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.