Then the midwife, turning back to the small scrap of humanity, looked closely at him and exclaimed, ‘Dead! Stop a minute, he’s alive enough, sure!‘¹ And so he was: tiny, weak, hardly expected to survive for long, but not dead yet.²
He was so feeble that his future remained doubtful. For five weeks he was kept at home, and then he was taken to be christened in church. And, although, as Hardy himself put it later, ‘he showed not the physique of his father’, he was named Thomas Hardy after his father and his grandfather.³ Three Thomas Hardys in three generations, and not one of them allowed the luxury of a second given name to distinguish one from another: you can understand why he said he wished he had been called something different, such as Christopher, the name his mother wanted to give him. But Thomas Hardy he was and remained.
There was nothing idyllic about his start in life. Jemima was a reluctant mother, and his parents had married unwillingly under pressure from her family, less than six months before his birth.
Both were Dorset country people, his father a builder in a very small way, living with his widowed mother in a hamlet a few miles from Dorchester. His newly acquired wife, born Jemima Hand, had earned her own living as a servant since the age of thirteen and had hoped to make a career as a cook. She was twenty-six when she found herself trapped by pregnancy. She came from the village of Melbury Osmond in the north-west of the county, close to Somerset, among the apple orchards. To this day it is idyllically pretty, with a church, a green, thatched cottages set at different angles to the road and a watersplash where two streams meet. Both rise in the parkland of the lords of the manor, the Fox-Strangways.
In Jemima’s day the third Earl of IIchester ruled over the estate and lived in the great house, Melbury Sampford, a sprawling mixture of styles crowned by a hexagonal Tudor tower with magnificent windows looking out in five directions. The park had been enclosed by the builder of the tower and was stocked with deer. There was a private church for the family, and lions on the gates. Here they sometimes entertained royalty; from here their younger sons went to the university and into the Church, assured of good livings in local parishes; and from here the family set off for London every spring with the object of making good matches for their children in the aristocratic marriage market. One daughter had defied them: Lady Susan Fox-Strangways married herself to an actor, William O’Brien. Although O’Brien was a friend of Garrick, gentlemanly and gifted, the scandal was great, but the O’Briens made a happy couple and were in time forgiven.
They were allowed to live in one of the houses belonging to the Fox-Strangways, at Stinsford near Dorchester, and the Earl fixed a gentlemanly job for O’Brien, who became Receiver General of the taxes of the county. She chose to be buried with her husband in a vault beneath Stinsford Church. It was made by a local builder named Thomas Hardy. So the Fox-Strangways played their part, remote and heedless forces of destiny, in the meeting of Hardy’s parents.
None of this was known to the young Jemima Hand. Her own family’s problems took all her attention. She was her parents’ fifth child, and there were two more after her, but it was not a happy family. Her father, George Hand, had married her mother, Elizabeth - or Betty - Swetman, with small enthusiasm and against her father’s wishes. The young couple reached the altar in the last month of Betty’s pregnancy. Both had grown up in Melbury Osmond, but otherwise they had little in common.
The Swetmans were an old established family, steady yeomen farmers with a bit of land; there is still a ‘Sweatman orchard’ in the village. Although the village census describes her as working as a ‘spinner’, she is said to have enjoyed enough leisure and money to indulge her taste for reading Richardson, Fielding and Paradise Lost, to have dispensed to the village from Culpepper’s Herbal and to have worn pretty clothes. She could expect to inherit her father’s savings, whereas George had nothing to offer but dark good looks, defiant intelligence and, presumably, charm.
