ABSTRACT
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, in Upper, or Higher, Bockhampton, a part of the Stinsford parish the reader of the novels will remember as Mellstock of Under the Greenwood Tree. If Hardy was influenced by the intellectual trends most current in his youth, an early pessimism would be altogether unaccountable. Because the Oxford movement had succeeded so thoroughly, it would have been impossible for Newman to have decried the church during the period when Hardy was attending two High Church services. Hardy’s early devotion to religion is even more strongly evidenced by an episode of his first years as an architectural apprentice in Dorchester. The preponderance of evidence and common sense alike lead us to conclude that Hardy’s youth was a period before the “necessity of taking thought” had made the heavens gray, when his insight into the conditions of existence was so imperfect that he regarded life hopefully.
