name	J. M. Barrie
birth date	May 09, 1860
birth place	Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland
death date	June 19, 1937
death place	London, England
resting place	Kirriemuir Cemetery, Angus, Scotland
occupation	Novelist, playwright
nationality	Scottish
citizenship	United Kingdom
education	Glasgow AcademyForfar AcademyDumfries AcademyEdinburgh University
period	Victorian, Edwardian
genre	children's literature, drama, fantasy
movement	Kailyard school
notableworks	''The Little White Bird''''Peter Pan''
spouse
children	guardian of the Llewelyn Davies boys
signature	JM Barrie Signature.svg
website	http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk }}

Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937) was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan. The child of a family of small-town weavers, he was educated in Scotland. He moved to London, where he developed a career as a novelist and playwright. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys who inspired him in writing about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (included in ''The Little White Bird''), then to write ''Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up'', a "fairy play" about this ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland. This play quickly overshadowed his previous work and although he continued to write successfully, it became his best-known work, credited with popularising the name ''Wendy'', which was very uncommon previously. Barrie unofficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents. Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital, which continues to benefit from them.

Childhood and adolescence

Barrie was born in Kirriemuir, Angus, to a conservative Calvinist family. His father David Barrie was a modestly successful weaver. His mother, Margaret Ogilvy, had assumed her deceased mother's household responsibilities at the age of eight. Barrie was the ninth child of ten (two of whom died before he was born), all of whom were schooled in at least the three Rs, in preparation for possible professional careers. He was a small child (he only grew to 5 ft 3½ in. according to his 1934 passport), and drew attention to himself with storytelling.

When he was 6 years old, Barrie's next-older brother David (his mother's favourite) died two days before his 14th birthday in an ice-skating accident. This left his mother devastated, and Barrie tried to fill David's place in his mother's attentions, even wearing David's clothes and whistling in the manner that he did. One time Barrie entered her room, and heard her say 'Is that you?' 'I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to,' wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother, ''Margaret Ogilvy'' (1896), 'and I said in a little lonely voice, "No, it's no' him, it's just me."' Barrie's mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her. Despite evidence to the contrary, it has been speculated that this trauma induced psychogenic dwarfism, and was responsible for his short stature and apparently asexual adulthood. Eventually Barrie and his mother entertained each other with stories of her brief childhood and books such as ''Robinson Crusoe'', works by fellow Scotsman Walter Scott, and ''The Pilgrim's Progress''.

At the age of 8, Barrie was sent to The Glasgow Academy, in the care of his eldest siblings Alexander and Mary Ann, who taught at the school. When he was 10 he returned home and continued his education at the Forfar Academy. At 13, he left home for Dumfries Academy, again under the watch of Alexander and Mary Ann. He became a voracious reader, and was fond of penny dreadfuls, and the works of Robert Michael Ballantyne and James Fenimore Cooper. At Dumfries he and his friends spent time in the garden of Moat Brae house, playing pirates 'in a sort of Odyssey that was long afterwards to become the play of ''Peter Pan'''. They formed a drama club, producing his first play ''Bandelero the Bandit'', which provoked a minor controversy following a scathing moral denunciation from a clergyman on the school's governing board.

Literary career

Barrie wished to pursue a career as an author, but was dissuaded by his family — who wished him to have a profession such as the ministry, telling him it's what David would have done, had he been alive. With wise advice from Alec, he was able to work out a compromise. He was to attend a university, but would study literature. He enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote drama reviews for Edinburgh Evening Courant. He was extremely introverted, and was shy about the fact he was in college and only approximately five feet. He would go on to graduate with his M.A. on April 21, 1882.

He worked for a year and a half as a staff journalist in Nottingham following a job advertisement found by his sister in ''The Scotsman'', then returned to Kirriemuir, using his mother's stories about the town (which he called 'Thrums') for a piece submitted to the newspaper ''St. James's Gazette'' in London. The editor 'liked that Scotch thing', so Barrie wrote a series of them, which served as the basis for his first novels: ''Auld Licht Idylls'' (1888), ''A Window in Thrums'' (1890), and ''The Little Minister'' (1891). The stories depicted the "Auld Lichts", a strict religious sect that his grandfather had once belonged to. Literary criticism of these early works has been unfavourable, tending to disparage them as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland far from the realities of the industrialised nineteenth century, but they were popular enough to establish Barrie as a very successful writer. After the success of the "Auld Lichts", he printed ''Better Dead'' (1888) privately and at his own expense, and it failed to sell. His two 'Tommy' novels, ''Sentimental Tommy'' (1896) and ''Tommy and Grizel'' (1900), were about a boy and young man who clings to childish fantasy, with an unhappy ending.

Meanwhile, Barrie's attention turned increasingly to works for the theatre, beginning with a biography of Richard Savage and written by both Barrie and H.B. Marriott Watson (performed only once, and critically panned). He immediately followed this with ''Ibsen's Ghost'' (or ''Toole Up-to-Date'') (1891), a parody of Henrik Ibsen's dramas ''Hedda Gabler'' and ''Ghosts'' (unlicensed in the UK until 1914, it had created a sensation at the time from a single 'club' performance). The production of Barrie's play at Toole's Theatre in London was seen by William Archer, the translator of Ibsen's works into English, who enjoyed the humour of the play and recommended it to others. His third play, ''Walker, London'' (1892), helped him be introduced to a young actress named Mary Ansell. Although he was unsure about his own suitability for marriage, he proposed to her and they were married on July 9, 1894. He got Ansell a Saint Bernard puppy, who would play a part in the novel ''The Little White Bird'' (or ''Adventures in Kensington Gardens''). He also gave Ansell's Christian name to many characters in novels.

Barrie also authored ''Jane Annie'', a failed comic opera for Richard D'Oyly Carte (1893), which he begged his friend Arthur Conan Doyle to revise and finish for him. In 1901 and 1902 he had back-to-back successes: ''Quality Street'', about a responsible 'old maid' who poses as her own flirtatious niece to win the attention of a former suitor returned from the war; and ''The Admirable Crichton'', a critically acclaimed social commentary with elaborate staging, about an aristocratic household shipwrecked on a desert island, in which the butler naturally rises to leadership over his lord and ladies for the duration of their time away from civilization.

The first appearance of Peter Pan came in ''The Little White Bird'', which was serialised in the United States, then published in a single volume in the UK in 1901. Barrie's most famous and enduring work, ''Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up'', had its first stage performance on 27 December 1904. This play introduced audiences to the name ''Wendy'', which was inspired by a young girl, Margaret Henley, who called Barrie 'Friendy', but could not pronounce her ''R''s very well and so it came out as 'Fwendy'. It has been performed innumerable times since then, was developed by Barrie into the 1911 novel ''Peter and Wendy'', and has been adapted by others into feature films, musicals, and more. The Bloomsbury scenes show the societal constraints of late Victorian middle-class domestic reality, contrasted with Neverland, a world where morality is ambivalent. George Bernard Shaw's description of the play as 'ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people', suggests deeper social allegories at work in ''Peter Pan''.

In April 1929 Barrie specified that the copyright of the Peter Pan works should go to the nation's leading children's hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. The current status of the copyright is somewhat complex.

Barrie had a long string of successes on the stage after ''Peter Pan'', many of which discuss social concerns. ''The Twelve Pound Look'' shows a wife divorcing a peer and gaining an independent income. Other plays, such as ''Mary Rose'' and a subplot in ''Dear Brutus'' revisit the image of the ageless child. Later plays included ''What Every Woman Knows'' (1908). His final play was ''The Boy David'' (1936), which dramatised the Biblical story of King Saul and the young David. Like the role of Peter Pan, that of David was played by a woman, Elisabeth Bergner, for whom Barrie wrote the play.

Barrie used his considerable income to help finance the production of commercially unsuccessful stage productions. Along with a number of other playwrights, he was involved in the 1909 and 1911 attempts to challenge the censorship of the theatre by the Lord Chamberlain.

