[In the following essay, Sherman explores the impact of Thomas Hardy's experiences in London on his later fiction.]

To Thomas Hardy the city of London was a Wheel and a Beast. "This hum of the Wheel—the roar of London!" he comments on the spectacle from the Marble Arch. Despite its deafening noise, he knew what it was composed of: "Hurry, speech, laughters, moans, cries of little children. . . . All are caged birds; the only difference lies in the size of the cage. This too is part of the tragedy." The Wheel by day became a Beast at night, "a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes," which produced insomnia in him from the eerie feeling of lying down in the presence of the Four Million, whom he had once also called "four million forlorn hopes."

One does not have to unearth Hardy's reading in the classics or philosophy to discover the origin of these images. They do not come from books, but from life itself, from the ever-increasing concentration of people in cities as the result of our industrial age. Neither do they belong exclusively to Hardy nor apply to London alone. Our own Sandburg has described Chicago, "Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cruel as a savage pitted against the wilderness." Lafcadio Hearn, reporter in Cincinnati and later in New Orleans during the 'eighties, noted, " . . . even before you see the smoky coronet that surrounds the modern city, you can hear a wild growl like that of some enraged beast." Thousands of city dwellers and workers have reacted in the same way to our industrialized and urbanized society; and probably no images portray more clearly or powerfully its brutalizing and destructive force than a Wheel and a Beast.

London was the commercial capital of the world. When Hardy, a youth commencing his twenties, went up to the city in 1862, the year of the Great Exhibition, he found the London of Dickens and Thackeray undergoing tremendous expansion and transformation. Hungerford Market stood where Charing Cross station now stands. "The Tube," or Subway, was still in its infancy. There was no Thames Embankment and no bridge across Ludgate Hill, and the huge block of buildings known as the Law Courts had not yet been erected. During his next five years in London Hardy came to have a knowledge of the metropolis, Mrs. Hardy says, like a born Londoner and as only a young man can get it.

Picture the youthful Hardy boarding the omnibus at Kilburn Gate, near Westbourne Park Villas, where he lived, with the cries of the conductors, "Any more passengers for London!" ringing in his ears. Imagine him in A. W. Blomfield's architectural offices at 8 Adelphi Terrace, drawing at the easternmost window on the second floor, or idling, when work was slack, on the balcony to watch the construction of the Thames Embankment and Charing Cross Bridge. Accompany him to the illuminated parade on the eve of the Prince of Wales's approaching marriage in the spring of 1863, when six people were killed in the Mansion Crush and he narrowly escaped with his life. Witness with him in the fall and winter of 1865-66, in a Poesque atmosphere behind high hoardings and by the flare of lamps, the removal of bodies in the Old St. Paneras Churchyard to permit the extension of the Midland Railway, and one of the coffins falling apart and revealing a skeleton and two skulls. Follow him to the Willis Rooms, where he was alternately attracted to and repulsed by the aristocratic Bayswater girls, with whom he danced, because of feelings of social and economic inferiority; and, perhaps to compensate for them, imagined the presence of "powdered Dears from Georgian Years," who had danced quadrilles and polkas there in Johnson's and Addison's time. It was a fashionable and exclusive resort, little changed, since those days when it was known as Almack's, and later as Brooks's Club, where, according to Gibbon the historian, the Goddess of Terpsichore was second only in popularity to the Goddess of Chance. Stand with Hardy on a day in 1865 in Covent Garden when he listened to John Stuart Mill speak in behalf of his candidature for Westminster, and remember that he knew Mill's essay On Liberty almost by heart.

