Because Thomas Hardy is so closely associated with the rural Wessex
of his novels, stories, and poems, it is easy to forget that he
was, in his own words, half a Londoner. Focusing on the formative
five years in his early twenties when Hardy lived in the city, but
also on his subsequent movement back and forth between Dorset and
the capital, Mark Ford shows that the Dorset-London axis is
critical to an understanding of his identity as a man and his
achievement as a writer. Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner presents a
detailed account of Hardy's London experiences, from his arrival as
a shy, impressionable youth, to his embrace of radical views, to
his lionization by upper-class hostesses eager to fete the creator
of Tess. Drawing on Hardy's poems, letters, fiction, and
autobiography, it offers a subtle, moving exploration of the
author's complex relationship with the metropolis and those he met
or observed there: publishers, fellow authors, street-walkers,
benighted lovers, and the aristocratic women who adored his writing
but spurned his romantic advances. The young Hardy's oscillations
between the routines and concerns of Dorset's Higher Bockhampton
and the excitements and dangers of London were crucial to his
profound sense of being torn between mutually dependent but often
mutually uncomprehending worlds. This fundamental self-division,
Ford argues, can be traced not only in the poetry and fiction
explicitly set in London but in novels as regionally circumscribed
as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
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