When the young Thomas Hardy arrived in London in 1862 to try his luck as an architect, he had a return ticket to Dorchester in his pocket. In the event, he stayed five years, relishing the theaters, galleries, and music halls, taking evening classes in French, and beginning notebooks on poetry and painting, before poor health forced a temporary retreat in 1867. Following his marriage in 1874, he and his first wife, Emma Gifford, lived intermittently in the capital and its suburbs until they settled in Dorset in 1881, and thereafter spent several months of almost every year in the capital until 1910. In a witty nod to the many editions of Hardy's work that feature his own hand-drawn map of Wessex, the endpapers of Mark Ford's informative and elegantly written Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner feature maps of Victorian London; another map traces the more than thirty different residences Hardy occupied in the city prior to his final visit in 1920. By then, as Ford notes, London was eager to travel to him, including in 1925 the entire cast of the Garrick Theatre production of his stage version of Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

It was Hardy who described himself as “half a Londoner.” In part, this was a riposte to those like J. M. Barrie, who argued that Hardy knew London society and professional life only “superficially” and failed in attempting to draw them; no writer quicker than Hardy to bridle at criticism, especially where it touched on his class origins or provincial background. But Ford argues persuasively that Hardy's immersion as a young man in metropolitan life, at a time when railways, newspapers, and the penny post had both forged new connections between country and city and sharpened the disparities between them, was essential to “the kinds of perspective on Dorset that would eventually enable him to transform it into Wessex” (13).

From the first, the capital stirred him to write: not by chance, the protagonists of the two novels most engaged with London, The Hand of Ethelberta (1875) and The Well-Beloved (1897), are both artists. A third of the fifty-one poems in his first volume of verse, Wessex Poems (1898), were written in the 1860s, within easy walking distance of Paddington Station; so, too, was his unpublished novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, much of it set in London. As that title suggests, city life prompted an uneasy mixture of erotic excitement and class anxiety, verging on hostility; Macmillan rejected The Poor Man because it too evidently meant “mischief.” Ford quotes Hardy's observation after taking Emma to a fashionable “crush”: “‘The most beautiful women present. … But these women! If put into rough wrappers in a turnip-field, where would their beauty be?’” (18).

Ford writes astutely on the poems of the 1860s, and on Hardy's sense, exacerbated by city life, of what he terms “the peculiar divide between external performance and inner consciousness” (242). He also provides a fascinating account of Hardy's attention to the physical experience of London. What Hardy called his “idiosyncratic mode of regard” is as much in evidence here as in Wessex (The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate [London, 1985], 235). His London is at once haunted by the past and startlingly new: the descriptions of the city's streets and skylines in his last novel, The Well-Beloved, have an affinity with other fin-de-siècle writing, and indeed with Impressionist painting, but when he looked out at Charing Cross Bridge from his offices in Adelphi Terrace, his first thoughts were of Garrick and Johnson. Like his fictional Casterbridge, Hardy's London was layered with history.

Hardy himself thought that living in London induced something “mechanical” in his writing. This was to underestimate the transforming power of his imagination. As Ford quotes, watching the Lord Mayor's Show in 1879 from an upper floor in Ludgate Hill, he noted that as the crowd grew denser, it mutated from an aggregation of individuals into “‘a molluscous black creature … whose voice exudes from its scaly coat, and who has an eye in every pore of its body’” (19). This is close to the visceral unease felt by other commentators on the city, notably John Ruskin in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880), but it also prefigures the literal and metaphorical view of human existence taken by the Spirit of the Years in Hardy's epic verse-drama, The Dynasts (1904–1908).

Ford's study begins with Hardy's macabre double funeral, with his heart buried in Stinsford and his ashes in Westminster Abbey. Other critics have similarly made this episode a paradigm for accounts of a divided Hardy, torn between the rural world he came from and largely wrote about and the metropolitan world he aspired to enter and which provided his audience, but few have done so with the subtlety and dispatch displayed on every page of Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner. This is, in sum, a masterly blend of biography and literary criticism. It is also a beautifully produced book. Both Mark Ford and his publishers are to be congratulated.