Social connections

Barrie travelled in high literary circles, and in addition to his professional collaborators, he had many famous friends. Novelist George Meredith was an early social patron. He had a long correspondence with fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived in Samoa at the time, but the two never met in person. George Bernard Shaw was for several years his neighbour, and once participated in a Western that Barrie scripted and filmed. H. G. Wells was a friend of many years, and tried to intervene when Barrie's marriage fell apart. Barrie met Thomas Hardy through Hugh Clifford while he was staying in London.

After the First World War Barrie sometimes stayed at Stanway House. He paid for the pavilion at Stanway cricket ground. Barrie founded an amateur cricket team for his friends. Arthur Conan Doyle, Wells, and other luminaries such as Jerome K. Jerome, G. K. Chesterton, A. A. Milne, Walter Raleigh, A. E. W. Mason, E. V. Lucas, Maurice Hewlett, E. W. Hornung, P. G. Wodehouse, Owen Seaman, Bernard Partridge, Augustine Birrell, Paul du Chaillu, and the son of Alfred Tennyson played in the team at various times. The team was called the Allahakbarries, under the mistaken belief that 'Allah akbar' meant 'Heaven help us' in Arabic (rather than 'God is great').

Barrie befriended Africa explorer Joseph Thomson and Antarctica explorer Robert Falcon Scott. He was godfather to Scott's son Peter, and was one of the seven people to whom Scott wrote letters in the final hours of his life following his successful – but doomed – expedition to the South Pole. Barrie was so proud of the letter that he carried it around for the rest of his life. In the note, Barrie was instructed to take care of Scott's wife, Kathleen, and son, Peter.

In 1896, his agent, Addison Bright persuaded him to meet with Broadway producer Charles Frohman. Frohman would become not only his financial backer, but a close friend as well. Frohman, who was responsible for producing the debut of ''Peter Pan'' in both England and the U.S., as well as other productions of Barrie's plays, famously declined a lifeboat seat when the ''RMS Lusitania'' was sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic. Actress Rita Jolivet, who stood with Frohman, George Vernon and Captain Alick Scott at the end, recalled Frohman quoting his greatest hit, ''Peter Pan'': “Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure that life gives us.” On a common impulse, they all moved closer together and joined hands just before a great wave swept them all off the deck. Jolivet alone survived.

Barrie met and told stories to the young daughters of the Duke of York, who would become Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret.

Marriage

Barrie became acquainted with actress Mary Ansell in 1891 when he asked his friend Jerome K. Jerome for a pretty actress to play a role in his play ''Walker, London''. The two became friends, and she joined his family in caring for him when he fell very ill in 1893 and 1894. They married in Kirriemuir on 9 July 1894, shortly after Barrie recovered, and Mary retired from the stage; but the relationship was reportedly unconsummated and the couple had no children. The marriage was a small ceremony in his parents' home, in the Scottish tradition. In 1900 Mary found Black Lake Cottage, at Farnham, Surrey, which became the couple's 'bolt hole' where Barrie could entertain his cricketing friends and the Llewelyn Davieses. Beginning in mid 1908, Mary had an affair with Gilbert Cannan (an associate of Barrie's in his anti-censorship activities), including a visit together to Black Lake Cottage, known only to the house staff. When Barrie learned of the affair in July 1909, he demanded that she end it, but she refused. To avoid the scandal of divorce, he offered a legal separation if she would agree not to see Cannan any more, but she still refused. Barrie sued for divorce on the grounds of infidelity, which was granted in October 1909. A few of Barrie's friends, knowing how painful the divorce was for him, wanted to avoid bad press. They wrote to newspaper editors asking them not to publish the story (only three papers did).

Llewelyn Davies family

The Arthur Llewelyn Davies family played an important part in Barrie's literary and personal life. It consisted of the parents Arthur (1863–1907) and Sylvia (1866–1910) (daughter of George du Maurier), and their five sons: George (1893–1915), John (Jack) (1894–1959), Peter (1897–1960), Michael (1900–1921), and Nicholas (Nico) (1903–1980).

Barrie became acquainted with the family in 1897, meeting George and Jack (and baby Peter) with their nurse (nanny) Mary Hodgson in London's Kensington Gardens. He lived nearby and often walked his Saint Bernard dog Porthos in the park. He entertained the boys regularly with his ability to wiggle his ears and eyebrows, and with his stories. He did not meet Sylvia until a chance encounter at a dinner party in December. She told Barrie that Peter had been named after the title character in her father's play, ''Peter Ibbetson''. He became a regular visitor at the Davies household and a common companion to the woman and her boys, despite the fact that he and she were each married. In 1901, he invited the Davies family to Black Lake Cottage, where he produced an album of captioned photographs of the boys acting out a pirate adventure, entitled ''The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island''. Barrie had two copies made, one of which he gave to Arthur, who misplaced it on a train. The only surviving copy is held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

The character of Peter Pan was invented to entertain George and Jack. Barrie would say, to amuse them, that their little brother Peter could fly. He claimed that babies were birds before they were born; parents put bars on nursery windows to keep the little ones from flying away. This grew into a tale of a baby boy who did fly away.

Arthur Llewelyn Davies died in 1907, and 'Uncle Jim' became even more involved with the Davies family, providing financial support to them. (His income from ''Peter Pan'' and other works was easily adequate to provide for their living expenses and education.) Following Sylvia's death in 1910, Barrie claimed that they had recently been engaged to be married. Her will indicated nothing to that effect, but specified her wish for 'J. M. B.' to be trustee and guardian to the boys, along with her mother Emma, her brother Guy Du Maurier, and Arthur's brother Compton. It expressed her confidence in Barrie as the boys' caretaker and her wish for 'the boys to treat him (& their uncles) with absolute confidence & straightforwardness & to talk to him about everything.' When copying the will informally for Sylvia's family a few months later, Barrie inserted himself elsewhere: Sylvia had written that she would like Mary Hodgson, the boys' nurse, to continue taking care of them, and for 'Jenny' (referring to Hodgson's sister) to come and help her; Barrie instead wrote 'Jimmy' (Sylvia's nickname for him). Barrie and Hodgson did not get along well, but served together as surrogate parents until the boys were grown.

Barrie also had friendships with other children, both before he met the Davies boys and after they had grown up, and there has since been speculation that Barrie was a paedophile. One source for the speculation is a scene in the novel ''The Little White Bird'', in which in the protagonist (who resembles Barrie) helps a small boy undress for bed, and at the boy's request they sleep in the same bed. However, there is no evidence that Barrie had sexual contact with children, nor that he was suspected of it at the time. Nico, the youngest of the brothers, flatly denied as an adult that Barrie ever behaved inappropriately. 'I don't believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call "a stirring in the undergrowth" for anyone — man, woman, or child,' he stated. 'He was an innocent — which is why he could write Peter Pan.' His relationships with the surviving Davies boys continued well beyond their childhood and adolescence.

The statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, erected in secret overnight for May Morning in 1912, was supposed to be modelled upon old photographs of Michael dressed as the character. However, the sculptor Sir George Frampton used a different child as a model, leaving Barrie disappointed with the result. 'It doesn't show the devil in Peter,' he said.

Barrie suffered bereavements with the boys, losing the two to whom he was closest in their early twenties. George was killed in action (1915) in World War I. Michael, with whom Barrie corresponded daily while at boarding school and university, drowned (1921) with his friend and possible lover, Rupert Buxton, at a known danger spot at Sandford Lock near Oxford, one month short of his 21st birthday. Some years after Barrie's death, Peter compiled his ''Morgue'' from family letters and papers, interpolated with his own informed comments on his family and their relationship with Barrie.

Death

Barrie died of pneumonia on 19 June 1937 and is buried at Kirriemuir next to his parents and two of his siblings. He left the bulk of his estate (excluding the Peter Pan works, which he had previously given to Great Ormond Street Hospital) to his secretary Cynthia Asquith. His birthplace at 4 Brechin Road is maintained as a museum by the National Trust for Scotland.

