THE THOMAS HARDY ASSOCIATION
LINKS
| A 57 |
DIRECTOR: ROBERT SCHWEIK
© 2000-2004
DICKENS FELLOWSHIP (HARDY)
DESCRIPTION:
Address: http://members.cruzio.com/~varese/dickens/gallery/hardy.html
Contact: Unidentified
Date: 07/01/04
A sub-page of a "Nineteenth-Century Gallery" sponsored
by the Philadelphia Branch of the Dickens Fellowship. It provides
an anecdote of Hardy's chance encounter with Dickens in a London
coffee-shop near Charing Cross in 1867, and of how Hardy
diffidently stood close, hoping the famous author might speak to
him. But Dickens was fussing with his bill and the hoped-for
conversation never took place. The account is quoted from Peter
Ackroyd's Dickens: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson,
1990); Ackroyd's source is from a reprinting in The Dickensian
(Vol. 47, No. 300, p. 171) of the anecdote as it appeared in
Newman Flower's book of reminiscences, Just As It Happened.
COMMENT:
Provides information supplementary to existing biographies of Hardy: the
incident is not recorded in Hardy's autobiography, nor in
Millgate's, Gittings', or other recent biographies, nor is it
referred to in any of the letters in the Purdy-Millgate edition
of Hardy's correspondence.