Abstract
The sources of Hardy’s thought lie in his reading. It is often considered, especially by those who quote rather gleefully Hardy’s own admission that he read, for instance, the leaders in The Times to improve his style, that he went to masters to learn the aesthetic or technical or formal tricks of the novelist’s trade while his philosophy came to him as it were from the depths of his own mind or perhaps, by some process of intellectual osmosis, out of the Dorset air. A recent study of his philosophy, for instance, while mostly quite intellectually respectable, can drift off into this sort of misty speculation:
Nature’s apparently random cruelty to one creature meant prosperity for another — this lesson had been impressed upon him as a child — and so for Hardy this darkness of heart had edged into his soulscape long before he had read books which affirmed it.1
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Notes
Deborah L. Collins, Thomas Hardy and His God: A Liturgy of Unbelief (London: Macmillan, 1990) p. 33.
Lance St John Butler, Victorian Doubt: Literary and Cultural Discourses (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).
Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1962) p. 98. (Cited hereafter as Life.)
Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) pp. 111, 181, 225n. There are many other small points of intersection that show how Hardy and Eliot inhabited the same world; might the younger novelist have been influenced by the older in his choice of titles, for instance? ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton’ certainly has a Hardyesque ring to it. Then again, here is that other Unbeliever, William Hale White, protesting in the Athenaeum of 28 November 1885 that the ‘official’ biography of George Eliot by John Walter Cross was too respectable: [George Eliot has been] ‘removed from the class — the great and noble church, if I may so call it, of the Insurgents, to one more genteel’. Hardy, of course, had Hearts Insurgent as an early title for Jude the Obscure. One might even wonder whether the characterisation of Sue Bridehead owed something to George Eliot. How many other models were available to Hardy of a free-thinking and intellectual woman prepared to live unmarried with a man? Eliot had lived in a species of ménage à quatre with the publisher John Chapman, his wife and his mistress in the early 1850s; she may have been Herbert Spencer’s mistress and she certainly was not married to G. H. Lewes. In John Chapman’s Diary for 1851 we get a flavour of the intellectual concerns of the household which Eliot had entered on January 8 that year
Quoted in A. S. Byatt, Passions of the Mind (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991) p. 85.
Harold Orel (ed.), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966; London: Macmillan, 1967) p. 125ff.
George Eliot, Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (London: Oxford University Press, 1954) vol. 2, p. 258.
Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy (London: Heinemann, 1978) p. 211.
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© 1994 Lance St John Butler
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Butler, L.S.J. (1994). ‘Bosh’ or: Believing neither More nor Less — Hardy, George Eliot and God. In: Pettit, C.P.C. (eds) New Perspectives on Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23394-6_6
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