11 Jan 2022
On This Day
11 January 2022 Cheryl

11 January 1928: Thomas Hardy dies

Thomas Hardy

Inside an ancient London churchyard, an ash tree is encircled with hundreds of overlapping gravestones. To make way for a new train line in 1865, the task of exhuming human remains from an old cemetery at St. Pancras Church for relocation fell to an architecture firm. After the task was completed hundreds of headstones remained which Thomas Hardy placed in a circular pattern around an ash tree. This has become known at ‘The Hardy Tree.’ [1]

Thomas Hardy died of pleurisy, a lung infection, on 11 January 1928 after dictating his final poem to his wife from his deathbed. He was aged 87.

Best known for his novels, which include Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy was a prolific and highly respected writer. His works are known for their realism and their depiction of rural life and the working class. Many of his novels also explore themes of love, loss, and social and moral issues.

Most of all I love Hardy as a poet, which is where he felt himself that he was at his greatest. He wrote hundreds of poems, in a great variety of forms, but he wrote the novels because they brought in the money. Sadly, most of the fabulous love poems he wrote were for his first wife Emma and they were penned after she died in 1912. The couple had had a tumultuous relationship and although not always happy together, they remained married for nearly four decades. After Emma’s death, Hardy became involved with Florence Dugdale who was 39 years younger than him, and they married in 1914. Hardy remained with Florence until his own death.

Hardy lived a long and productive life, continuing to write and publish poetry and fiction well into his old age. He was obsessive about wishing to hide his own lowly origins, especially as he grew more and more famous. In his later years, he became increasingly reclusive, and his health began to decline. Despite this, he remained active and engaged with the world, corresponding with friends and fellow writers.

The gulf between his humble birth and his fame remained even in death – his ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried near the graves of Emma and his parents at tiny Stinsford Church in Dorset.