By Samuel C. Chew

T HOMAS HARDY was in the precisely central year of his
long life when he began to write The Mayor of Cas-
terbridge. Sprung of yeoman stock, he was born in 1840
in a tiny hamlet near Dorchester in the South of England.
His father's trade of master-builder (or "contractor," as
we should say) directed him to the profession of archi-
tecture, and this he practiced as a young man at first
locally and afterwards for a time in London. But poetry
was the native country of his mind and his tastes were for
the life of a man of letters; and having failed to secure an
audience for his early verse he turned to novel-writing
as a livelihood. With this practical purpose in mind he
was ready, till near the end of this part of his career, to
make such concessions to the requirements of editors of
magazines as were supposed necessary in order to conform
to the moral conventions of the period and to the expecta-
tions of readers of fiction. A first experiment was rejected
by publishers to whom it was submitted, and there fol-
lowed three novels in as many different modes before he
won his first great popular success with Far from the
Madding Crowd in 1874. The Return of the Native, the
first of his four masterpieces, appeared in 1876, and then
came four novels of minor interest. Meanwhile he had
married, and he and his wife alternated long sojourns in
London and occasional visits to the Continent with tem-
porary abodes in one or another place in southern England.
In 1883 came the decision to settle permanently in his

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