50 Fun Facts About Thomas Hardy

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

Dorset pulled him back: born in a thatched cottage at Higher Bockhampton, he spent five years working in London before ill health sent him home in 1867.

What was the trade of Hardy's father?

Stonemason and builder Thomas Hardy senior was also a keen musician in the Stinsford church band, a family tradition his son turned into the novel Under the Greenwood Tree.

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

Wessex was an extinct Anglo-Saxon kingdom whose name Hardy 'disinterred' because a single county was too small a canvas; the label caught on, and real organisations across the region now use it.

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

Architecture gave him a living and, by chance, a wife: he trained under the local architect John Hicks, and a church survey in Cornwall in 1870 introduced him to his future bride.

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

St Pancras Old Church lost part of its burial ground to the Midland Railway; an ash tree ringed with displaced gravestones there was known as the Hardy Tree until it fell in December 2022.

Whom did Hardy meet at St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 and marry in 1874?

Emma Gifford, the rector's sister-in-law, urged him on as a writer, and the pair married against the wishes of both their families.

Which house near his birthplace was Hardy's home from 1885 until his death in 1928?

Max Gate stood on an isolated plot, yet Hardy still ringed it with pines for privacy; they grew so thickly that the house ended up dark and gloomy.

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

Secretary and typist to Hardy before their marriage, Florence later put her name to a two-volume Life of him that he had largely written himself.

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

The wire fox terrier lived with the Hardys for thirteen years; when he died in 1926, Hardy drew up the inscription and the design for the headstone that still marks his grave in the garden.

Which Irish writer beat Hardy to the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature?

W. B. Yeats won even though two members of the Nobel committee argued that the older Hardy should come first; Hardy was nominated 25 times in all and never won.

Having turned down a knighthood, Hardy accepted which honour in 1910?

The Order of Merit came in the Birthday Honours just after he turned 70, yet by his own account the freedom of his home town that November appealed to his sentiment perhaps more than many earlier tributes from far away.

Hardy's ashes lie in Poets' Corner, but what was buried separately in the churchyard at Stinsford?

His heart was buried at Stinsford, where he had wanted to lie whole among his family's graves; the rest of him was cremated so that the nation could have its Abbey funeral.

On the last evening of his life, Hardy asked his wife to read him a verse from which Persian poem?

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam supplied the verse, which asks the Creator to take man's forgiveness as well as give it; after those four lines Hardy signalled that he wanted no more read.

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

The Poor Man and the Lady struck a publisher's reader as too politically risky for a beginner, so Hardy shelved it and recycled parts, one resurfacing in 1878 as An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress.

Which Hardy serial left Henry Knight literally hanging off a cliff, a scene often called the first cliffhanger?

A Pair of Blue Eyes leaves Knight clinging to the rock, eye to eye with a fossil trilobite, until Elfride hauls him up on a rope she makes by tearing her own linen into strips.

Which 1874 novel, serialised in the Cornhill Magazine, made Hardy famous?

Far from the Madding Crowd ran anonymously at first, and the Spectator's reviewer guessed that it must be the work of George Eliot.

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

A valentine reading 'Marry me' went to Boldwood only because a tossed hymn book landed shut; the reserved farmer took the joke in earnest and became obsessed with her.

Shepherd Gabriel Oak is ruined early in his story when what drives his flock over the edge of a chalk pit?

His young sheepdog, too keen at its work, chased the ewes over the edge; the flock was not insured, so Oak sold everything to pay his debts, and the dog was shot the same day.

Which of Bathsheba Everdene's suitors wins her with a private display of swordsmanship?

Frank Troy, a sergeant of dragoons, dazzles her in a ferny hollow, shearing off a lock of her hair and then spitting a caterpillar on her bodice with the point of his sword.

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

Dorchester's Roman amphitheatre, Maumbury Rings, appears in the novel as 'the Ring', the lonely spot where Henchard arranges to meet the wife he wronged years before.

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

Five guineas was the bid of a passing sailor, Newson; sober the next morning, Henchard swore off strong drink for twenty-one years, one for each year he had lived.

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

Scottish and bound for America, Farfrae charms a Casterbridge inn with homesick songs of his 'ain countree', then stays when Henchard begs him to become his manager.

What subtitle did Hardy give Tess of the d'Urbervilles?

A Pure Woman was added at the last moment as a verdict Hardy thought nobody would dispute; as he later admitted, it was disputed more than anything else in the book.

Where do Tess and Angel Clare fall in love while working side by side?

Talbothays Dairy gives Tess a fresh start among people who know nothing of her past; when she tells Angel the truth on their wedding night, he leaves her.

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

A bloodstain spreading on the ceiling, in the shape of a gigantic ace of hearts, sends Mrs Brooks for help; Tess has stabbed Alec, who had told her that Angel would never come back.

At which ancient monument does Tess spend her last night of freedom with Angel?

