Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born into a well-educated but working-class family; he eventually became an architect. He found it frustrating -- his relative lack of social standing put him often at disadvantage -- and he became interested in social reform. He began writing novels and as they were serialized, they became highly regarded and influential. (While Hardy was adapting a novelistic device used previously by Dickens, it's usually thought that we get the word 'cliffhanger' from Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which one of the cliffhangers that occur at the end of the serial installments involves a man literally hanging from a cliff.) The novel that is the fortnightly book, The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character, was serialized in 1886. A tragedy, it depicts a cascade of events arising when a man, drunk on rum-laced frumenty (a wheat-based porridge), auctions off his wife and daughter.
I'll be reading this in a Heritage Press edition from my grandfather's library. The book has a gold-stamped printed linen cover and has a large number of very crisp and striking engravings by Agnes Miller Parker, one of the foremost British book-artists of the twentieth century.
While Hardy has always been most famous for his novels, he always considered himself a poet foremost, so I'll be putting up a number of his poems for the next two weeks, as well.