These are some of the main events in Hardy's life in London between 1862 and 1867. On the whole, they were busy and prosperous years for all classes. The building trades had won a victory in 1862 after three years' agitation for the nine-hour day. The same year the Lancashire cotton mills were idle on account of the Northern blockade of the South's cotton ports, and large-scale relief had to be organized for these unemployed workers. Liberals and Radicals were active in spreading pro-Northern and antislavery sentiments to prevent England from aiding the South. In 1864 the Italian liberator Garibaldi was accorded a tremendous working-class reception. In 1865 General William Booth was taking religion into the slums of London, and in spite of the general prosperity hundreds of people were without a place to eat and sleep. There was agitation for the extension of suffrage and all kinds of reform. Karl Marx was busy in London organizing international working-men's associations. The Reform League, a militant political organization, with a membership of some 20,000, largely recruited from the trade unions throughout England, was working for amelioration.¹ The Reform League was important in Hardy's life because it was on the ground floor below Blomfield's offices, and the members of the League were well known to Blomfield's pupils, who, "as became Tory and Churchy young men, indulged in satire at the League's expense," Mrs. Hardy says, and once indeed had to apologize to its bricklayer secretary, George Howell, for their conduct. Hardy, one may be sure, did not participate in this horseplay. His sympathies were on the other side, with the working class. We have evidence of that in Andrew Macmillan's letter returning the manuscript of Hardy's legendary novel The Poor Man and the Lady, "by The Poor Man," which was never published and was later lost or destroyed. Macmillan wrote: "The utter heartlessness of all the conversation you give in drawingrooms and ballrooms about the working-classes has some ground of truth, I fear, and might justly be scourged as you aim at doing; but your chastisement would fall harmless from its very excess." One is somewhat skeptical of Macmillan's judgment when he remembers that Lowes in the House of Commons described the working class as "impulsive, unreflecting, violent people," guilty of "venality, ignorance, drunkenness, and intimidation." Macmillan praised the scene in Rotten Row and called "Will's speech to the workingmen" in Trafalgar Square "full of wisdom." Trafalgar Square was a popular place for speeches and demonstrations, and Hardy must have listened to a few of them himself. The Reform League staged a huge meeting in the square on June 29, 1867, and afterward paraded through Pall Mall to show their hostility to the new Tory ministry. Hardy left London in July of that year, and if he did not attend the meeting he certainly would have known about it. But neither the publishers nor the Victorian reading public were ready for a "socialistic, not to say revolutionary" novel such as Hardy's was reputed to have been. George Meredith, of Chapman and Hall, to whom Hardy next submitted the manuscript, advised him, Mrs. Hardy says, "'not to nail his colours to the mast' so definitely in a first book, if he wished to do anything practical in literature." Such criticism as this made Hardy apprehensive about his future. His fear of insecurity persisted long after there was any justification for it. In his diary, November 28, 1878, he wrote: "Woke before it was light. Felt that I had not enough staying power to hold my own in the world." Hardy did not have the crusading energy to fight the Wheel and the Beast. He instinctively recoiled against the inhuman materialism and ignoble rewards of his age as he observed it in London. "If I have seen one thing," he wrote in "A Young Man's Exhortation" (1867), "it is the passing preciousness of dreams." In his decision to leave London in the summer of 1867 and return to a simpler pattern of life in Wessex, there is a strain of ivory towerism. Since corruptibility had never been compulsory, he would retreat to his native heath and let the city lie at the monster's feet.

From the title alone of The Poor Man and the Lady, "by The Poor Man," Arthur Quiller-Couch says we may deduce something of Hardy's indignation at the remediable ills of society. "Thin-skinned" and uncertain of the future, he put away his sword of ink and wrote, as he afterward admitted, "to keep base life afoot." Henceforth, London was not material for a novel to him, but only for novel-padding. At music halls, police courts, horse races, slums, and other places, which he visited for this express purpose, he saw plenty of evidence of the Wheel and the Beast. There are passages in his novels and in his journal which disclose his sensitivity to poverty and misery in London. "Poverty in the country is a sadness," he comments in The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), "but poverty in town is a horror." Again, in his journal: "Rural life may reveal coarseness of considerable leaven, but that libidinousness which Maltes the scum of cities so noxious is not usually present." In Desperate Remedies (1871), his first published novel, he describes a ricketyfurnished tenement apartment with its diaper-strung kitchen, and comments on the lives of the occupants: "Only for one short hour in the whole twenty-four did husband and wife taste genuine happiness. It was in the evening after the sale of some necessary article of furniture, they were under the influence of a quartern of gin." He records in his journal the remark of a man on the street corner to him: "When one is drunk, London seems a wonderfully enjoyable place, with its lamps and cabs, moving like fire-flies." In Piccadilly at night he observes: "A man on a stretcher, with bloody bandage round his head, was wheeled past by two policemen, stragglers following." At one of the music halls, he comments on "the round-hatted young men gaping at the stage with receding chins and rudimentary mouths"; and at Bizet's opera of Carmen he is struck by "the possessed, maudlin, distraught manner" of the players on the stage, "as if they lived on a planet whose atmosphere was intoxicating." The animalism and brutality of Mansion in Desperate Remedies, and the couple in Jude, at the office of marriage licenses—the soldier, sullen, and his bride, sad over her black eye and her pregnancy,—are products of the city jungle and contain glimmers of Dreiser's later sociological studies. There is an impressionistic description in A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) of a surging, bustling crowd, mostly of women, with the glaring gas lamps from butchers' stalls discoloring their lumps of flesh. Hardy is reminded of "the wild colouring in Turner's later pictures," which alone satisfied his awareness of the tragical mysteries of life. "The purl and babble of tongues of every pitch and mood," he writes, "was to the human wildwood what the ripple of a brook is to the natural forest." It is an urban voice, "Heart-halt and spirit lame," that seeks refuge from the city's oppression in the little poem "In a Wood," only to find in the forest the same combat as among men. It is interesting that Hardy, who was one of the first acclaimers of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) should see the struggle for existence in uncultivated nature in terms of the competitive struggle in the city. In The Hand of Ethelberta and Jude the Obscure, however, he comments with ironic humor on the subdivision of labor in the city; and in A Pair of Blue Eyes he attributes the difference between the rural mechanic and the typical workingman to "that beach pebble attrition . . . which metamorphoses the unit Self into a fraction of the Unit Class." Not knowing Marx, Hardy was led by his observations of the distressing phenomena in London, as probably any young man would have been who had been kept regularly at church till he knew the morning and evening service by heart, into philosophical reflections about God and man. When Hardy saw "patient hundreds labouring on," a drunken or disorderly person with a bandaged head, men and women jammed into omnibuses, or charcoal trees in the square, he was moved to reflect: "Yes, man has done more with his materials than God has done with his." He began to wonder whether "the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions," and whether "Nature . . . so far back as when she crossed the line from invertebrates to vertebrates did not exceed her mission." Unable to get over the hurdle between reality and illusion, he tried to solve the contradiction in the existence of good and evil by stretching Darwin's hypothesis over the gigantic force which was slower to develop consciousness and morality than man.

