‘I lived in quiet, screened,unknown’: The Lives of Thomas Hardy

Abstract

Thomas Hardy was born in Upper Bockhampton, in the parish of Stinsford, near Dorchester, Dorset, on 2 June 1840, at 8 a.m. At first put aside as dead, he was rescued, by the observation and slap of the midwife, in an episode which somehow seems symbolically appropriate. Initial perception of death preceded a life of exceptional longevity; yet that longevity, and the prolific creativity that accompanied it, were themselves frequently to be accompanied by longings for obscurity and oblivion, an exit from what ‘A Necessitarian’s Epitaph’ calls ‘A world I did not wish to enter’. ‘Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed’, questions ‘Before Life and After’, ‘How long, how long?’

From ‘A Private Man on Public Men’.