Stonehenge is where Tess falls asleep on a slab that Angel takes for an altar; the men who surround them at dawn let her finish her sleep, and she wakes to say, 'I am ready.'

What signals Tess's execution at the end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles?

A black flag raised over the prison is all the reader sees: Hardy keeps the hanging offstage and adds that the 'President of the Immortals' had ended his sport with Tess.

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

Oxford in thin disguise shuts Jude out: a college master advises the working man to stick to his trade, and Jude chalks a defiant verse from Job on the college wall.

What relation is Sue Bridehead to Jude Fawley?

His cousin Sue shares the family failing: Jude's great-aunt warns that 'the Fawleys were not made for wedlock', and when the pair live together unmarried they are shunned for it.

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

Wakefield's bishop, Walsham How, told the newspapers he had thrown the novel on the fire; Hardy doubted it, remarking how hard a thick book is to burn, least of all in summer.

What name does Tess give her dying baby when she baptises him herself?

Sorrow is the name Tess chooses when she christens the child by candlelight in her bedroom, with her small brothers and sisters gathered round her as the congregation.

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

The Trumpet-Major grew out of the memories of old people Hardy had known as a child, eyewitnesses to the years when the south coast braced for a French invasion.

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

Astronomy gives the love story its scale: Hardy said he wished to set 'two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe'.

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

Egdon Heath has the whole first chapter to itself before a single person appears, and Gustav Holst later wrote a tone poem named after it as a homage to Hardy.

Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native is a reddleman, a travelling seller of what?

Red ochre for sheep farmers to mark their flocks, called reddle, stains Venn red from head to foot; Hardy says mothers scared children with 'The reddleman is coming for you!'

Clym Yeobright comes home to the heath from which glamorous city, where Eustacia Vye dreams of living?

Paris is where Clym managed a diamond business he came to think worthless; he returns to open a school for the poor, and Eustacia marries him still hoping he will take her back there.

Hardy wrote 'The Convergence of the Twain' after which disaster?

The sinking of the Titanic drew no simple lament from Hardy: his poem pictures the iceberg growing far away while the ship was being built, the two fated to meet.

In a Hardy poem first printed at the very end of 1900, which frail old bird sings of 'joy illimited'?

A thrush, 'frail, gaunt, and small', is the singer of 'The Darkling Thrush'; the gloomy speaker can only suppose that the bird knows of some hope he cannot see.

Hardy's vast verse drama The Dynasts, never meant for the stage, follows which wars?

The Napoleonic Wars, from Trafalgar to Waterloo, are watched and argued over by a chorus of spirits such as the Spirit of the Pities, Hardy's way of voicing his own divided views.

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

The death of his first wife in 1912 ended some twenty years of estrangement, yet it sent Hardy back to the Cornish scenes of their courtship and into the poems widely judged his finest.

Which poet's 1973 anthology of English verse gave Hardy more poems than anyone else?

Philip Larkin chose 27 Hardy poems against nine by T. S. Eliot, so a Victorian novelist became the best-represented poet in a book of twentieth-century verse.

Hardy's Christmas poem 'The Oxen' recalls the old country belief that cattle do what at midnight on Christmas Eve?

Kneel, in homage, is what an elder said the oxen were doing; writing in the dark Christmas of 1915, the doubting Hardy admits he would still go and look, 'hoping it might be so'.

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

The Immanent Will, as Hardy drew it, is blind and purposeless rather than cruel, though he let himself hope that it might one day grow conscious and sympathetic.

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

Burnt them on a bonfire at his home within days of his death; only twelve notebooks escaped, one of them filled with 1820s newspaper stories of wife sales that had fed his fiction.

Hardy wrote The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall for his local amateur players, retelling the legend of which lovers?

Tristan and Iseult had been in his mind since 1870, when he visited Tintagel while courting his future wife; he finished the play for the Hardy Players at the age of 83.

Which novelist's Cakes and Ale (1930) features Edward Driffield, a writer widely taken for Hardy?

W. Somerset Maugham denied the likeness, yet Driffield is a novelist of humble birth, lionised in old age, whose second wife tends his reputation.

Hardy's heroine Bathsheba Everdene lent her surname to the heroine of which young-adult book series?

The Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen owes her surname to Bathsheba; Suzanne Collins said the two are very different, but both struggle with knowing their hearts.

Hardy, Kipling and Conan Doyle signed the Authors' Declaration defending Britain's entry into which war?

The First World War manifesto of 53 leading authors grew out of a government summons to well-known writers in September 1914; Hardy signed, yet the slaughter that followed horrified him.

Which Victorian novelist, then working as a publisher's reader, advised Hardy not to publish his first novel?

George Meredith warned the young Hardy that the press would be about his ears 'like hornets' and told him to write something with more plot; the result was the sensation novel Desperate Remedies.

Which instrument did the young Hardy play at village dances and parties, as his father had before him?

The fiddle came from his father: as a small child Hardy danced to his jigs and reels, some of which moved him to tears, and as a boy he played them from old family tune books.