ABSTRACT
Throughout his long life, Thomas Hardy was a keen observer of his local night sky and an avid student of contemporary astronomy and cosmology. Although Hardy’s literary and philosophical uses of the central tenets of evolutionary theory have attracted the lion’s share of scholarly attention, Hardy’s astronomy has received some critical mention in the “literature and science” surveys of A. J. Meadows and Tess Cosslett and within brief articles by Harumi James, Jacob Korg, and Paul Ward, among others.1 To the best of my knowledge, no one has previously attempted a 1 See, for example: Harumi James, “Two on a Tower: Science and Religion, Space and Time” Hardy Review 2 (Summer 1999): 141-56; Jacob Korg, “Astronomical Imagery in Victorian Poetry” in Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, eds. James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985) 137-58; Paul Ward, “Two on a Tower: A Critical Revaluation” Thomas Hardy Yearbook 8 (1978): 2934; Jim Barloon, “Star-Crossed Love: The Gravity of Science in Hardy’s Two on a Tower,” The Victorian Newsletter (Fall 1998): 27-32; and Edward C. Sampson “Telling Time by the Stars in
systematic, critical appraisal of the importance of astronomy and cosmology within his literature and thought.
