Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) - photo 1
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) - photo 2

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Lot 256
09.12.2020 00:00UTC +00:00
Classic
Starting price
£ 7 000
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 470162
Lot 256 | Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Estimate value
£ 7 000 – 10 000
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Wessex Poems. 1907

HARDY, Thomas (1840-1928). Wessex Poems and Other Verses. Poems of the Past and the Present. London: MacMillan and Co., 1907.



Presentation copy inscribed by Hardy to his future wife Florence. Florence Dugdale first met the author in 1905 at the age of 26, at which point he was in his mid-sixties and married to his first wife Emma. She began working with him soon after, assisting him with research, and their relationship swiftly became very close. While there is no evidence that it was adulterous, ‘the developing relationship with Florence Dugdale reinforced – or reawakened – Hardy’s old susceptibility to feminine companionship and caused him to fret anew at the restrictions placed upon him by his own marriage – legal restrictions chiefly, but also moral ones’ (Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography, 1982). Emma died in 1912 and, the following year, Florence would move in to Hardy’s home at Max Gate, Dorchester, before they married at Enfield in 1914. ‘What Hardy valued above all in Florence Dugdale was a gentleness, a peacefulness, a quietness even, such as he had scarcely ever known before in his relationships with women’ (Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, 2006).



Octavo (173 x 107mm). Frontispiece and numerous illustrations throughout. Publisher’s plum cloth, lettered and decorated in gilt, upper cover stamped in blind; housed in matching cloth and patterned paper slipcase. Provenance: Florence Dugdale (1879-1937, writer of children’s stories and Hardy’s second wife; presentation inscription on endpaper: ‘To / Miss Florence Dugdale / with the author’s kind regards. / June 1907’ – Frederick Baldwin Adams Jr. (1910-2001, American bibliophile and director of the Pierpont Morgan Library; bookplate, sale Sotheby’s, London, 7 November 2001, lot 497).



[with]: Florence HARDY (1879-1937). Autograph letter in the third person to the Ohio book collector Paul Lemperly, Max Gate, 29 March 1917, proposing to send some ‘privately printed pamphlets’; with envelope.

Place of origin:Northern Europe
Auction house category:Books
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
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09.12.2020 – 09.12.2020
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