Born in 1840 to a stone mason father and a highly educated mother, Thomas Hardy attended Mr Last's Academy for Young Gentlemen until the age of sixteen. The family could not afford to send him to university, but instead he became an apprentice to a local architect and later moved to the capital where he enrolled at King’s College London and won two notable architectural prizes. In the urban environment he became increasingly aware of the stark class divisions and the acute need for social reform; reading John Stuart Mill had a powerful impact on Hardy’s thinking and the issues he would discuss in his novels. After five years in the capital, Hardy returned to his native Dorset and settled in Weymouth, dedicating himself to writing.
Hardy considered himself first and foremost as a poet, but is perhaps best remembered for his novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). One of the major figures of Victorian realism, Hardy’s fiction often explores the restraints that social circumstances and class impose on people’s lives; his novels attracted a lot of attention and criticism for their treatment of sex, religion and marriage, considered controversial at the time.
Hardy died of pleurisy on 11 January 1928, after dictating his final poem to his wife on his deathbed.
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