Introduction
Thomas Hardy's life was as uneventful as the lives of his great characters. He was born on June, 2, 1840, in Dorsetshire cottage at Upper Bockhamption. He came of an old family. One of whose members had been with Nelson at Trafalgar. He was educated at Dorchester school. Here in 1856 he was apprenticed to an architect who restored old churches. Hardy stayed with him for five years. In 1861 he went to London and studied architecture under Sir Arthur Bloomfield, rounding off an irregular education by attending evening classes at King's College. He won prizes in the following year for architectural theory from the Royal Institute of British architects. A career as an architect was presently to be cut short by a new influence. He had written verse even before he came to London and now he began to produce many of the Wessex poems. In 1867 he left London and settled at Weymouth, where he practiced his profession and began to write his first novel. On the advice of George Meredith, Hardy withdrew the manuscript and directed his attention to producing something with less introspection and more intrigue. As a result, he accepted the conventions of contemporary sensation-novelists and wrote Desperate Remedies, a melodramatic and immature work. The critics, however, were favorable, and he was encouraged to produce the idyllic Under the Greenwood Tree in 1872, and a year later, A Pair of Blue Eyes, which was the first book to be published under the author's name and which showed that his art was surely developing the success of this novel and the encouragement of Miss Emma Gifford, whom 107 Existential Elements in Thomas Hardy's Novels Hardy married in 1874, prompted him to turn his back upon architecture and devoted himself wholly to writing. His married life was inaugurated by his first great popular success Far from the Madding Crowd, which was published anonymously as a serial in the Cornhill Magazine. In 1876 he moved to Sturminster Newton, and four years later, after a severe illness, settled near Dorchester, where he built his own house, Max Gate, With the exception of periodic visit to London and abroad, he remained in Dorset until his death. Between 1878 and 1894 appeared those works upon which Hardy's reputation as a novelist justly rests. The Return of the Native opens the phase. In this story hardy first registered a protest against the "happy-ending" school of literature, although the exigencies of its periodical publication forbade him to flout convention entirely. In 1886 The Mayor of Casterbridge was produced, and a year later, The Woodlanders. In 1892 and 1894 he assailed contemporary artistic and moral standards with Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The outcry against these novels caused him to abandon prose altogether and turn his attention to poetry again, polishing and revising his old verses. In 1898 Wessex Poems appeared, and Poems of the Past and Present followed three years later. Between 1904 and 1907, Hardy brought out the ambitious epic-drama, The Dynasts, which is an epitome of his philosophical ideas and which, although "written for mental performance only," has been produced successfully on the stage. These works were sufficient to establish his reputation as an original and imaginative poet, a claim which he consolidated by a personal and never-failing inspiration to the end. In 1912 his wife died, and two years later he married Florence Emily Dugadale, who wrote his biography. Increasing honours were conferred upon him. Government recognition followed public acclamation, and in 1910 he was awarded the order of Merit, and later the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Hardy died on January 11, 1928. His ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried at Stinsford Church in his native Wessex soil, which, indeed, it had never left.
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