Biographies

Books

Journals

Video

Honours

Barrie was made a baronet in 1913; his baronetcy was not inherited. He was made a member of the Order of Merit in 1922. In 1919 he was elected Rector of the University of St Andrews for the next three years, and served as Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh from 1930 to 1937.

Other

The Sir James Barrie Primary School in Wandsworth, South West London is named after him.

The Barrie School in Silver Spring, Maryland, is also named in his honour.

Works (by year)

''Auld Licht Idylls'' (1888)

''Better Dead'' (1888)

''When a Man's Single'' (1888)

''A Window in Thrums'' (1889)

''My Lady Nicotine'' (1890), republished in 1926 with subtitle ''A Study in Smoke''

''The Little Minister'' (1891)

''Richard Savage'' (1891)

''Jane Annie'' Opera, music by Ernest Ford, libretto by Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle (1893)

''A Powerful Drug and Other Stories'' (1893)

''A Tillyloss Scandal'' (1893)

''Two of Them'' (1893)

''A Lady's Shoe'' (1894)

''Life in a Country Manse'' (1894)

''Scotland's Lament: A Poem on the Death of Robert Louis Stevenson'' (1895)

''Sentimental Tommy, The Story of His Boyhood'' (1896)

''Margaret Ogilvy'' (1896)

''Tommy and Grizel'' (1900)

''The Wedding Guest'' (1900)

''The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island'' (1901)

''Quality Street'' (1901)

''The Admirable Crichton'' (1902)

''The Little White Bird; or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens'' (1902)

''Little Mary'' (1903)

''Peter Pan'' (staged 1904)

''Alice Sit-By-The-Fire'' (1905)

''Pantaloon'' (1905)

''Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens'' (1906)

''What Every Woman Knows'' (1906)

''Walker, London'' (1907)

''When Wendy Grew Up - An Afterthought'' (1908)

''Peter and Wendy'' (novel) (1911)

''A Kiss for Cinderella'' (1912)

''Half Hours'' (1914) includes:

*''Pantaloon''

*''The Twelve-Pound Look''

*''Rosalind''

*''The Will''

''Der Tag (The Tragic Man)'' (1914)

''Charles Frohman: A Tribute'' (1915)

''Shakespeare's Legacy'' (1916)

''Dear Brutus'' (1917)

''Echoes of the War'' (1918) includes:

*''The New Word''

*''The Old Lady Shows Her Medals'' (basis for the movie ''Seven Days Leave'' (1930), starring Gary Cooper)

*''A Well-Remembered Voice''

*''Barbara's Wedding''

''Mary Rose'' (1920)

''The Twelve-Pound Look'' (1921)

''The Author'' (1925)

''Cricket'' (1926)

''Shall We Join the Ladies?'' (1928) includes:

*''Shall We Join the Ladies?''

*''Half an Hour''

*''Seven Women''

*''Old Friends''

''Peter Pan'' (stageplay published) (1928)

''The Greenwood Hat'' (1930)

''Farewell Miss Julie Logan'' (1932)

''The Boy David'' (1936)

''M'Connachie and J. M. B.'' (1938)

''When Wendy Grew Up: An Afterthought'' (1957)

''Ibsen's Ghost(Toole Up-to-Date)'' (1975)

story treatment for film ''As You Like It'' (1936)

''Stories by English Authors: London'' (selected by Scribners, as contributor)

''Stories by English Authors: Scotland'' (selected by Scribners, as contributor)

preface to ''The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan'' by Daisy Ashford

References

External links

(plain text and HTML)

Works by or about J. M. Barrie at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)

JMbarrie.co.uk site authorized by Great Ormond Street Hospital, edited by Andrew Birkin, includes database of original photographs, letters, documents and audio interviews conducted by Birkin in 1975-76

Kirjasto.sci.fi, Biography

Was the author of ''Peter Pan'' a pedophile? (from The Straight Dope)

"Why J. M. Barrie Created Peter Pan" New Yorker 22 November 2004 issue; Anthony Lane, author.

J. M. Barrie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Great Ormond Street Hospital's copyright claim

Audio recording of Barrie's short play ''The Will'' Recording by professional actors at LostPlays.com

Film of Barrie from 1922 as Rector of St Andrews with Ellen Terry

Category:1860 births Category:1937 deaths Category:20th-century British children's literature Category:19th-century Scottish people Category:Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Category:Baronets in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom Category:Chancellors of the University of Edinburgh Category:People educated at Glasgow Academy Category:Kailyard school Category:People from Kirriemuir Category:Real people associated with Peter Pan Category:Rectors of the University of St Andrews Category:Scottish dramatists and playwrights Category:Scottish journalists Category:Scottish novelists Category:Scottish fantasy writers Category:Scottish children's writers Category:People educated at Dumfries Academy

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bgcolour	#6495ED
name	J. M. W. Turner
birth date	April 23, 1775
birth place	Covent Garden, London, England
death date	December 19, 1851
death place	Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London, England
nationality	English
field	Painting
training	Royal Academy of Art
movement	Romanticism
inspired by	Dutch artists
influenced	}}

Joseph Mallord William Turner RA (23 April 1775–19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light" and his work regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism.

Early life

Turner was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, England. His father, William Turner (1738–7 August 1829), was a barber and wig maker. His mother, Mary Marshall, became increasingly mentally unstable, possibly due in part to the early death of Turner's younger sister, Mary Ann Turner, in 1786. Mary Marshall died in 1804, after having been committed in 1799 to St Luke's Hospital and then to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, a mental asylum otherwise known as "Bedlam".

Possibly due to the load placed on the family by these problems, the young Turner was sent to stay with his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, in Brentford in 1785, which was then a small town west of London on the banks of the River Thames. It was here that he first expressed an interest in painting. A year later he attended a school in Margate on the north-east Kent coast. By this time he had created many drawings, which his father exhibited in his shop window.

He entered the Royal Academy of Art schools in 1789, when he was only 14 years old, and was accepted into the academy a year later. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, chaired the panel that admitted him. At first Turner showed a keen interest in architecture but was advised to continue painting by the architect Thomas Hardwick (junior). A watercolour by Turner was accepted for the Summer Exhibition of 1790 after only one year's study. He exhibited his first oil painting in 1796, ''Fishermen at Sea'', and thereafter exhibited at the academy nearly every year for the rest of his life.

Career

Turner travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in the Louvre in Paris in the same year. He also made many visits to Venice. On a visit to Lyme Regis, in Dorset, England, he painted a stormy scene (now in the Cincinnati Art Museum).

Important support for his work also came from Walter Ramsden Fawkes, of Farnley Hall, near Otley in Yorkshire, who became a close friend of the artist. Turner first visited Otley in 1797, aged 22, when commissioned to paint watercolours of the area. He was so attracted to Otley and the surrounding area that he returned to it throughout his career. The stormy backdrop of ''Hannibal Crossing The Alps'' is reputed to have been inspired by a storm over Otley's Chevin while Turner was staying at Farnley Hall.

Turner was also a frequent guest of George O'Brien Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont at Petworth House in West Sussex and painted scenes that Egremont funded taken from the grounds of the house and of the Sussex countryside, including a view of the Chichester Canal. Petworth House still displays a number of paintings.

Style

Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's ''The Illustrated History of Art'', his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321)

Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in ''Dawn after the Wreck'' (1840) and ''The Slave Ship'' (1840).

Turner's major venture into printmaking was the ''Liber Studiorum'' (Book of Studies), a set of seventy prints that the artist worked on from 1806 to 1819. The ''Liber Studiorum'' was an expression of his intentions for landscape art. Loosely based on Claude Lorrain's ''Liber Veritatis'' (Book of Truth), the plates were meant to be widely disseminated, and categorised the genre into six types: Marine, Mountainous, Pastoral, Historical, Architectural, and Elevated or Epic Pastoral. His printmaking was a major part of his output, and a whole museum is devoted to it, the Turner Museum in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 1974 by Douglass Montrose-Graem to house his collection of Turner prints.

Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God–a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena.

His early works, such as ''Tintern Abbey'' (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in ''Hannibal Crossing the Alps'' (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects.

One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea.

In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in ''Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway'', where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.

High levels of ash in the atmosphere during 1816 the "Year Without a Summer", led to unusually spectacular sunsets during this period, and were an inspiration for some of Turner's work.

John Ruskin says in his "Notes" on Turner in March 1878, that an early patron, Dr Thomas Monro, the Principal Physician of Bedlam, was a significant influence on Turner's style:

His true master was Dr Monro; to the practical teaching of that first patron and the wise simplicity of method of watercolour study, in which he was disciplined by him and companioned by Giston, the healthy and constant development of the greater power is primarily to be attributed; the greatness of the power itself, it is impossible to over-estimate.

On one of his trips to Europe he met the Irish physician Robert James Graves. Graves was travelling in a diligence in the Alps when a man who looked like the mate of a ship got in, sat beside him, and soon took from his pocket a note-book across which his hand from time to time passed with the rapidity of lightning. Graves wondered if the man was insane, he looked, saw that the stranger had been noting the forms of clouds as they passed and that he was no common artist. The two travelled and sketched together for months. Graves tells that Turner would outline a scene, sit doing nothing for two or three days, then suddenly, "perhaps on the third day he would exclaim 'there it is', and seizing his colours work rapidly till he had noted down the peculiar effect he wished to fix in his memory."

The first American to buy a Turner painting was James Lenox of New York City, a private collector. Lenox wished to own a Turner and in 1845 bought one unseen through an intermediary, his friend C. R. Leslie. From among the paintings Turner had on hand and was willing to sell for £500, Leslie selected and shipped the 1832 atmospheric seascape ''Staffa, Fingal's Cave''. Worried about the painting's reception by Lenox, who knew Turner's work only through his etchings, Leslie wrote Lenox that the quality of ''Staffa'', "a most poetic picture of a steam boat" would become apparent in time. Upon receiving the painting Lenox was baffled, and "greatly disappointed" by what he called the painting's "indistinctness". When Leslie was forced to relay this opinion to Turner, Turner said "You should tell Mr. Lenox that indistinctness is my forte." ''Staffa, Fingal's Cave'' is currently owned by the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

Personal life

As he grew older, Turner became more eccentric. He had few close friends except for his father, who lived with him for 30 years, eventually working as his studio assistant. His father's death in 1829 had a profound effect on him, and thereafter he was subject to bouts of depression. He never married but had a relationship with an older widow, Sarah Danby. He is believed to have been the father of her two daughters born in 1801 and 1811.

Death

He died in the house of his mistress Sophia Caroline Booth in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea on 19 December 1851. He is said to have uttered the last words "The sun is God" before expiring. At his request he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral, where he lies next to Sir Joshua Reynolds. His last exhibition at the Royal Academy was in 1850.

The architect Philip Hardwick (1792–1870) who was a friend of Turner's and also the son of the artist's tutor, Thomas Hardwick, was in charge of making his funeral arrangements and wrote to those who knew Turner to tell them at the time of his death that, "I must inform you, we have lost him." Other active executors were his cousin and executor, and chief mourner at the funeral, Henry Harpur IV (benefactor of Westminster - now Chelsea & Westminster - Hospital), Revd. Henry Scott Trimmer, George Jones RA and Charles Turner ARA.

Legacy

Turner left a small fortune which he hoped would be used to support what he called "decayed artists". He planned and designed an almshouse for them at Twickenham with a gallery for some of his works. His will was contested and in 1856, after a court battle, part of his fortune was awarded to his first cousins including Thomas Price Turner. Another portion of the money went to the Royal Academy of Arts, which does not now use it for this purpose, though occasionally it awards students the Turner Medal. His collection of finished paintings was bequeathed to the British nation, and he intended that a special gallery would be built to house them. This did not come to pass owing to a failure to agree on a site, and then to the parsimony of British governments. Twenty-two years after his death, the British Parliament passed an Act allowing his paintings to be lent to museums outside London, and so began the process of scattering the pictures which Turner had wanted to be kept together. In 1910 the main part of the Turner Bequest, which includes unfinished paintings and drawings, was rehoused in the Duveen Turner Wing at the Tate Gallery. In 1987 a new wing of the Tate, the Clore Gallery, was opened specifically to house the Turner bequest, though some of the most important paintings in it remain in the National Gallery in contravention of Turner's condition that the finished pictures be kept and shown together. Increasingly paintings are lent abroad, ignoring Turner's provision that they be kept "constantly" in Turner's Gallery. thumb|Turner's 1813 watercolour ''[[Ivybridge|Ivy Bridge'']] After the Turner content was diminished and diluted in the Clore Gallery from c. 2002, in 2010-12 only two of the nine rooms on the main floor were devoted to Turner. The claim that the Tate was fulfilling Turner's wishes was dropped in 1995, when the Charity Commission said that the Turner Bequest had been free of Turner's conditions. This was challenged by Leolin Price QC.

A commemorative stained glass window was added to St. Mary's Church, Battersea between 1976 and 1982. There are statues representing him at St Paul's Cathedral, Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal Academy of Arts and Victoria & Albert Museum. A portrait drawing by Cornelius Varley with his patent graphic telescope (Sheffield Museums & Galleries) was compared with his death mask (National Portrait Gallery, London) by Kelly Freeman at Dundee University 2009-10 to ascertain whether it really depicts Turner (www.faceofturner.com).

The Turner Society was founded by Selby Whittingham at London and Manchester in 1975. After that endorsed the Tate Gallery's Clore Gallery wing as the solution (on the lines of the Duveen wing of 1910), to the controversy of what should be done with the Turner Bequest, Selby Whittingham resigned from that and founded the Independent Turner Society.

A prestigious annual art award, the Turner Prize, created in 1984, was named in Turner's honour, and twenty years later the Winsor & Newton Turner Watercolour Award was founded.

A major exhibition, "Turner's Britain", with material (including ''The Fighting Temeraire'') on loan from around the globe, was held at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery from 7 November 2003 to 8 February 2004.

In 2005, Turner's ''The Fighting Temeraire'' was voted Britain's "greatest painting" in a public poll organised by the BBC.

In October 2005 Professor Harold V. Livermore (1914-2010), its owner for 60 years, gave Sandycombe Lodge, the villa at Twickenham which Turner designed and built for himself, to the Sandycombe Lodge Trust to be preserved as a monument to the artist. In 2006 he additionally gave some land to the Trust which had been part of Turner's domaine. The organisation The Friends of Turner's House was formed in 2004 to support it.

In April 2006, Christie's New York auctioned ''Giudecca, La Donna Della Salute and San Giorgio'', a view of Venice exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1841, for US$35.8 million, setting a new record for a Turner. The ''New York Times'' stated that according to two sources who had requested anonymity the buyer was casino magnate Stephen Wynn.

In 2006, Turner's ''Glaucus and Scylla'' (1840) was returned by Kimbell Art Museum to the heirs of John and Anna Jaffe after a Holocaust Claim was made. The painting was repurchased by the Kimbell for $5.7 million at a sale by Christie's in April 2007.

Between 1 October 2007 and 21 September 2008, the first major exhibit of Turner's works in the United States in over forty years came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Dallas Museum of Art. It included over 140 paintings, more than half of which were from the Tate.

An art gallery known as the Turner Contemporary has been built in Margate to celebrate the association of the artist with the town.

The "Turner and his painters" exhibition (Tate Britain, London, 23 September 2009 to 31 January 2010, Paris, Grand Palais, 22 February to 24 May 2010) retraces and illustrates the development of Turner's very personal vision, through the many chance or deliberate, but always opportune and enriching interaction that influenced his remarkable career. Nearly 100 paintings and other graphic works (studies and engravings) from major British and American collections, as well as the Louvre and the Prado will be on show.

