very “Great Victorian” doing the whole thing with a sweep of his hand (they are ordinary smallish, curled up hands) and setting no great stock by literature but immensely interested in facts; incidents; and somehow, one could imagine, naturally swept off into imagining and creating without a thought of its being difficult or remarkable; becoming obsessed; and living in imagination.

Writing and Ending

The long hours Hardy spent in his study made both his wives feel excluded. It was a room one visitor described as ‘bare, simple, workmanlike and pleasantly shabby’, with ‘well-faded walls…distempered an unusual shade of coral-pink.’  Every morning at 10 am he would sit at his writing table, writing and thinking, often till dinner time. He said:

I never let a day go without using a pen. Just holding it sets me off: in fact I can’t think without it. It’s important not to wait for the right mood. If you do it will come less and less.

Wounded by the reception of what he felt to be his finest works, Hardy never wrote another novel after Tess and Jude the Obscure. The rest of his life was devoted to his first love, poetry. He was always sure to limit himself to just three or four drafts in order to keep the poems fresh. Free verse and other modern approaches failed to interest him and he pronounced:

All we can do is to write on the old themes, in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before.

He was supportive of up and coming modern poets like Ezra Pound, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, expressing interest in their personal lives and plans for their careers. And as his old friends died, younger men like Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence would replace them. Lawrence, who lived at nearby Clouds Hill, had asked Robert Graves to introduce him, and was immediately attracted to Hardy’s dignity and quiet reserve. T.E. enjoyed the simple life at Max Gate and with his easy manner he was a favourite with Hardy and Florence.

Hardy’s muse never left him. In his ninth decade he continued to write exquisite poetry full of memories of places, ghosts, lost love. His last collection Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925) almost sold out before its release. There were many poems about Emma in this edition, including this deeply evocative piece set in Cornwall where they met.

She Opened the Door

She opened the door of the West to me,

With its loud sea-lashings,

And cliff-side clashings

Of waters rife with revelry.

She opened the door of Romance to me,

The door from a cell

I had known too well,

Too long, till then, and was fain to flee.

She opened the door of a Love to me,

That passed the wry

World-welters by

As far as the arching blue the lea.

She opens the door of the Past to me,

Its magic lights,

Its heavenly heights,

When forward little is to see!

It is full of wistfulness, longing and regret, and it undoubtedly hurt the second love in his life, but it is no less beautiful for all of that.

Hardy’s extraordinarily robust health declined on 11 December 1927, when he discovered he was unable to work for the first time. He took to his bed and rarely left it after that. On the evening of  11 January 1928, Hardy asked Florence to read him a verse from the Rubiayat of Omar Khayyam:

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth did’st make,

And who with Eden did’st devise the Snake;

For at the Sin wherewith the Face of Man

Is blacken’d, Man’s forgiveness give – and take!

He died shortly afterwards.

Hardy’s death made Florence a wealthy woman and she allowed herself certain luxuries that had been withheld by her husband, such as avoiding the dreaded winters at Max Gate by taking an apartment in London. But happiness eluded her. Long plagued by ill health, she died from cancer nine years later.

In The Common Reader (1935) Virginia Woolf wrote this tribute to Hardy:

…it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.

Music

‘The Snow it Melts the Soonest’, sung by Anne Briggs

Thomas Hardy was a great lover of music and a musician himself. He favoured traditional folk songs and featured them richly in his work. ‘The Snow it Melts the Soonest’ is a traditional song that dates back as far as 1821 and it is most likely that he knew it. This version sung by Anne Briggs was used for the BBC adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, starring Gemma Arterton as Tess and Eddie Redmayne as Angel.