THOMAS HARDY (1840 - 1928)

- THOMAS  HARDY (1840 - 1928) -

Hardy, who lived until the First World War, was as much a modern as a Victorian writer; his pessimism about man and his refusal to adopt a religious faith he really didn't share mark him as a post - Victorian writer. He saw no reason to believe that the Universe was organised for the benefit of  man. He thought that people were in the different hands of fate.

He was born near Dorchester in the south - west of England, that area which he made the " Wessex " of his novels. In 1861 he went to London to study and work as an architect. There he began writing and produced two novels anonymously.

Works:

Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d'Ubervilles, Jude the Obscure. All are stories of country life and are tragic in that the main characters are usually victims of life or of themselves. Even if Hardy' s work in its rural setting appears similar to that of George Eliot, his novels have a fatalistic depth which is missing in hers.

Hardy' s last novel, Jude The Obscure, was not well accepted. This made him turn to writing lyric poetry instead. "Wessex Poems, and Other Verses" . They are in the tradition of Tennyson. All his verse is sad and resigned, as is in the work of the Georgian poets, who were much influenced by Hardy' s poetry.

Irony

His irony is not directed at human egotism, but at the very condition of human existence. Setting his characters he saw them as ures whose passions were doomed to run the course that the human condition set for them.

Vision of Life

Both as novelist and poet, Hardy devised human situations compounded of a mixture of irony and tragedy: Hardy' s sensitive descriptions of the villages, fields, the seasons are indicative of his concept of man's conflict with nature. Nature was for Hardy not only a cruel force, but also the personification of an overpowering fate against which human beings were helpless. Man may struggle against his impulses and instincts, but, according to Hardy' s deterministic concept of life, instinct will finally prevail over reason. Thus, we frequently find in Hardy' s work the theme of man' s tragic inability to adapt to his life in the world. This pessimistic view of the human condition derives from the influence of DARWIN.