Thomas Hardy

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Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), novelist and poet, was born on 2 June 1840, in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset. The eldest child of Thomas Hardy and Jemima Hand, Hardy had three younger siblings: Mary, Henry, and Katharine. Hardy learned to read at a very young age, and developed a fascination with the services he regular attended at Stinsford church. He also grew to love the music that accompanied church ritual. His father had once been a member of the Stinsford church musicians - the group Hardy later memorialised in Under the Greenwood Tree - and taught him to play the violin, with the pair occasionally performing together at local dance parties. Whilst attending the church services, Hardy developed a fascination for a skull which formed part of the Grey family monument. He memorised the accompanying inscription (containing the name 'Angel', which he would later use in his novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles) so intently that he was still able to recite it well into old age. Thomas Hardy By Bain News Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Adulthood Between the years of 1856-1862, Hardy worked as a trainee architect. He formed an important friendship with Horace…
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# Resource Title Description Contributor
11 Victorian Poetry and Fiction The years 1837-1901 in which Queen Victoria reigned were highly influential in the development of… Charlotte Barrett
12 Victorian Publishing History

The History of Reading

In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, reading was… 		Charlotte Barrett
13 ‘‘Beauty […] lay not within the thing but in what the thing symbolised’’: Female Clothing and the Senses in the Works of Thomas Hardy By Charlotte Barrett This essay… Charlotte Barrett
14 On the Origin of Species Publisher info: London: John Murray, 1859.
15 The Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy (vol 1)
16 The Mayor of Casterbridge
17 Far From the Madding Crowd
18 The Woodlanders In three volumes.
19 The Return of the Native
20 Character and Environment in Thomas Hardy's Fiction Thomas Hardy was born in Upper Bockhampton, Dorset and lived within the county for much of his… Charlotte Barrett