2017-06-02 Fri

An English novelist and poet, Thomas Hardy was born on 2nd June 1840. Though he had been writing poetry throughout his life his first work was published only in 1898.

Some of his most famous works are Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). During his lifetime, younger poets viewed him as a mentor and after his death, his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.

Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. Two of his novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.

The adjacent stamp is a 20 Pence commemorative stamp of Thomas Hardy’s 150th Birth Anniversary issued in 1990.