On July 7, 2010, Turner's final painting of Rome, “Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino”, from 1839, was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum at a Sotheby’s auction in London for $44.9 million. In January 2011 ''The Painter'', a biographical play on his life by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, premiered at the Arcola Theatre in London.

Selected works

1796–''Fisherman at Sea'', oil on canvas, 36 x 48 1/8 in., Tate Gallery, London

1796– circa. ''Fishing Fleet'', oil on canvas, Melbourne, Australia

1799–''Warkworth Castle, Northumberland–Thunder Storm Approaching at Sun-Set'', oil on canvas–Victoria and Albert Museum, London

1806–''The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory'', oil on canvas–Tate Gallery, London

1807–''The Junction of the Thames and the Medway'', oil on canvas–National Gallery of Art, Washington

1812–Snow Storm: ''Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps'', oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London

1817–''Eruption of Vesuvius'', oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT

1817–''Raby Castle, the Seat of the Earl of Darlington'', oil on canvas, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

1822–''The Battle of Trafalgar'', oil on canvas, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

1826–''Mortlake Terrace, the Seat of William Moffatt, Esq.; Summer's Evening'', oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

1829–''Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus'', oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

1833–''Rotterdam Ferry Boat'', oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

1834–''Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore'', oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

1835–''Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight'', oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

1835–''The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons'', oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

1835–''The Grand Canal, Venice'', oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1838–''The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken up'', oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

1839–''Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino'', oil on canvas, The Getty, Los Angeles.

1839–''The Rape of Proserpine'', oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

1840–''Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)'', oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

1840–''Glaucus and Scylla'', oil on canvas, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX

1840–''Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water'', oil on canvas, Clark Art Museum, Williamstown, MA

1843–''The Evening of the Deluge'', oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

1844–''Approach to Venice'', oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

1844–''Rain, Steam and Speed–The Great Western Railway'', oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

Date unknown–''Shrimpers, Lyme Regis'', oil on board, National Trust for England and Wales, Nunnington Hall, North Yorkshire, UK

See also

British art

Cloudscape (art)

English school of painting

History of painting

List of British painters

Romanticism

Sketchbook

Theory of Colours

Turner Prize

Western painting

Notes

Bibliography

Anthony Bailey, ''Standing in the Sun: a life of J.M.W.Turner (Sinclair Stevenson, London; HarperCollins, New York. 1997)

James Hamilton, '' Turner'' (New York: Random House, c1997)

A.J.Finberg, '' The Life of J.M.W.Turner, R.A.'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939 and 1961)

Selby Whittingham. '' An Historical Account of the Will of J.M.W.Turner, R.A.'' (J.M.W.Turner, R.A., Publications, London, 1993-6)

Colin Harrison, ''Turner's Oxford'' (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2000)

Stanley Warburton, ''Discovering Turner's Lakeland'' (Lytham St Annes, 2008)

David Hill, ''Turner and Leeds: Image of Industry'' (Jeremy Mills Publishing, 2008)

External links

J.M.W. Turner's Biography, artwork collection and critical reception

Works at The Athenaeum

www.william-turner.org - The Complete Works

J.M.W. Turner at the National Gallery of Art

Film Threat Documentary Review

The Turner Museum (Sarasota, Fla.)

Katharina Fritsch, The Artist and the Emperor, ''Tate etc.'', Spring 2007

Turner's Journeys of the Imagination

J.M.W. Turner at Olga's Gallery

The Twickenham Museum—J.M.W. Turner

The Independent Turner Society

A A Gill, The Turner Surprise: David Hockney on Turner, ''The Times'', 17 June 2007

Turner Sothebys London to Offer J.M.W. Turners Masterpiece Popes Villa at Twickenham, Artdaily.org, 26 April 2008

Turner painting sold to Getty Museum in Los Angeles for record £29.7m ''The Guardian'', 7 July 2010

Christie's Videos - Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio Joseph Mallord William Turner,RA

Sotheby's Videos - The Temple Of Jupiter Panellenius Joseph Mallord William Turner,RA

Sotheby's Videos - Modern Rome Campo Vaccino and The condition of Modern Rome, Campo Vaccino Joseph Mallord William Turner,RA

Category:1775 births Category:1851 deaths Category:Burials at St Paul's Cathedral Category:English printmakers Category:Landscape artists Category:Marine artists Category:English romantic painters Category:Royal Academicians Category:People from Covent Garden Category:Tate Gallery Category:English watercolourists

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name	Thomas Hardy
birth date	June 02, 1840
birth place	Stinsford, Dorchester, Dorset, England
death date	January 11, 1928
death place	Dorchester, Dorset, England
resting place
occupation	Novelist, Poet, and Short Story writer
movement	Naturalism
influences	Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, John Milton, Charlotte Brontë,
influenced	Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Stephen King, John Fowles
spouse
signature	Thomas Hardy signature.svg }}

Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.

While he regarded himself primarily as a poet who composed novels mainly for financial gain, he became and continues to be widely regarded for his novels, such as ''Tess of the d'Urbervilles'' and ''Far from the Madding Crowd''. The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional county of Wessex (based on the Dorchester region where he grew up) and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances.

Hardy's poetry, first published in his fifties, has come to be as well regarded as his novels and has had a significant influence over modern English poetry, especially after The Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s cited Hardy as a major figure.

Life

Thomas Hardy was born at Higher Bockhampton, a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford to the east of Dorchester in Dorset, England. His father Thomas (d.1892) worked as a stonemason and local builder. His mother Jemima (d.1904) was well-read. She educated Thomas until he went to his first school at Bockhampton at age eight. For several years he attended Mr. Last's Academy for Young Gentlemen in Dorchester. Here he learned Latin and demonstrated academic potential. However, a family of Hardy's social position lacked the means for a university education, and his formal education ended at the age of sixteen when he became apprenticed to James Hicks, a local architect. Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862; there he enrolled as a student at King's College, London. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. Hardy never felt at home in London. He was acutely conscious of class divisions and his social inferiority. However, he was interested in social reform and was familiar with the works of John Stuart Mill. He was also introduced to the works of Charles Fourier and Auguste Comte during this period by his Dorset friend, Horace Moule. Five years later, concerned about his health, he returned to Dorset and decided to dedicate himself to writing. In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he married in 1874. Although he later became estranged from his wife, her death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him. After her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places linked with their courtship, and his ''Poems 1912–13'' reflect upon her passing. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. However, he remained preoccupied with his first wife's death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry.

Hardy became ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died at Max Gate just after 9 pm on 11 January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed; the cause of death was cited, on his death certificate, as "cardiac syncope", with "old age" given as a contributory factor. His funeral was on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, and it proved a controversial occasion because Hardy and his family and friends had wished for his body to be interred at Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma. However, his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted that he be placed in the abbey's famous Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets' Corner.

Shortly after Hardy's death, the executors of his estate burnt his letters and notebooks. Twelve records survived, one of them containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s. Research into these provided insight into how Hardy kept track of them and how he used them in his later work. In the year of his death Mrs Hardy published ''The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1841–1891: compiled largely from contemporary notes, letters, diaries, and biographical memoranda, as well as from oral information in conversations extending over many years''. Hardy's work was admired by many writers of a younger generation including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In his autobiography ''Goodbye to All That'', Robert Graves recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s. Hardy received him and his new wife warmly, and was encouraging about his work.

In 1910, Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit.

Hardy's cottage at Bockhampton and Max Gate in Dorchester are owned by the National Trust.

Novels

Hardy's first novel, ''The Poor Man and the Lady'', finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher and Hardy destroyed the manuscript so only parts of the novel remain. He was encouraged to try again by his mentor and friend, Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith. ''Desperate Remedies'' (1871) and ''Under the Greenwood Tree'' (1872) were published anonymously. In 1873 ''A Pair of Blue Eyes'', a novel drawing on Hardy's courtship of his first wife, was published under his own name. The term "cliffhanger" is considered to have originated with the serialised version of this story (which was published in ''Tinsley's Magazine'' between September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left literally hanging off a cliff.

