1. Thomas Hardy
1840-1928

2. Quick Facts
Born on June 2, 1840 in cottage built by
grandfather in Higher Bockhampton, miles east
from Dorchester in Dorset, England
Educated by his mother until the age of 8 and only
had formal education until age 16

3. Personal Details
 Ended formal education to
apprentice a local architect and
eventually became one
 Was an English novelist and poet
but regarded himself more as a
poet
 Married Emma Gifford in 1874 (d.
1912)
 His poems from 1912-1913
reflected her death
 Married his secretary Florence
Dugdale in 1914 (at age 35 and
Thomas age 74)

4. Emma Gifford
Florence Dugdale and Thomas
Hardy

5.  Received the Order of Merit (which
gives him the post-nominal letters
OM)
 Died on January 11, 1928 due to
inflammation of his lungs
 His funeral was on January 16,1928
and was largely controversial
 His wish was to be buried next to
Emma but his executor wanted him
to be buried at Poet’s Corner
 His heart was buried with Emma
and his remains buried at Poet’s
Corner in Westminster
Abbey, London, England, next to
Charles Dickens (who wrote A
Christmas Carol)

6. The heart of Thomas buried next to
Emma at Stinsford a mile away from
the cottage he was born

7. Style

8.  Influenced by Romanticism
 Free expression of artist
 Fatalist
 All subjects are subject to fate
 Naturalism
 1880s to 1940s
 Replicate everyday believable reality
 Victorian Literature
 Preceded Romantic Period
 Idealize portraits of difficult lives in which their hard work and
perseverance will win; virtue-rewarded; wrongdoers-punished
 Became complex in later decades
 Victorian Realist
 Rejected God
 Challenged the beliefs of Victorian society
 Considered most important novelist in the later decades of Victorian Era
due to his Victorian Realist view in literature
 Many of his work reflected his hardship in Dorchester

9. Notable Work

10. Poetry
Moments of Vision (1917)
Satires of Circumstance (1914)
The Dynasts (1908)
Time’s Laughingstocks (1909)
Wessex Poems (1898)
Winter Words in Various Moods and Meters
(1928)

11. Novels
A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
Desperate Remedies (1871)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1897)
The Return of the Native (1879)
The Trumpet Major (1879)
The Well Beloved (1897)
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)

12. Influences
Charles Dickens
Charlotte Bronte
George Meredith
Thomas Gray
Arthur Schopenhauer

13. Influenced
Philip Larkin
D.H. Lawrence
Robert Frost
W.H. Auden
W.D. Snodgrass
John Fowles
Robinson Jeffers

14. Consulted Sources
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/110
http://www.hardysociety.org/index.php/hard
y/novels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy#I
nfluence