Thomas Willing

Thomas Willing 1731-1821, American merchant and financier, b. Philadelphia. He studied law in London. Returning to Philadelphia in 1749, he entered his father's business and later established with Robert Morris (1734-1806) a prominent importing and exporting firm in Philadelphia. He was elected mayor of Philadelphia in 1763 and was (1767-77) a justice of the Pennsylvania court. As a member (1775-76) of the Continental Congress, he voted against the Declaration of Independence. In 1780, Willing was active in raising money for the Continental army. He was one of the founders of the Bank of North America and its first president (1781-1792). He was also (1791-1811) first president of the Bank of the United States.

Bibliography: See B. A. Konkle, Thomas Willing and the First American Financial System (1937).

HARDY, Thomas [1840–1928]. English novelist and poet, born at Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, where his father was a stonemason and small builder, and educated in Dorchester and articled to a local architect. In 1862, he moved to London and worked with the fashionable architect Arthur Blomfield, but because of poor health he returned to Dorset in 1867. Continuing to work in architecture, he also began to write Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). He created the imaginary world of ‘Wessex’, based on Dorset and the surrounding counties, in which many of his locations are identifiable. His 14 novels include The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1896).

More than simply a ‘regional’ writer, Hardy presented the life of the rural world in which he had grown up and preserved the image of a vanished way of life. A major achievement is the use of dialect. He could capture the tones of Dorset speech, without the elaborately deviant spellings which make the Dorset poems of William Barnes difficult to read, but conveying the distinctive sounds as well as the words and grammar:‘Tis not to married couples but to single sleepers that a ghost shows himself when a'do come. One has been seen lately, too. A very strange one.’
‘No—don't talk about it if 'tis agreeable of ye not to! 'Twill make my skin crawl when I think of it in bed alone. But you will—ah, you will, I know, Timothy: and I shall dream all night o't! A very strange one? What sort of a spirit did ye mean when ye said a very strange one, Timothy?—no, no—don't tell me.’
‘I don't half believe in spirits myself. But I think it ghostly enough—what I was told. 'Twas a little boy that zid it’
(from The Return of the Native, 1878).

Hardy used dialect for both tragic and comic episodes and varied its intensity to suggest the status of the characters and the degree of their relationship. He valued and defended the dignity of Dorset usage, which he saw not as a deviation from the national standard, but as a survival of the ancient speech of Saxon Wessex.

Lawrence, Sir Thomas (1769–1830). Painter. Lawrence was born in Bristol, the son of an innkeeper, and almost completely self-taught. In 1791 he was elected ARA, made a full academician three years later, and president in 1820. A portrait of Queen Charlotte, painted in 1790, led to enormous success and his appointment as painter to the king on the death of Reynolds in 1792. Knighted in 1815, three years later he was commissioned by the prince regent to paint the portraits of all the principals involved in the struggle against Napoleon. This group hangs in the Waterloo chamber in Windsor castle. Lawrence made probably the finest collection of old master drawings in England, which he offered to the nation in his will. This was refused and the collection dispersed on his death. Fellow-artist Benjamin Haydon, less successful, said of him, ‘Lawrence … was suited to the age, and the age to him. He flattered its vanities, pampered its weaknesses, and met its meretricious taste.’

June Cochrane