Author Thomas Hardy was born June 2, 1840
British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy was born June 2, 1840 in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset.
150th Birth Anniversary of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Released by the UK in 1990
Designer: John Gibbs
For almost the entire Victorian period, Hardy was known as a novelist. Far from the Madding Crowd had brought him a wide readership, which was cemented by The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge. The controversial Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895) strengthened his reputation as one of the more challenging novelists of his day.
But Hardy had never stopped writing poems, and in 1898, once he had secured a steady income from writing serialized novels, he brought out his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems and Other Verses. Like his novels and the short story collection Wessex Tales (1888), these were largely set in his imagined rural terrain, but the poems were not as well-received as Hardy’s prose.
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