by Claudia Reynolds

Created on: July 13, 2010   Last Updated: July 14, 2010

“We Be on a Blighted Star” - The Life and Works of Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was arguably the foremost novelist of the Naturalism movement in British literature, although some critics and students of literature consider him to be more of the Realist movement. since his works address the social issues, hypocrisy and brutal class codes of Victorian England.

 Born in Dorset, England on June 2, 1840, Hardy thought of himself primarily as a poet.  However, most of his poetry was not published until after 1898, when Hardy was in his fifties. His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady (1867) was never published.  Only portions of this novel remain, as Hardy destroyed most of it when he was unable to find a publisher.  Hardy’s next novel, Desperate Remedies, was published anonymously in 1871, beginning his long and brilliant career as a novelist.
   
Hardy lived and wrote during a time when the Industrial Revolution was just that - a revolution.  Across England, as well as across the Atlantic in America, the agricultural way of life was rapidly being replaced by factories and mass production.  In all of Hardy’s best-known works, including Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, the English countryside is described in long, lyrical passages that are almost hymn-like in their worship of the natural world and its beauty.  While the supporters and advocates of progress and industry cared little for natural beauty, Hardy elevated the natural world, the rural beauty of agrarian England, to character status in his novels.

 Another theme of the Naturalism writers was a strong belief in fatalism.  Hardy expresses this well in the title quote, “We be on a blighted star,” spoken by the title character in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891.)  Hardy evinces and expresses a belief that man is just a pawn of impersonal forces beyond his own control, tossed about willy-nilly by the whims of some capricious God or other external forces.  One of these forces which Hardy saw as beyond the control of the individual was the strict enforcement of a class-code in London society.  We see this at work both in Tess, when her well-do-to in-laws refuse to take her in, although she has nowhere else to go, and at the beginning of the novel when her rape at the hands of a distant aristocratic cousin leaves her pregnant and disgraced.  Tess becomes the fallen

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