Overview

It was a tradition with the Hardy family, late on Christmas Eve, for the local singers and musicians gather together at the family home at Higher Bockhampton for a glass of cider and a warming by the log fire. Meanwhile, they prepared their music scores and candles, prior to setting out on foot to entertain the locals by serenading them with Christmas carols at their front doors. The musicians included Hardy’s father Thomas (violin), and his grandfather Thomas (cello). Hardy recreated this scene in his novel Under the Greenwood Tree (published in 1872), where ‘Hardy’ became ‘Dewy’, the cottage ‘Lewgate’, and the choir, the ‘Mellstock Quire’. Although Hardy had difficulty in embracing the Christian faith, he adored it’s joyous traditions, reliving them vicariously in Under the Greenwood Tree, and so may we!

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9781912587971

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ANDREW NORMAN was born in Newbury, Berkshire, UK in 1943. Having been educated at Thornhill High School, Gwelo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, he qualified in medicine at the Radcliffe Infirmary. He married in 1967 and has two children. From 1972-83 Andrew worked as a general practitioner in Poole, Dorset, before a spinal injury cut short his medical career. He is now an established writer whose published works include biographies of Thomas Hardy, Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill, Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter, T. E. Lawrence, Adolf Hitler, and Robert Mugabe. Andrew remarried in 2005. Andrew’s interest in Thomas Hardy arose from the fact that his paternal forebears came from the parish of Fordington (Dorchester), which is adjacent to Hardy's own parish of Stinsford. In fact, his ancestor John Norman’s three sons were baptized by the Reverend Henry Moule, whose own son Horatio (known as ‘Horace’) became arguably Thomas Hardy’s greatest friend.

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