Phase the Second: The Novelist (1870–97)

Abstract

The first mention in The Life of Desperate Remedies is of the character Edward Springrove who was said by Hardy to be based on a new assistant who had joined Mr Crickmay’s office staff in August or September 1869 (p. 65). In the novel Springrove is a young architect from a humble background who loves books, writes poetry, and has a comprehensive knowledge of Shakespeare. He may well be speaking for Hardy when he says that to succeed as an architect depends upon ‘an earnestness in making acquaintances, and a love for using them’. The similarity to Hardy himself is so close that the ‘new assistant’ may be just another attempt to throw the biographical sleuths off the trail. Again we meet Hardy’s resentment of what is, unfortunately, the very natural desire of many people to know more about the writer and his life. Again and again he denied — even when it was obvious that he was not being strictly accurate — that his novels contained autobiographical material. They all do. His objections to a biographical chapter in F. A. Hedgcock’s Thomas Hardy: penseur et artiste (Paris, 1911) was so great that he managed to stop the publication of an English translation, and he commented in the margin of his own copy ‘All this is too personal, and in bad taste.’