Some of these philosophical reflections from London life, Hardy used in Jude the Obscure (1896) in the "vague and quaint imaginings" of Sue, "that at the framing of terrestrial conditions there seemed never to have been contemplated such a development of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures subject to those conditions as that reached by thinking and educated humanity," for instance, and "that the First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist and not reflectively like a sage." Before Hardy wrote Jude, he was beginning to regard people in drawing rooms, art salons, on street corners, wherever he observed them in London, as automatons and somnambulists. When viewing the pictures at the Academy in May, 1890, he recollected the time "when there was a rail round Frith's pictures, and of the curious effect upon an observer of the fashionable crowd seeming like people moving about under enchantment, or as somnambulists." In the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, in Part II of The Dynasts, the Spirit of the Years comments to the Spirit of the Pities on Marie Louise's marriage to Napoleon: "Yet see it pass, as by a conjuror's wand." One never encounters in Hardy's writings comparisons of Wessex people to automatons or somnambulists.

The somnambulistic behavior of urban people was even more apparent to Hardy in the London of the Boer War. In the poem "Embarcation" depicting a scene on the Southampton docks in October, 1899, he writes: "Wives, sisters, parents, wave white hands and smile, / As if they knew not that they weep the while." The companion poem "Departure" contains two lines which read like a summary of The Dynasts in one sentence: "Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these, / That are as puppets in a playing hand?—" Some old notes written before he began working on The Dynasts indicate the military trend of his imagination: "Army as somnambulists.—not knowing what it is for." "London appears not to see itself," he writes in his journal, March 28, 1888. "Each individual is conscious of himself, but nobody conscious of themselves collectively, except perhaps some poor gaper who stares round with half-idiotic aspect. There is no consciousness here," he adds, "of where anything comes from or goes to,—only that it is present." Hardy borrowed the term "Immanent Will" from Schopenhauer, it is true, but these traits which he ascribes to it, he observed on the stream of humanity in London long before he was acquainted with German philosophy. His description of the crowd in the Strand on the periphery of Mansion's vision in Desperate Remedies (1871) precludes the influence of either Schopenhauer or von Hartmann, for The World as Will and Idea was not translated into English until 1883, and The Philosophy of the Unconscious not until 1884. Hardy sees

... tall men looking insignificant; little men looking great and profound; lost women of miserable repute looking as happy as the days are long; wives happy by assumption looking careworn and miserable. Each and all were alike in this one respect, that they followed a solitary trail like the inwoven threads which form a banner, and all were equally unconscious of the significant whole they collectively showed forth.

Furthermore, the distinguishing trait of the Will, "groping tentativeness," seems to have risen out of the general experience of living and more particularly out of the discovery that the world is different from what he thought it was or wished it to be. At the age of forty-one: "Since I discovered several years ago, that I was living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently, I have troubled myself very little about theories . . . where development according to perfect reason is limited to the narrow field of pure mathematics, I am content with tentativeness from day to day." Was he thinking possibly of his disappointments and frustration as a youth in London?

These urban human traits, his brooding imagination magnified to the dimension of the "unconscious, unweeting mind" of The Dynasts, just as he extended the wheel-like pattern of Piccadilly to cosmic proportions as the abode of "Man's counterfeit / That turns in some far sphere unlit / The Wheel which drives the Infinite."

