The Son's Veto - Thomas Hardy

1762 Words8 Pages
The Son’s Veto (1891) is a story dealing with three themes that occur throughout the whole of Thomas Hardy’s work – as a writer of short stories, as a novelist, and even as a poet. The themes are marriage, social class, and education. Hardy himself had relatively modest social origins, and despite being a gifted youngster, he did not follow the traditional upper class educational path of public school followed by Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, he trained as a draughtsman and worked for his living in architectural practices before becoming a writer. His marriage to Emma Gifford was not a happy one, and following his wife’s death a second marriage (to a woman forty years younger) was no more successful. He became celebrated as a writer, but was always very conscious of the possibilities of ‘downward class mobility’. Plot Sophy is working as a servant to rural vicar Reverend Twycott when she receives a proposal of marriage from gardener Sam Hobson, but she doesn’t accept him. When she injures her foot in a fall down stairs, she thinks she will have to leave the vicarage, but Reverend Twycott (recently widowed) suddenly realises her worth and proposes to her, an offer which she accepts. Feeling that he has committed ‘social suicide’ by marrying a servant, Twycott moves to a new ‘living’ in south London. They have a son, Randolph, who is sent to public school in preparation for Oxford or Cambridge, prior to taking up the ministry. When Twycott dies, Sophy lives in a small house he had the foresight to provide for her. She is bored by the eventlessness of her existence, and estranged from her son, who has adopted a superior and critical attitude to his uneducated mother. Eventually she meets Sam again when he is transporting vegetables to Covent Garden market. She tells him she is unhappy and wishes she were living back in the countryside. Their relationship comes
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