The Mayor of Casterbridge | Author Biography

Thomas Hardy was born June 2, 1840, in a village near Dorchester in the southwestern region of England that would become the setting for his novels. His father, Thomas, was a builder and mason; his mother, Jemima Hand, was a cook.

Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy

After attending schools in his village, Bockhampton, and in Dorchester, Hardy was apprenticed at age sixteen to his father’s employer, an architect. While learning architecture, Hardy studied the classics with a university-educated tutor named Horace Moule. In 1862, Hardy moved to London, where he worked as an assistant architect, read widely, and began writing. Poems that he submitted to periodicals were rejected, but an article, “How I Built Myself a House,” was published.

Hardy’s work took him back to Dorchester and then to Weymouth, where he met Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he married in 1874. Hardy also began writing novels at this time, and it was Emma who encouraged him to leave architecture and write full time. His first published novel, Desperate Remedies, came out in 1871 and was quickly followed by two others. (His first, unpublished novel has been lost.) But it was Far from the Madding Crowd, published in 1874, that ensured his reputation. By the late 1870s, he was an established member of England’s literary elite.

The Mayor of Casterbridge, published in 1886, was considered pivotal in Hardy’s career, as its male main character was more fully developed than those in previous novels. The Mayor of Casterbridge also represented a new achievement in the novel form by successfully blending a psychological portrait of one man with a depiction of the social realities of a particular time and place. Other major works of this period were a collection of short stories, Wessex Tales (1888), and the dark and controversial Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Reaction to Jude the Obscure (1896) was so harsh that Hardy gave up writing novels. He published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, in 1898 and continued to write poetry throughout his remaining years.

In 1912, just after Hardy had completed a final revision of his novels, his wife died. He married Florence Emily Dugdale, who had been his secretary, in 1914. Hardy worked on his autobiography, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, which was ostensibly written by his second wife, and burned his private papers. The autobiography, as well as the last volume of Hardy’s poetry, Winter Words, was published posthumously in 1928.

Hardy was honored during his lifetime with the British government’s Order of Merit (1910) and with honorary doctorate of literature degrees from Cambridge University in 1913 and from Oxford University in 1920. He died January 11, 1928, in Dorchester after a brief illness. His ashes are interred in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey in London, though his heart is buried in the grave of his first wife.grave of his first wife.