Hardy employs the Beast image in The Dynasts, as well as the Wheel. The Beast seems to have become more graphic to him in the fall of 1879, when he and his wife viewed the Lord Mayor's show from the upstairs office of Good Words, a periodical published in Ludgate Hill. To Mrs. Hardy, who had never seen the spectacle before, the surface of the crowd seemed like "a boiling cauldron of porridge," but to Hardy it was the Beast which caused his insomnia:

As the crowd grows denser it loses its character of an aggregate of countless units, and becomes an organic whole, a molluscous black creature having nothing in common with humanity, that takes the shape of the streets along which it has lain itself, and throws out horrid excrescences and limbs into neighbouring alleys; a creature whose voice exudes from its scaly coat, and who has an eye in every pore of its body. The balconies, stands, and railway bridge are occupied by smaller detached shapes of the same tissue, but of gentler motion, as if they were the spawn of the monster in their midst.

"The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive," wrote Frederick Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, "something against which human nature rebels." Hardy's aerial view of the movements of London traffic bears a resemblance to the description of the Russian army whose "undulating columns twinkle as if they were scaly serpents" invading France; and also to the Allied armies, which "glide on as if by gravitation, in fluid figures, dictated by the conformation of the country, like water from a burst reservoir; mostly snake-shaped, but occasionally with batrachian and saurian outlines." One can see how much the view of the Lord Mayor's show from Ludgate Hill in 1879 contributed to the perspective and the images by which Hardy depicts military movements in Part III of The Dynasts in 1908. The monster glimpsed by the Spirit of the Pities following the battle of Ligny is recognizable by the Spirit of the Years as Devastation:

. . . loosely jointed,
With an Apocalyptic Being's shape,
And limbs and eyes a hundred thousand strong,
And fifty-thousand heads; which coils itself
About the buildings there.

Hardy's harrowing experience in the Mansion Crush in 1863 may partly account for the origin of the Beast metaphor. It should not be forgotten that Hardy was a sensitive and immature youth who had scarcely been away from home before, and furthermore that he had been made apprehensive about the city and his chances of securing employment on his arrival there. If Wordsworth could write about feeling "in heart and soul the shock of the huge town's first presence," as he "paced her streets, a transient visitant," how much more powerful an impression must have been produced on Hardy by an experience as terrifying as his. It is very possible that the shock from it remained deep in Hardy's subconscious and increased his feeling of sensitivity to one of hypersensitivity. If one accepts this experience as the source of the Beast image, the less terrifying aspect of the monster Devastation in The Dynasts is readily explained by the interval of time in which the effect of the shock was diminished. Wordsworth's definition of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquillity" has a peculiar application in Hardy's case. We know something of the working of Hardy's mind from his account of the poem "In Time of the Breaking of Nations." This poem, he tells us, was engendered by an emotion felt while he was observing an agricultural scene in Cornwall at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, but it was not written till 1915. Hardy says of himself, "I believe it would be said by people who knew me well that I have a faculty (possibly not uncommon) for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred." One would not wish either to exaggerate or to minimize the influence of the Mansion Crush on Hardy. Possibly he was not entirely aware of its influence himself, but his suffering from insomnia in the city lends some support to the theory.

In one respect these images of London as a Wheel and a Beast never seem to have emerged wholly from Hardy's subconscious. Consider the explicit significance that such a writer as George Gissing has given The Whirlpool or as Frank Norris The Octopus. Hardy might have realized his images of the Wheel and the Beast if he had not consented to the abortion of The Poor Man and the Lady "by The Poor Man"; but after he came to regard London life as a source for novel-padding instead of a thesis, there was little hope for his emancipation. If he had lived in the "Great Wen" of Cobbett's time and thrown his energies into working for the Reform Bill, or even if he had remained in the London of his own time and fought against some of the remediable ills at which he felt indignant instead of retreating to Wessex, his Wheel and Beast images might have become potent symbols of reality instead of philosophical masks for his reluctant atheism.

¹ There is a reference to the Reform League in Marx's letter (January 15, 1866) to Dr. Kugelmann, when during the middle 'sixties political activities of the working classes took on for a while an international aspect. Marx writes: "We have succeeded in drawing into the movement the one really big workers' organization, the English Trades Unions, which formerly concerned themselves exclusively with wage questions. With their help the English Society (The Reform League) which we founded for achieving universal suffrage (half of its central committee consists of members—workers—of our Central Committee) held a monster meeting a few weeks ago, at which only workers spoke. You can judge of the effect by the fact that the Times dealt with the meeting in leading articles in two consecutive issues."—Letters to Dr. Kugelmann (New York: International Publishers, 1934), p. 33.