Hardy said that he first introduced Wessex in ''Far from the Madding Crowd'' (1874), his next novel. It was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Over the next twenty-five years Hardy produced ten more novels.

The Hardys moved from London to Yeovil and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote ''The Return of the Native'' (1878). In 1885, they moved for the last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother. There he wrote ''The Mayor of Casterbridge'' (1886), ''The Woodlanders'' (1887), and ''Tess of the d'Urbervilles'' (1891), the last of which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was initially refused publication. Its subtitle, ''A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented'', was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle-classes.

''Jude the Obscure'', published in 1895, met with even stronger negative outcries from the Victorian public for its frank treatment of sex, and was often referred to as "Jude the Obscene". Heavily criticised for its apparent attack on the institution of marriage through the presentation of such concepts as erotolepsy, the book caused further strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy was concerned that ''Jude the Obscure'' would be read as autobiographical. Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags, and the Bishop of Wakefield is reputed to have burnt his copy. In his postscript of 1912, Hardy humorously referred to this incident as part of the career of the book: "After these [hostile] verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop – probably in his despair at not being able to burn me". Despite this criticism, Hardy had become a celebrity in English literature by the 1900s, with several highly successful novels behind him, yet he felt disgust at the public reception of two of his greatest works and gave up writing fiction altogether. Other novels written by Hardy include ''Two on a Tower'', a romance story set in the world of Astronomy.

Literary themes

Hardy criticises certain social constraints that hindered the lives of those living in the 19th century. Considered a Victorian Realist writer, Hardy examines the social constraints that are part of the Victorian status quo, suggesting these rules hinder the lives of all involved and ultimately lead to unhappiness. In ''Two on a Tower,'' Hardy seeks to take a stand against these rules and sets up a story against the backdrop of social structure by creating a story of love that crosses the boundaries of class. The reader is forced to consider disposing of the conventions set up for love. Nineteenth-century society enforces these conventions, and societal pressure ensures conformity. Swithin St Cleeve's idealism pits him against contemporary social constraints. He is a self-willed individual set up against the coercive strictures of social rules and mores.

Hardy’s characters often encounter crossroads, which are symbolic of a point of opportunity and transition. But the hand of fate is an important part of many of Hardy's plots. ''Far From the Madding Crowd'' tells a tale of lives that are constructed by chance. “Had Bathsheba not sent the valentine, had Fanny not missed her wedding, for example, the story would have taken an entirely different path.” Hardy's main characters often seem to be in the overwhelming and overpowering grip of fate.

Poetry

:''For the full text of several poems, see the External links section''

In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, ''Wessex Poems'', a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and after a great amount of negative criticism erupted from the publication of his novel ''Jude The Obscure'', Hardy decided to give up writing novels permanently and to focus his literary efforts on writing poetry. After giving up the novel form, Hardy continued to publish poetry collections until his death in 1928. Although he did publish one last novel in 1897, that novel, ''The Well-Beloved'', had actually been written prior to ''Jude the Obscure''.

Although his poems were not initially as well received by his contemporaries as his novels were, Hardy is now recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His verse had a profound influence on later writers, notably Philip Larkin, who included many of Hardy's poems in the edition of the ''Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse'' that Larkin edited in 1973.

In a recent biography on Hardy, Claire Tomalin argues that Hardy became a truly great English poet after the death of his first wife, Emma, beginning with the elegies he wrote in her memory, calling these poems, "one of the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry."

Most of Hardy's poems, such as "Neutral Tones'" and "A Broken Appointment", deal with themes of disappointment in love and life (which were also prominent themes in his novels), and mankind's long struggle against indifference to human suffering. Using stylistic patterns similar to those that he used in his novels, Hardy sometimes wrote ironic poems, like "Ah, Are You Digging On My Grave," in which he employed twist endings in the last few lines or in the last stanza to convey that irony. Some, like "The Darkling Thrush" and "An August Midnight", appear as poems about writing poetry, because the nature mentioned in them gives Hardy the inspiration to write. His compositions range in style from the three-volume epic closet drama ''The Dynasts'' to shorter poems such as "A Broken Appointment." A particularly strong theme in the ''Wessex Poems'' is the long shadow that the Napoleonic Wars cast over the nineteenth century, for example, in "The Sergeant's Song" and "Leipzig".

A few of Hardy's poems, such as "The Blinded Bird" (a melancholy polemic against the sport of ), display his love of the natural world and his firm stance against animal cruelty, exhibited in his antivivisectionist views and his membership in the RSPCA.

A number of notable composers, including Gerald Finzi, Benjamin Britten, and Gustav Holst, have set poems by Hardy to music.

Religious beliefs

Hardy's family was Anglican, but not especially devout. He was baptised at the age of five weeks and attended church, where his father and uncle contributed to music. However, he did not attend the local Church of England school, instead being sent to Mr Last's school, three miles away. As a young adult, he befriended Henry R. Bastow (a Plymouth Brethren man), who also worked as a pupil architect, and who was preparing for adult baptism in the Baptist Church. Hardy flirted with conversion, but decided against it. Bastow went to Australia and maintained a long correspondence with Hardy, but eventually Hardy tired of these exchanges and the correspondence ceased. This concluded Hardy's links with the Baptists.

Although Hardy’s faith remained intact, the irony and struggles of life led him to question the traditional Christian view of God: Hardy's religious life seems to have mixed agnosticism, deism, and spiritism. Once, when asked in correspondence by a clergyman about the question of reconciling the horrors of pain with the goodness of a loving God, Hardy replied, Nevertheless, Hardy frequently conceived of and wrote about supernatural forces that control the universe, more through indifference or caprice than any firm will. Also, Hardy showed in his writing some degree of fascination with ghosts and spirits. Despite these sentiments, Hardy retained a strong emotional attachment to the Christian liturgy and church rituals, particularly as manifested in rural communities, that had been such a formative influence in his early years, and Biblical references can be found woven throughout many of Hardy's novels.

Hardy's friends during his apprenticeship to John Hicks included Horace Moule (one of the eight sons of Henry Moule), and the poet William Barnes, both ministers of religion. Moule remained a close friend of Hardy's for the rest of his life, and introduced him to new scientific findings that cast doubt on literal interpretations of the Bible, such as those of Gideon Mantell. Moule gave Hardy a copy of Mantell's book ''The Wonders of Geology'' (1848) in 1858, and Adelene Buckland has suggested that there are "compelling similarities" between the "cliffhanger" section from ''A Pair of Blue Eyes'' and Mantell's geological descriptions. It has also been suggested that the character of Henry Knight in ''A Pair of Blue Eyes'' was based on Horace Moule.

Locations in novels

Berkshire is ''North Wessex'', Devon is ''Lower Wessex'', Dorset is ''South Wessex'', Somerset is ''Outer'' or ''Nether Wessex'', Wiltshire is ''Mid-Wessex'',

Bere Regis is ''King's-Bere'' of ''Tess'', Bincombe Down cross roads is the scene of the military execution in ''A Melancholy Hussar''. It is a true story, the deserters from the German Legion were shot in 1801 and are recorded in the parish register. Bindon Abbey is where Clare carried her. Bournemouth is ''Sandbourne'' of ''Hand of Ethelberta'' and ''Tess of the d'Urbervilles'', Bridport is ''Port Bredy'', Charborough House and its folly tower is the model for ''Welland House'' in the novel ''Two on a Tower''. Corfe Castle is the ''Corvsgate-Castle'' of ''Hand of Ethelberta''. Cranborne Chase is ''The Chase'' scene of Tess's seduction. (Note – Bowerchalke on Cranborne Chase was the film location for the great fire in John Schlesinger's 1967 film Far from the Madding Crowd.) Milborne St Andrew is "Millpond St Judes" in Far From the Madding Crowd. Charborough House is located between Sturminster Marshall and Bere Regis. Charborough House and its folly tower is the model for Welland House in the novel Two on a Tower by Thomas Hardy. Little England Cottage, Milborne St Andrew being the location of Swithin St Cleeves home and remains as described to this day. Dorchester, Dorset is ''Casterbridge'', the scene of ''Mayor of Casterbridge''. Dunster Castle in Somerset is ''Castle De Stancy'' of ''A Laodicean''. Fordington moor is ''Durnover moor'' and ''fields''. Greenhill Fair near Bere Regis is ''Woodbury Hill Fair'', Lulworth Cove is ''Lulstead Cove'', Marnhull is ''Marlott'' of ''Tess of the D'Urbervilles'', Melbury House near Evershot is ''Great Hintock Court'' in ''A Group of Noble Dames.'' Minterne is ''Little Hintock'', Owermoigne is ''Nether Moynton'' in ''Wessex Tales''.

