Thomas Hardy in the Madding Crowd

As the last few plots of rural Notting Hill were built over, Thomas Hardy took lodgings at 16 Westbourne Park Villas when he was working as a church draughtsman.

From this decidedly urban setting alongside the railway lines just outside of Paddington, Hardy made his first tentative literary steps and pursued the Orsett Terrace lady’s maid Eliza Nicholls (who influenced the ‘Sue Bridehead’ character in ‘Jude the Obscure’).

After attending a Dickens lecture, he tried his hand at journalism, deserted Eliza – for literary glory and/or her younger sister – and hit the depths of despondency sketching St Stephen’s church from his window. Hardy recalled his Westbourne Park years as mostly depressing but also an inspiring time when ‘a sense of the truth of poetry, of its supreme place in literature, had awakened itself in me. At the risk of ruining all my worldly prospects I dabbled in it.’

Hardy only managed four years of the ‘rayless grime’ from 1863 to ’67 before returning to Dorset, which he contrasted with the ‘crass clanging town’ in the sonnet ‘From Her in the Country’. But he maintained a strong local connection.

After finishing ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ on Porchester Road, he married Emma Gifford on Elgin Avenue and signed the register as ‘Thomas Hardy of Westbourne Park, London.’ Whenever he reappeared in the madding crowd after that he stayed locally; off Westbourne Grove at 18 Newton Road, where he wrote the London social life comedy ‘The Hand of Ethelberta’, and 20 Monmouth Road when he was writing ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’, 5 Campden Hill Road after ‘The Woodlanders’, and 5 Upper Phillimore Place.

As Hardy was working his way up the hill in 1874, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born into the estate agent family on Campden Hill at 32 Sheffield Terrace.

GK spent his formative years, from 1877 to 1901, reading Thomas Macaulay histories at 11 Warwick Gardens.

The Notting Baroness Violet Hunt was born into the Campden Hill Pre-Raphaelite scene, the daughter of the landscape painter Alfred and Mrs Hunt, the model for Tennyson’s ‘Margaret’, who lived at Tor Villa (the former residence of Edward Lear, of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ fame).

Violet had her first affair with the older painter George Broughton, after being half seriously proposed to by Oscar Wilde. Her archetypal arty Notting Hill society has been described as ‘having a certain Bohemian flavour, it nevertheless dressed for dinner.’

In this ‘murky modern Babylon’, Henry James pondered as he moved to 34 De Vere Gardens: ‘It takes London to put you in the way of a purely rustic walk from Notting Hill to Whitehall. Frequently have I wished that, for the sake of a daily luxury and exercise made romantic, I were a government clerk living in snug domestic conditions in a Pembridge villa.’

In James’s ‘Wings of the Dove’, the house of Pearl Craigie, 56 Lancaster Gate, ‘had figured to her, through childhood, as the remotest limit of her vague world.’

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