50 Fun Facts About Thomas Hardy

In which English county was Thomas Hardy born and did he set most of his fiction?

He was born in the hamlet of Higher Bockhampton, just east of the county town, in 1840.

What was the trade of Hardy's father?

His mother Jemima was well read and taught him at home until he was eight.

What is the name of the semi-fictional region in which Hardy set his novels?

He first used the name in his fourth novel, borrowing it from the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

To which profession was the 16-year-old Hardy apprenticed, since his family could not afford university?

He worked for the local architect James Hicks and later designed his own house.

In the mid-1860s Hardy supervised excavation of part of which London graveyard to make way for a railway?

The Midland Railway was being extended to its new terminus at St Pancras.

Whom did Hardy meet in 1870 while restoring a church at St Juliot in Cornwall, and marry in 1874?

Her death in 1912 produced his greatest poems.

Which house on the edge of Dorchester did Hardy design and move into in 1885?

His brother built it; it passed to the National Trust in 1940, and Hardy's birthplace followed in 1948.

Hardy's second wife, Florence Dugdale, whom he married in 1914, had been his what?

She was 39 years his junior and later published his ghost-written biography as her own work.

Hardy's notoriously ill-tempered dog, named after his fictional region, was what breed?

The dog's gravestone can still be found in the grounds of his house.

How many times in total had Hardy been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by 1927?

He was a final candidate in 1923 but never won.

Which honour was Hardy appointed to in 1910?

The same year brought his first Nobel nomination.

What compromise was reached over Hardy's burial in 1928?

He had wanted to lie with Emma at Stinsford; his executor Sydney Cockerell insisted on Westminster Abbey.

What did Hardy do on his deathbed on 11 January 1928?

The death certificate gave 'cardiac syncope', with old age as a contributory factor.

What was the title of Hardy's first novel, never published and later destroyed?

George Meredith warned him it was too politically controversial; Hardy called it 'socialistic, not to say revolutionary'.

The word 'cliffhanger' is thought to derive from the serialisation of which Hardy novel?

The character Henry Knight is left literally hanging off a cliff at the end of an instalment.

Which 1874 novel was successful enough for Hardy to give up his day job for writing?

It appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in the Cornhill Magazine.

In Hardy's 1874 novel, what does Bathsheba Everdene playfully send to the farmer William Boldwood?

He takes the joke seriously with tragic consequences; Hardy cited it as an example of chance driving the plot.

How is the shepherd Gabriel Oak ruined early in his story?

He sells everything to pay his debts and ends up seeking work at a hiring fair.

Which soldier wins Bathsheba's heart with a private display of swordsmanship?

Gabriel Oak sees the danger and tries to warn her.

Which real town in Hardy's home county does Casterbridge represent in The Mayor of Casterbridge?

The novel's opening, in which Henchard auctions his wife, was based on real press reports of wife-selling.

In The Mayor of Casterbridge, for how much does the drunken Michael Henchard sell his wife and daughter?

He was drunk on rum-laced furmity; the buyer was a sailor named Newson.

What nationality is Donald Farfrae, the energetic young man Henchard hires as his corn factor?

He shows Henchard how to salvage substandard grain and later becomes his rival in business and love.

What is the subtitle of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, intended to raise Victorian eyebrows?

The book was initially refused publication for its sympathetic treatment of a 'fallen woman'.

Where does Tess work as a milkmaid when she meets Angel Clare?

Her past is unknown there, until she confesses it on their wedding night.

How does the landlady discover that Tess has killed Alec d'Urberville?

Tess has stabbed him in his bed and run after Angel.

At which ancient monument are Tess and Angel found on the night before her arrest?

She asks Angel to marry her younger sister 'Liza-Lu once she is gone.

What signals Tess's execution at the end of the novel?

Angel and 'Liza-Lu watch from a hill above Wintoncester at 8 a.m., then walk on hand in hand.

Which real city is 'Christminster', the university town Jude Fawley longs to study in?

Jude teaches himself Greek and Latin while working as a stonemason but is never admitted.

What relation is Sue Bridehead to Jude Fawley?

She dislikes both sex and marriage, and the couple's unmarried life leads to social ostracism.

The bishop of which diocese is said to have burnt his copy of Jude the Obscure?

Hardy joked that Walsham How burnt it 'probably in his despair at not being able to burn me'.

How many novels did Hardy publish in total?

The Well-Beloved, written before Jude, was the last to appear in book form, in 1897.

Which was Hardy's only historical novel, published in 1880?

It is set during the Napoleonic Wars, a period he returned to in his epic drama The Dynasts.

Two on a Tower (1882) is a romance set in the world of which science?

The young astronomer Swithin St Cleeve loves the older aristocrat Lady Viviette Constantine.

The Return of the Native takes place entirely around which fictional location?

Gustav Holst's tone poem Egdon Heath (1927) is subtitled 'A Homage to Thomas Hardy'.

What is the trade of Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native, which stains him red from head to foot?

He sells red ochre that farmers use to mark their sheep.

From which city does Clym Yeobright return to the heath, having worked as a diamond merchant?

He plans to become a schoolmaster for the rural poor, which does not suit Eustacia Vye's ambitions.

In which year did Hardy publish his first poetry collection, gathering verse written over 30 years?

It gathered poems written over 30 years; in the twentieth century he published only poetry.

What was the original title of Hardy's poem 'The Darkling Thrush'?

It appeared in Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901.

What is The Dynasts, published in three volumes between 1904 and 1908?

Keith Wilson argued in 2006 that it should stand among Hardy's greatest achievements.

Hardy's celebrated elegies Poems 1912–13 were written after what event?

They had been estranged for 20 years; Claire Tomalin argues he became a truly great poet only then.

How many Hardy poems did Philip Larkin include in his 1973 anthology of modern English verse?

T. S. Eliot got only nine, and Yeats fewer still.

Hardy's poem 'The Blinded Bird' is a polemic against which practice?

He was an antivivisectionist and a member of the RSPCA.

What name did Hardy give the indifferent force he believed controlled the universe?

He replaced the 'tribal god, man-shaped, fiery-faced and tyrannous' with an unconscious will slowly becoming aware of itself.

What did the executors of Hardy's estate do with his letters and notebooks after his death?

Twelve notebooks survived, one full of 1820s newspaper clippings that fed The Mayor of Casterbridge.

What was the Hardy Players' original name when the amateur group began staging Hardy's work in 1908?

Their production of The Trumpet Major was an international success and Hardy wrote The Queen of Cornwall for them.

Which novelist based the character Edward Driffield in Cakes and Ale (1930) on Hardy?

Lawrence wrote a Study of Thomas Hardy that fed his own novels The Rainbow and Women in Love.

Which post-punk band's frontman, Nigel Blackwell, regularly slips Hardy references into his lyrics?

More conventionally, Finzi, Britten, Vaughan Williams and Holst all set Hardy poems to music.

In 1914 Hardy signed the Authors' Declaration justifying Britain's entry into the First World War, along with how many other leading writers?

H. G. Wells, Kipling and Conan Doyle also signed; Hardy was later horrified by the war's destruction.

Which Victorian poet-novelist advised Hardy not to publish his politically risky first novel?

Hardy took the advice and instead wrote two anonymously published novels aimed at commercial appeal.

Which London architect's practice did Hardy join as an assistant in April 1862?

He enrolled at King's College London the same year and won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects.