Poems about Ideas

Abstract

In the Postscript he wrote for the 1912 edition of Jude the Obscure Hardy roundly asserted that ‘Britons hate ideas’. In this, his most controversial, most reviled novel, he had certainly given his readers a good few ‘ideas’ to hate: sexual incompatibility, the ‘new woman’, child suicide, Oxbridge arrogance, and religious hysteria among them. In this sense then he cannot be said to have ‘hated ideas’ himself; indeed, so far from being an ivory-tower-dwelling recluse, he held strong opinions on many social issues, was a staunch Liberal in politics, and repeatedly took the part, as he drily put it in his fine essay The Dorsetshire Labourer, of ‘those unimportant scores of millions of outsiders in civilised society … who [are] neither University men nor Churchmen.’ In an interview with William Archer he asked, ‘What are my books but one long plea against ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ — to woman — and to the lower animals?’ adding that he hoped, ‘[All] mankind may be, and one day will be, viewed as members of one corporeal frame.’