Piddlehinton and Piddle Trenthide are the ''Longpuddle'' of ''A Few Crusted Characters''. Puddletown Heath, Moreton Heath, Tincleton Heath and Bere Heath are ''Egdon Heath''. Poole is ''Havenpool'' in ''Life's Little Ironies''. Portland is the scene of ''The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved''. Puddletown is ''Weatherbury'' in ''Far from the Madding Crowd'', River Frome valley is the scene of ''Talbothays dairy'' in ''Tess''. Salisbury is ''Melchester'' in ''On the Western Circuit'', ''Life's Little Ironies'' and ''Jude the Obscure'' etc. Shaftesbury is ''Shaston'' in ''Tess of the d'Urbervilles'' and ''Jude the Obscure''. Sherborne is ''Sherton-Abbas'', Sherborne Castle is home of ''Lady Baxby'' in ''A Group of Noble Dames''. Stonehenge is the scene of Tess's apprehension. Sutton Poyntz is ''Overcombe''. Swanage is the ''Knollsea'' of ''Hand of Ethelberta''. Taunton is known as Toneborough in both Hardy's novels and poems. Wantage is ''Alfredston'', of Jude the Obscure. Fawley, Berkshire is ''Marygreen'' of ''Jude the Obscure''. Weyhill is ''Weydon Priors'', Weymouth is ''Budmouth Regis'', the scene of ''Trumpet Major'' & portions of other novels; Winchester is ''Wintoncester'' where Tess was executed. Wimborne is ''Warborne'' of ''Two on a Tower''. Wolfeton House, near Dorchester is the scene of ''The Lady Penelope'' in ''a Group of Noble Dames''. Woolbridge Manor House, close to Wool station, is the scene of Tess's confession and honeymoon.

Influence

Hardy provides the springboard for D. H. Lawrence's ''Study of Thomas Hardy'' (1936). Though this work became a platform for Lawrence's own developing philosophy rather than a more standard literary study, the influence of Hardy's treatment of character and Lawrence's own response to the central metaphysic behind many of Hardy's novels helped significantly in the development of ''The Rainbow'' (1915, suppressed) and ''Women in Love'' (1920, private publication). Hardy was clearly the starting point for the character of the novelist Edward Driffield in W Somerset Maugham's novel ''Cakes and Ale''. Thomas Hardy's works feature prominently in the narrative in Christopher Durang's ''The Marriage of Bette and Boo'', in which a graduate thesis analysing ''Tess of the d'Urbervilles'' is interspersed with analysis of Matt's family's neuroses.

Works

Prose

Hardy divided his novels and collected short stories into three classes:

Novels of Character and Environment

''The Poor Man and the Lady'' (1867, unpublished and lost)

''Under the Greenwood Tree'' (1872)

''Far from the Madding Crowd'' (1874)

''The Return of the Native'' (1878)

''The Mayor of Casterbridge'' (1886)

''The Woodlanders'' (1887)

''Wessex Tales'' (1888, a collection of short stories)

''Tess of the d'Urbervilles'' (1891)

''Life's Little Ironies'' (1894, a collection of short stories)

''Jude the Obscure'' (1895)

Romances and Fantasies

''A Pair of Blue Eyes'' (1873)

''The Trumpet-Major'' (1880)

''Two on a Tower'' (1882)

''A Group of Noble Dames'' (1891, a collection of short stories)

''The Well-Beloved'' (1897) (first published as a serial from 1892)

Novels of Ingenuity

''Desperate Remedies'' (1871)

''The Hand of Ethelberta'' (1876)

''A Laodicean'' (1881)

Hardy also produced a number of minor tales and a collaborative novel, ''The Spectre of the Real'' (1894). An additional short-story collection, beyond the ones mentioned above, is ''A Changed Man and Other Tales'' (1913). His works have been collected as the 24-volume Wessex Edition (1912–13) and the 37-volume Mellstock Edition (1919–20). His largely self-written biography appears under his second wife's name in two volumes from 1928–30, as ''The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–91'' and ''The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928'', now published in a critical one-volume edition as ''The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy'', edited by Michael Millgate (1984).

Short stories (with date of first publication)

"How I Built Myself A House" (1865)

"Destiny and a Blue Cloak" (1874)

"The Thieves Who Couldn't Stop Sneezing" (1877)

"The Duchess of Hamptonshire" (1878)

"The Distracted Preacher" (1879)

"Fellow-Townsmen" (1880)

"The Honourable Laura" (1881)

"What The Shepherd Saw" (1881)

"A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four" (1882)

"The Three Strangers" (1883)

"The Romantic Adventures Of A Milkmaid" (1883)

"Interlopers At The Knap" (1884)

"A Mere Interlude" (1885)

"A Tryst At An Ancient Earthwork" (1885)

"Alicia's Diary" (1887)

"The Waiting Supper" (1887–88)

"The Withered Arm" (1888)

"A Tragedy Of Two Ambitions" (1888)

"The First Countess of Wessex" (1889)

"Anna, Lady Baxby" (1890)

"The Lady Icenway" (1890)

"Lady Mottisfont" (1890)

"The Lady Penelope" (1890)

"The Marchioness of Stonehenge" (1890)

"Squire Petrick's Lady" (1890)

"Barbara of the House of Grebe" (1890)

"The Melancholy Hussar of The German Legion" (1890)

"Absent-Mindedness in a Parish Choir" (1891)

"The Winters And The Palmleys" (1891)

"For Conscience' Sake" (1891)

"Incident in Mr. Crookhill's Life"(1891)

"The Doctor's Legend" (1891)

"Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk" (1891)

"The History of the Hardcomes" (1891)

"Netty Sargent's Copyhold" (1891)

"On The Western Circuit" (1891)

"A Few Crusted Characters: Introduction" (1891)

"The Superstitious Man's Story" (1891)

"Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver" (1891)

"To Please His Wife" (1891)

"The Son's Veto" (1891)

"Old Andrey's Experience as a Musician" (1891)

"Our Exploits At West Poley" (1892–93)

"Master John Horseleigh, Knight" (1893)

"The Fiddler of the Reels" (1893)

"An Imaginative Woman" (1894)

"The Spectre of the Real" (1894)

"A Committee-Man of 'The Terror'" (1896)

"The Duke's Reappearance" (1896)

"The Grave By The Handpost" (1897)

"A Changed Man" (1900)

"Enter a Dragoon" (1900)

"Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer" (1911)

"Old Mrs. Chundle" (1929)

"The Unconquerable"(1992)

Poetry collections

''The Photograph'' (1890)

''Wessex Poems and Other Verses'' (1898)

''Poems of the Past and Present'' (1901)

''The Man He Killed'' (1902)

''Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses'' (1909)

''The Voice'' (1912)

''Satires of Circumstance'' (1914)

''Moments of Vision'' (1917)

''Collected Poems'' (1919)

''Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses'' (1923)

''Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles'' (1925)

''Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres'' (1928)

''The Complete Poems'' (Macmillan, 1976)

''Selected Poems'' (Edited by Harry Thomas, Penguin, 1993)

''Hardy: Poems'' (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 1995)

''Thomas Hardy: Selected Poetry and Nonfictional Prose'' (St. Martin's Press, 1996)

''Selected Poems'' (Edited by Robert Mezey, Penguin, 1998)

''Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems'' (Edited by James Gibson, Palgrave, 2001)

Drama

''The Dynasts'' (verse drama)

*''The Dynasts, Part 1'' (1904)

*''The Dynasts, Part 2'' (1906)

*''The Dynasts, Part 3'' (1908)

''The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse'' (1923) (one-act play)

Notes

References

Armstrong, Tim. "Player Piano: Poetry and Sonic Modernity" in '' Modernism/Modernity'' 14.1 (January 2007), 1–19.

