ABSTRACT
Katharine Adams [A letter to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, dated 4 August 1920, from Katharine Adams (1862-1952), a bookbinder, whom Cockerell described as ‘one of the leading craftswomen of the century’]
Last week I ventured to accept an invitation from Mrs Hardy to tea, and with a beating heart penetrated into the very secret and sacred circle of the great man. I was received by Mrs Hardy and Wessex, and was shortly after joined by the Man himself. I looked at him with curiosity. I think it is 30 years since I saw and talked with him before, and the impression that was with me was of a rough-looking man, dressed very unlike his fellows, with a very keen alert face and a decided accent of some kind. Now I see a refined, fragile, gentle little old gentleman, with a rounderlooking head, as he has but little hair, a gentle and smooth voice and polished manners. He was very charming to me. We talked a little about his books, rather more about the performance of The Dynasts at Oxford1 which seemed to have pleased him very much. He showed me all his pictures and some of his other treasures. Mrs Hardy was much younger than I expected to see and the most melancholy person I have ever seen. I think she smiled once, but the smile only expressed sadness. She said she longed to go to America – ‘but I never shall’, she said with a deep sigh, and with a still deeper sigh she said ‘this place is too depressing for words in the winter, when the dead leaves stick on the window pane and the wind moans and the sky is grey and you can’t even see as far as the high road’. Does she think too late, think you, that youth and age cannot be mated? (pp. 24-5).
