ABSTRACT
Edmund Gosse [...] When he was paying a visit to me at Weymouth in 1920,1 and we went roaming over the town together in the desultory fashion he loved, I noticed that the architect came out strongly in him. He was particularly curious about the church in which Sir James Thornhill’s altar-piece is hanging, a good deal out of condition, and Hardy went ardently into the question how much of the new church is really part of the old.2 Nothing would content him but to rummage everywhere about that * Gosse, Edmund, ‘The World of Books: Thomas Hardy’s Lost Novel’, Sunday Times, 22
January 1928, p. 8. Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), prolific critic, biographer, and poet. Ann Thwaite says of Gosse: ‘He became one of Hardy’s closest friends and most frequent correspondents. He and his wife Nellie celebrated their golden wedding in 1925, at which time Hardy sent a telegram: “CONTINUED HAPPINESS FOR BOTH FROM ONE WHO THINKS HE HAS KNOWN YOU THE WHOLE TIME.” This was indeed the case. Hardy and Gosse first met as guests at the Savile Club in the winter of 1874, nine months or so before the Gosses’ marriage. At this time the 25-year-old Gosse was already at the heart of the London literary scene, and was meeting Swinburne almost daily when released from his work at the British Museum. Gosse later became a leading figure in the literary establishment (H.G. Wells called him the “official British man of letters”), and numbered among his many friends Henry James and R.L. Stevenson as well as Hardy. He was knighted in 1925. In many ways and for long periods Gosse was Hardy’s most intimate friend. Nearly 300 letters from Hardy to Gosse survive, and Hardy preserved more of Gosse’s letters than of anyone else’s. Some of Hardy’s are mere notes, acknowledging invitations, books, birthday greetings, and so on, but others are among his most interesting letters, full of humour, modest pleasure in their mutual admiration, and gratitude for Gosse’s perceptive championing of his work. Gosse was not merely a hero-worshipper, however. He needed his heroes to care about him, and Hardy certainly did’ (The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Norman Page [Oxford: OUP, 2000], pp. 139-40). Hardy’s first, and lost, novel was The Poor Man and the Lady, written in 1867-8. Michael Millgate says of Gosse’s summary of the plot of the novel, as Hardy had narrated it to him, that ‘Gosse’s account has generally been regarded with some suspicion, but it was first written as a kind of diary record of a date on which he and Hardy were certainly together, and the details it offers, whatever their origin, do not significantly conflict with what can be inferred from other sources’ (Millgate, p. 109, n.)
1 In January 1920. 2 Sir James Thornhill (1675/6-1734), painter born in Dorset and the father-in-law of
William Hogarth. His very large painting of ‘The Last Supper’ can be seen in St Mary’s
not very inspired construction. I had noticed this tendency before, in our many Wessex rambles, but it was particularly interesting in Weymouth, of which Hardy retained so many early memories. It was on this occasion that he referred – I think almost for the only time – to his student days in London. He told me that his early studies had all been in Perpendicular, and that when he entered Sir Arthur Blomfield’s office he felt like a fish out of water, because there all the other young men laughed at him as an old-fashioned provincial. There was a rage for modern Gothic there, but Hardy said, in his dry way, ‘Taste has come round, in the course of sixty years, to my way of thinking’.
