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Far from the Madding
Crowd
Thomas Hardy was bom on 2nd June, 1840, in the village of Higher Bockhampton. The village is in the county1 of Dorset, in the south of England.
Thomas’s father was a builder and a stonemason - he cut and shaped pieces of stone for building. Thomas’s mother loved reading and she owned many books. Thomas was the eldest child. He had a brother and two sisters.
Thomas Hardy went to a good school in Dorchester, the nearest town to his home. He learnt Latin, French, German and Mathematics, as well as Literature, Science and Art.
When he was sixteen, Thomas left school and started to work for an architect. The architect drew designs of new buildings and planned ways to repair old ones.
In 1862, Thomas moved to London and he became an assistant to a famous architect. Thomas enjoyed living in London. He visited theatres and art galleries, and he read lots of books. Soon he began to write poetry, although none of his poems were published at this time.
In 1867, Thomas decided to return to Dorchester. In the town, he worked as an architect’s assistant. But now he knew that he wanted to be a writer. He wrote a novel, but no one wanted to publish it. This did not stop Thomas writing, and soon he was working on a second novel.
In 1870, the architect sent Thomas to the county of Cornwall, in the far west of England. His job was to make drawings of the church in the village of St Juliot. He also had to find out if the church could be repaired or rebuilt.
This visit to Cornwall changed Thomas’s life completely because he fell in love with Emma Lavinia Gifford. Emma had fair hair and blue eyes and she liked poetry and novels. She also wanted to be a writer.
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Emma encouraged Thomas to write more novels, and in
1871, one of these novels - Desperate Remedies - was published. Thomas did not earn much money from the book. However, his next novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), was more successful. It is a story about the working people of Dorset at the time of Thomas’s own father and grandfather.
Far From the Madding Crowd was published in 1874. It is one of Hardy’s greatest novels. The title comes from the words in a poem. Hardy writes about people who live in quiet, beautiful places that are far away from noisy, busy towns. But these people’s lives are full of sadness and pain and madness.
Thom as and Emma got married and went to live in Dorchester. In the twenty years that followed, Thomas wrote more successful novels and short stories. His stories were set in a part of England which Hardy called Wessex. Wessex included the counties of Devon, Berkshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset and Hampshire. (See the map on page 3.)
Hardy’s best-known novels are: The Return of the Native
(1878), The Trumpet-Major (1880), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896).
A fter 1895, when he finished Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy wrote no more novels. Jude the Obscure is a very unhappy story. It shows arguments2 between working people and well-educated people. And the story tells about sexual relationships between people who are not married. Many readers were shocked by this book and suddenly Hardy was no longer a popular writer. For the last thirty years of his life, he wrote only poetry. Many books of his poems were
published during this time.
The last years of Thomas and Emma’s marriage were not happy. Thomas did not speak to Emma and he did not care when she was ill. But when she died in 1912, Thomas felt
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guilty3 and unhappy. Suddenly he wrote many poems about Emma and about the early days of their relationship. In 1914, Hardy married again. His new wife, Florence Dugdale, was much younger than Thomas. But Thomas could not forget his first wife. He made Florence very unhappy because he thought about Emma all the time.
Thomas Hardy died on 11th January, 1928. His body was buried4 in Westminster Abbey, the famous church in London. But Hardy’s heart was buried with Emma, in a churchyard in Dorset.
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