Thomas Hardy Read Free Page B

in that same year, was situated a mile or so from his house, beside the lane which led from Higher to Lower Bockhampton. The school was the brainchild of Julia Augusta Martin, who, together with her husband Francis, owned the adjoining estate of Kingston Maurward. This they had purchased from the Pitt family three years earlier, in 1845. The couple inhabited the manor house, built in the early Georgian period, not to be confused with the estate’s other manor house nearby, which dated from mid-Tudor times. A benefactress of both Stinsford and Bockhampton, Julia had built and endowed the Bockhampton National School at her own expense; collaborating with the Revd Arthur Shirley (who in 1837 had succeeded the Revd Murray as vicar of Stinsford) on the project.
    The Martins had no children of their own and Julia came to regard Thomas III as her surrogate child. In fact, she had singled him out as the object of her affection long before he had even started school. Passionately fond of ‘Tommy’, Julia was ‘accustomed to take [him] into her lap, and kiss [him] until he was quite a big child!’Thomas III, in turn, ‘was wont to make drawings of animals in water-colours for her, and to sing to her’. That he reciprocated Julia’s sentiments is borne out by his statement, made some years later, that she was ‘his earliest passion as a child’. 21 One of Thomas III’s songs contained the words, ‘I’ve journeyed over many lands, I’ve sailed on every sea’, 22 which would, no doubt, have amused Julia, who must have realised that Thomas III had never ventured beyond his native Dorset. It transpired, however, that the boy was shortly to widen his horizons when he and his mother Jemima paid a visit to her sister in Hertfordshire, and on the return journey caught the train from London’s Waterloo Station to Dorchester. This was Thomas III’s first experience of rail travel – the railway having come to Dorchester only as recently as the previous year, 1847.
    At school, Thomas III excelled at arithmetic and geography, though his handwriting was said to be ‘indifferent’. 23 Meanwhile, his mother encouraged him with the gift of John Dryden’s translation of Virgil, Dr Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and a translation of St Pierre’s Paul and Virginia . A friend gave the young Thomas III the New Guide to the English Tongue by Thomas Dilworth 24 and he also possessed A Concise History of Birds . Perhaps, however, his greatest joy was to discover, in a closet in his house, a magazine entitled A History of the (Napoleonic) Wars . 25 This would one day inspire him to write two books of his own, namely The Trumpet Major and The Dynasts .
    When a year later, in 1849, Thomas III’s parents decided that their son should transfer to a day school in Dorchester, Julia Martin was offended, not only at the loss of her ‘especial protégé little Tommy’, but also because this new school was Nonconformist. This may have been a deliberate gesture of defiance by the Hardys who had developed a great antipathy towards Stinsford’s vicar, the Revd Shirley. This was because, as will shortly be seen, Shirley had been instrumental in destroying not only the fabric of their cherished medieval parish church of St Michael, but also its cherished tradition of providing live music for its congregation.
    And so, at the age of 9, Thomas III commenced the second stage of his formal education, walking to and from his new school in Dorchester – a distance of 6 miles in total. Here he flourished, winning at the age of 14 his first prize: a book entitled Scenes and Adventures at Home and Abroad . 26 The headmaster, Isaac Last, was by repute ‘a good scholar and teacher of Latin’, but because this subject was not part of the normal curriculum, Thomas III’s father was obliged to pay extra for it. Nevertheless, his confidence in his son was amply rewarded when, in the following year, the boy was awarded Theodore Beza’s Latin Testament for his