Blunden, Edmund. ''Thomas Hardy.'' New York: St. Martin's, 1942.

Brennecke, Jr., Ernest. ''The Life of Thomas Hardy.'' New York: Greenberg, 1925.

D'Agnillo, Renzo, "Music and Metaphor in ''Under the Greenwood Tree'', in ''The Thomas Hardy Journal'', 9, 2 (May 1993), pp.39–50.

D'Agnillo, Renzo, “Between Belief and Non-Belief: Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Shadow on the Stone’”, in Thomas Hardy, Francesco Marroni and Norman Page (eds), Pescara, Edizioni Tracce, 1995, pp.197–222.

Deacon, Lois and Terry Coleman. ''Providence and Mr. Hardy.'' London: Hutchinson, 1966.

Draper, Jo. ''Thomas Hardy: A Life in Pictures.'' Wimborne, Dorset: The Dovecote Press.

Ellman, Richard & O'Clair, Robert (eds.) 1988. "Thomas Hardy" in ''The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry'', Norton, New York.

Gatrell, Simon. ''Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography.'' Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.

Gibson, James. ''Thomas Hardy: A Literary Life.'' London: Macmillan, 1996.

Gittings, Robert. ''Thomas Hardy's Later Years.'' Boston : Little, Brown, 1978.

Gittings, Robert. ''Young Thomas Hardy.'' Boston : Little, Brown, 1975.

Gittings, Robert and Jo Manton. ''The Second Mrs Hardy.'' London: Heinemann, 1979.

Gossin, P. ''Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World''. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007 (The Nineteenth Century Series).

Halliday, F. E. ''Thomas Hardy: His Life and Work.'' Bath: Adams & Dart, 1972.

Hands, Timothy. ''Thomas Hardy : Distracted Preacher? : Hardy's religious biography and its influence on his novels.'' New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Hardy, Evelyn. ''Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography.'' London: Hogarth Press, 1954.

Hardy, Florence Emily. ''The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891.'' London: Macmillan, 1928.

Hardy, Florence Emily. ''The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928'' London: Macmillan, 1930.

Harvey, Geoffrey. ''Thomas Hardy: The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy.'' New York: Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group), 2003.

Hedgcock, F. A., ''Thomas Hardy: penseur et artiste.'' Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1911.

Holland, Clive. ''Thomas Hardy O.M.: The Man, His Works and the Land of Wessex.'' London: Herbert Jenkins, 1933.

Jedrzejewski, Jan. ''Thomas Hardy and the Church.'' London: Macmillan, 1996.

Johnson, Lionel Pigot. ''The art of Thomas Hardy (London: E. Mathews, 1894).

Kay-Robinson, Denys. ''The First Mrs Thomas Hardy.'' London: Macmillan, 1979.

Langbaum, Robert. "Thomas Hardy in Our Time." New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, London: Macmillan, 1997.

Marroni, Francesco, "The Negation of Eros in 'Barbara of the House of Grebe’ ", in "Thomas Hardy Journal", 10, 1 (February 1994) pp. 33–41

Marroni, Francesco and Norman Page (eds.), ''Thomas Hardy''. Pescara: Edizioni Tracce, 1995.

Marroni, Francesco, ''La poesia di Thomas Hardy''. Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1997.

Marroni, Francesco, "The Poetry of Ornithology in Keats, Leopardi, and Hardy: A Dialogic Analysis", in "Thomas Hardy Journal", 14, 2 (Mayy 1998) pp. 35–44

Millgate, Michael (ed.). ''The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy.'' London: Macmillan, 1984.

Millgate, Michael. ''Thomas Hardy: A Biography.'' New York: Random House, 1982.

Millgate, Michael. ''Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited.'' Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Morgan, Rosemarie, (ed) The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, (Ashgate publishing), 2010.

Morgan, Rosemarie, (ed) The Hardy Review,(Maney Publishing), 1999–.

Morgan, Rosemarie, Student Companion to Thomas Hardy (Greenwood Press),2006.

Morgan, Rosemarie, Cancelled Words: Rediscovering Thomas Hardy (Routledge, Chapman & Hall),1992

Morgan, Rosemarie, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1988;paperback: 1990.

David Musselwhite,Social Transformations in Hardy's Tragic Novels: Megamachines and Phantasms,Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

O'Sullivan, Timothy. ''Thomas Hardy: An Illustrated Biography.'' London: Macmillan, 1975.

Orel, Harold. ''The Final Years of Thomas Hardy, 1912–1928.'' Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976.

Orel, Harold. ''The Unknown Thomas Hardy.'' New York: St. Martin's, 1987.

Phelps, Kenneth. ''The Wormwood Cup: Thomas Hardy in Cornwall.'' Padstow: Lodenek Press, 1975.

Pinion, F. B. ''Thomas Hardy: His Life and Friends.'' London: Palgrave, 1992.

Pite, Ralph. ''Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life.'' London: Picador, 2006.

Saxelby, F. Outwin. ''A Thomas Hardy dictionary : the characters and scenes of the novels and poems alphabetically arranged and described'' (London: G. Routledge, 1911).

Seymour-Smith, Martin. ''Hardy.'' London: Bloomsbury, 1994.

Stevens-Cox, J. ''Thomas Hardy: Materials for a Study of his Life, Times, and Works.'' St. Peter Port, Guernsey: Toucan Press, 1968.

Stevens-Cox, J. ''Thomas Hardy: More Materials for a Study of his Life, Times, and Works.'' St. Peter Port, Guernsey: Toucan Press, 1971.

Stewart, J. I. M. ''Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography.'' New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1971.

Turner, Paul. ''The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography.'' Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

Weber, Carl J. ''Hardy of Wessex, his Life and Literary Career.'' New York: Columbia University Press, 1940.

Wilson, Keith. ''Thomas Hardy on Stage.'' London: Macmillan, 1995.

Wilson, Keith, ed. ''Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate.'' Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Wilson, Keith, ed. ''A Companion to Thomas Hardy.'' Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Wotton, George. Thomas Hardy: Towards A Materialist Criticism. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 1985.

Letter from Hardy to Bertram Windle, transcribed by Birgit Plietzsch, from CL, vol 2, pp.131–133 The letter is contained in the maps section of the TTHA website.

==External links==

The Thomas Hardy Association (TTHA)

Works by Thomas Hardy at Internet Archive

Works by Thomas Hardy in audio format from LibriVox

Poems by Thomas Hardy at Poetry Foundation

Poems by Thomas Hardy at PoemHunter.com

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works of Thomas Hardy at the Victorian Literary Studies Archive, Nagoya University, Japan

"The Dead Man Walking" (1909) and other Hardy poems at ''poetry-archive.com''

Thomas Hardy's Wessex Research site, including maps, by Dr Birgit Plietzsch

Works by Thomas Hardy in e-book version

Thomas Hardy's ashes at Westminster Abbey

Pictures of Thomas Hardy visiting Marie Stopes at her lighthouse home on Portland, Dorset

The Thomas Hardy Society

The Life and Death of Thomas Hardy @ ''Ward's Book of Days''

Hardy Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Category:19th-century English people Category:Pantheists Category:English poets Category:English novelists Category:English short story writers Category:Members of the Order of Merit Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Category:Alumni of King's College London Category:People from Dorchester, Dorset Category:1840 births Category:1928 deaths Category:Victorian poets Category:Victorian novelists Category:Burials at Westminster Abbey

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