Thomas Hardy

At 87 years old, Thomas Hardy physical status not available right now. We will update Thomas Hardy's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1940 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and writer.

A Victorian realist in the style of George Eliot, he was inspired both in his writing and in his poetry by Romanticism, particularly William Wordsworth.

He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially when it came to the declining status of rural people in the United Kingdom, including those from South West England. Though Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and primarily thought of himself as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898.

He began writing novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Jude the Obscure (1895).

Young poets (especially the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor during his lifetime lauded his poetry.

He died and Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, and Philip Larkin.Many of his books revolve around tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire, and a portion of Berkshire; originally based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

According to BBC's survey The Big Read, two of his books, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were ranked in the top 50.

Source

Life and career

Thomas Hardy was born in Bishop Bockhampton (then Upper Bockhampton), a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford (the east of Dorset, England), where his father Thomas (1811-1839) worked as a stonemason and local builder and married Jemima (née Hand; 1813-1839) in Beaminster, England. Jemima was a well-read girl who taught Thomas until he went to his first school in Bockhampton at the age of eight. He attended Mr. Last's Academy for Young Gentlemen in Dorchester, where he learned Latin and demonstrated academic promise. Hardy's family had no means for a university education, so his formal training came to an end at the age of sixteen when he was apprenticed to James Hicks, a local architect.

Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before settling in London in 1862; he continued as a student at King's College London. He has been awarded awards from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. In April 1862, he began working with Blomfield on All Saints' parish church in Windsor, Berkshire, in 1862–64. In August 2016, a reredos, possibly designed by Hardy, was discovered behind panelling at All Saints'. Hardy was in charge of the digging of a portion of St Pancras Old Church's graveyard before it was destroyed when the Midland Railway was extended to a new terminus at St Pancras in the mid-1860s.

Hardy never felt at home in London because he was acutely aware of class divisions and his social inequity. He became interested in social change and the works of John Stuart Mill during this period. Horace Moule, a Dorset boy, was introduced by his Dorset colleague Horace Moule to Charles Fourier and August Comte's archives. Mill's essay On Liberty was one of Hardy's cures for slumbery, and he declared that "my pages portray a unity of view with" Mill in 1924. He was also attracted to Matthew Arnold's and Leslie Stephen's ideal of the urbane liberal freethinker.

He returned to Dorset, settling in Weymouth, and committed himself to writing after five years of being worried about his health.

Hardy fell in love with Emma Gifford, who married in Kensington in late 1874, while on a historic mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall. (Now Surbiton) is a licensed property in 1870. Thomas and his wife moved to Max Gate in Dorchester, which was designed by Hardy and built by his brother in 1885. Although Emma and her brother became estranged, his death in 1912 had a tragic influence on him; after her death, Hardy went to Cornwall to revisit places linked to their courtship; 1912-13 examines her disappearance. Florence Emily Dugdale, his secretary, married Hardy in 1914, when he was 39 years old. He remained preoccupied with his first wife's death and attempted to beat his remorse by writing poetry. He owned Wessex, a Wire Fox Terrier who was notoriously ill-tempered in his later years. The gravestone of Wessex can be found on the Max Gate grounds. In 1910, Hardy was named a Member of the Order of Merit, and he was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for the first time. He was voted again for the award 11 years ago.

Hardy's theatre involvement dates back to the 1860s. He worked with several would-be adapters over the years, including Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886 and Charles Jarvis in the same decade. Neither adaptation came to fruition, but Hardy showed that he was genuinely excited about such a venture. However, one play that was staged caused him such pain. His impression of the controversies surrounding his and Comyns Carr's Far From the Madding Crowd's 1882 debut left him afraid of the harm that adaptations could do to his literary reputation. It's also remarkable that he so enthusiastically and eagerly joined a local amateur group, at the time known as the Dorchester Dramatic and Debating Society, but the Hardy Players would not appear. His reservations about adaptations of his books meant that he had to hide his participation in the drama at first. However, the success of the play, The Trumpet Major, culminated in a long and fruitful partnership between Hardy and the Players throughout his remaining years. In fact, his play The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel (1923) was supposed to be performed by the Hardy Players.

Hardy, one of Britain's top writers in 1914, included H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who signed the "Authors' Declaration" in support of the country's involvement in the First World War. The German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal act, and Hardy feared that "I do not believe a world in which such violence is likely to be worth the sacrifice" and that "better to allow western 'civilization' perish" and that the black and yellow races have a chance." "The exchange of international thought is the only real hope for the world," he wrote to John Galsworthy.

Hardy became ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died in Max Gate on January 11, 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed, with "old age" being cited as a contributing factor. Hardy's funeral took place at Westminster Abbey on Monday, and it was a tumultuous occasion as his first wife, Emma, was cremated in the same grave. His relatives and friends agreed; however, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, the abbey's executor, insisted that he be placed in the abbey's most popular Poets' Corner. In Poets' Corner, a compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried with Emma at Stinsford and his ashes were scattered. The estate of Hardy's death was valued at £95,418 (equivalent to £6,100,000 in 2021).

The executors of Hardy's estate burned his letters and notebooks a few years after his death, but twelve notebooks survived, one of which contained notes and excerpts of newspaper articles from the 1820s, and analysis of how Hardy used them in his writings has given insight into how Hardy used them. Mrs Hardy's The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1841–1891, compiled mainly from contemporary notes, letters, diaries, and biographical memoranda, as well as oral reports from decades of interviews.

Many younger writers, including D. H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, and Virginia Woolf, had admired Hardy's work. Robert Graves' autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929) recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s and how Hardy treated him and his new wife warmly and was enthusiastic about his work.

The National Trust owns Hardy's birthplace in Bockhampton and his house Max Gate, both in Dorchester.

Source