Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner by Mark Ford
Hamish Robinson
Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner by Mark Ford Harvard University Press £20
Potential readers of this book should perhaps be warned at the outset that they will be confronted with large chunks of literary criticism in this otherwise richly biographical study of the man who might be described as the last great novelist of the 19th century and the first great poet of the 20th. The book follows a biographical timeline, from Hardy’s first sojourn in the city as a lowly apprentice architect to his latter-day appearances as a literary lion gracing the ‘season’, and draws shrewdly on a wide range of biographical material, but much of its business is attending, often minutely, to the influence that London exerts, both as
an idea and as a setting, on individual novels and poems.
The book’s thesis is that London, and the experience of the modern metropolis, represents the ‘dark matter’ of the ostensibly provincial Hardy universe: a massive yet elusive and insufficiently acknowledged presence in the fictional Wessex and in Hardy’s writings in general. In the Talbothays dairy scenes in Tess of the d’urbervilles, for example, Hardy lets us feel the formative pressure of the city’s unrelenting demand for fresh milk and butter in the long working hours of the farm girls and also something of the prosperity and contentment that working at full-stretch can bring. Far from being pastoral in the literary sense – though different scenes may touch deceptively on the bucolic – these chapters are in part a brilliant study of a very modern ‘work environment’. As Ford notes, at a time when other agricultural sectors were in recession, dairy farming flourished, thanks to an ever-increasing urban demand for fresh milk and to the spreading of the railways that could transport it. London is littered with the ghosts of 19th-century dairies, and the seemingly rustic business of supplying them, as described in Tess, was as much a reflection of contemporary urban living as, say, that of an out-of-town call centre would be today. But London is not always so spectral a presence in Hardy’s fiction: before and alongside the mature Wessex novels, in such lesser-read works as A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Well-beloved, Hardy experimented with London settings and even, in The Hand of Ethelberta, with a comedy of metropolitan manners and social mobility. Likewise his poems, which, bookwise, he only began to publish after he had put an end to his career as a novelist and had no great designs on popular readership, are as likely to be set in the British Museum as on Egdon Heath. But then, as Ford points out, Hardy had lived and worked in London for years at a time, had occupied 33 separate London addresses ranging from Belgravia to Tooting, was much engaged, obsessed even, by his London experiences, as his private and autobiographical writings testify, and considered himself, for all his devotion to Dorset, in words Ford borrows for the subtitle, ‘half a Londoner’.
One might also remark on a faintly perceived polemical edge to the book. On occasion Ford seems to suggest that this more metropolitan emphasis brings Hardy’s work nearer to that of city-crazed modernists such as Joyce or