Introduction to Thomas Hardy

Hello, I'm John McCrae, and we're talking about

the poetry of Thomas Hardy.

Now,

if you know about Thomas Hardy already,

you would probably know of him more.

As a novelist, he is considered one of the last of the great Victorian novelist,

and that reputation as a novelist has tended to overshadow

his reputation as a poet.

And

unfortunately,

there are quite a lot of superficial ways of

looking at this career division because he stopped writing

novels after the huge scandals surrounding tests of the

D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure in the 18 nineties,

18 91 in 18 95 respectively.

These novels were social realist novels.

They tend to be called, but they were very scandalous in their handling of

themes of sexuality,

themes of feminine roles in a changing world

and things like that.

And the that scandalous reputation is in many ways considered to have

disappointed Hardy so much that he gave up writing anymore novels.

And he'd written quite a lot of novels up to that time,

from the pastoral of Under the Greenwood Tree to the

wonderful novel Far From the Madding Crowd, which has been

made into a movie, A couple of times

mayor of Castor Bridge, which opens with a man auctioning off his wife

at a county fair.

Pretty spectacular way to open a normal

one of his novels actually gives rise to the the

idea that we have of cereals ending on a cliffhanger.

He It's a novel called a pair of blue eyes.

It's not one of his great ones, but he literally has.

At the end of one of the serialised chapters,

most of the novels of that time 18 seventies were published in serial form.

Before they came out in the volume form,

he actually leaves one of the characters hanging by his fingernails on the

edge of a cliff down very near where Broadchurch is filmed nowadays,

which is Dorset,

Wessex County.

Which brings me onto the whole

nature of his landscape because he more or less reinvented

the area known as Wessex. It's an Old Kingdom of England, down around Dorset Way,

and most of his novels and his first poems.

Many of his short stories are set in Wessex.

Dorchester is the main town,

but you also have Weymouth and Portland Bill and lots of these places,

and there are many parts of that landscape where he lived and worked

that

are considered Hardee country today and in many ways are not much changed.

As I said,

he wrote all these novels and tested the D'Urbervilles

and do the obscure caused particular amounts of scandal.

I find it, and I tend to agree with the critics th season.

I find it rather superficial

to say he was so disappointed at the reactions to do the obscure

that he decided to give up writing novels.

Full stop turned the page, and he starts writing poetry.

I don't think anything is ever as simple as that

first point against that is 18 95. Do the Obscure, the novel about

an ambitious young man

aspiring to a university education very,

very actual themes that are still very relevant today.

That was actually followed by another one,

which had been serialised two or three years before, called the Well Beloved,

which is a phenomenally different novel from most of them. It's not a pastoral.

It's not a social novel in the usual ways.

It's a novel that tells the same love story

in three periods of time with the same characters.

It's a time shift novel

and time shift time travel, if you Like,

is a phenomenally 20th century idea. He was ahead of the game on many of his

experimental concerns in his novels, in many with social concerns in his novels,

in his handling of the roles of women as free independent spirits

in his accommodation

of modern developments like railways

into

the traditional old fashioned countryside

themes.

He is not to be considered

just as a Victorian

with the concepts that we have of that.

Like George Eliot, he was fascinated by progress.

George Eliot in many of her novels, including Middlemarch, Her Greatest,

uses the railways as

the symbol of the development

of the Victorian age

that becomes important in Hardy.

There's a wondrous moment in tests of the D'Urbervilles when she

and the man she's currently with Who's Alec at that time,

they take the milk on a horse drawn

carriage waggon really

to the little local station,

and you have this wonderful image of

the iron machine coming down the tracks,

touching them

as they put the milk onto the train

and

the milk goes off and she says to him,

and that's going to be in London

in the morning,

the miracle of the changing relationship of distance and time

that the railways involved.

That's a constant theme.

I don't see it as

something as banal as Oh, he preferred the countryside to the city

that again is a superficial way of looking at Hardy.

What he is looking at again and again is something I would like to call.

And I'm not the only one I would like to call the clash of the modern

How the modern world, with its new inventions, its new ways of travelling.

We shall see this in a poem

about the Titanic that he wrote in 1912

the

difficulty of negotiating

the space and time

that progress brings.

And he had personal experience of this.

There's a story about him when he came to London.

As a young architect, we're talking about the late 18 fifties. He was born in 18 40.

So in about 18 59 when uh, ST Pancras station in London was built,

it was him, as a young apprentice architect in London who was commissioned

to move the gravestones out of the way

during the night

at a very, very ancient graveyard, which is which was in the way

of the railway station they were building,

but the work had to be done at night so as not to cause ructions and scandal.

And today the gravestones are still piled up around

the big tree in the middle of that graveyard.

You can see it

from ST Pancras station.

It's got a kind of a nickname as Hardee's graveyard.

And that experience, apparently

his biographers like to say,

was kind of seminal in his

relating the past

to the present.

There is no way he was an enemy of progress,

never let that be said.

But he was a post Darwinian

for most of his life,

and we have to talk about Charles Darwin a little bit because in that very

same year that we're talking about When he was a young architect in London,

Thomas Hardy

Charles Darwin published after many years of thinking about it,

circulating the ideas he published in 18 59 on The Origin of Species.

And I think it's fair to say that no book,

not even Karl Marx's Das Capital had such a profound influence

on the world in the 19th century as that one,

It's the book which told Queen Victoria she was a monkey

and famously she wasn't amused.

It's the theory of evolution.

It wasn't Darwin who coined the phrase survival of the fittest. That was Huxley

T. H. Huxley, who was a disciple of Darwin.

But it changed fundamentally.

The nature of belief

in Victorian England and around the world

because organised religion

was, in a way, undermined,

questioned,

and faith

became a really

worrisome problem for many people.

Now Thomas Hardy. He's very often seen as a gloomy old man who

believed in a negative destiny.

Yes and no.

He certainly

believed in pre Christian

faiths. He constantly refers back to the Greek gods. He has an

A presence in a lot of his poetry, as we shall see

of the imminent will,

the sort of looming destiny which towers over all human endeavour.

And we'll see some quite savagely ironic playing with that idea.

It's not all doom and gloom,

but there's a lot of questioning of faith.

There's a lot of questioning of Victorian values.

There's a lot of

looking at nature and how the world is changing.

There's a lot of wanting to hold onto the old,

but no resistance at all

to the fascination with the new.

He was also a war poet.

He wrote about the Napoleonic Wars,

the Boer War

and the First World already inspired that generation of first World War poets.

He's modern

and Victorian.

There's a lot to be going on within Thomas Hardy. He's really good.