She was born on the 20th of March 1851. Seven days later her mother went to the Registry Office and formally declared her daughter’s arrival in to the world. She was the sixth child so her parents were by now quite used to taking their children to St. Mary’s church at Puddletown for baptism and they were quietly confident this would be the last time – mother then being 46 years old. Although Tryphena was not baptised until she was six years old.
Fit and healthy, the girl sailed through school and at the age of 15 became a pupil teacher. Her parents were justly proud when at the age of 18 she went on to a teacher training college in London. On completion of her course in December 1871 she immediately applied for and was offered the position of headmistress at a day school for girls in Plymouth, Devon. This was a prestigious post with a salary of about £100 a year – a princely sum for someone from a rural background well used to living amongst people scratching a living from the countryside.
Six years later she resigned her teaching post at Plymouth and married the proprietor of a public house. The couple had a daughter followed by three sons. After the birth of her last child there were complications from which she never fully recovered. Her health deteriorated and she passed away on the 17th of March 1890, just three days before her 39th birthday. She was buried at Topsham in Devon.
Her life had been full, interesting and worthwhile but not remarkable, which begs the question: why, when we enter her name into an Internet search engine, are we offered thousands of entries? Being the cousin of Thomas Hardy would not alone account for Tryphena Sparks’ posthumous celebrity.
In 1890 on hearing of her death Hardy penned a poem he entitled ‘Thoughts of Phena at News of Her Death’ in which he referred to her as “…my lost prize.” The poem was first published as part of Wessex Poems in 1898 but interest about a relationship between Tryphena and Thomas Hardy really took hold in 1962 with the publication of ‘Tryphena and Thomas Hardy’ by Lois Deacon in the ’Monographs on the Life, Times and Works of Thomas Hardy’ series. Deacon claimed the couple had a child together and suggested Tryphena was the daughter of her “supposed elder sister,” Rebecca. In 1968 Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman published their book ‘Providence and Mr Hardy’ repeating the sensational claim about their being a child.
A few Hardy scholars came out and supported Deacon in her claims and by the early 1970’s even the pages of The Dorset Year Book became part of the battlefield for warring scholars. The claims have been given no credence by Hardy biographers and we have failed to find any hard evidence such as a birth certificate, baptism register entry, census record, or death certificate and conclude that Lois Deacon read too much between the lines of the novels and poetry of Thomas Hardy and relied too much on the memories of a very old lady, Mrs. Eleanor Bromell, Tryphena’s daughter.
Accountants, we are told, can make figures say whatever you want them to say and so it is often the case with family historians who are tempted to bend the facts to fit in with their wishful thinking. It seems Lois Deacon may have fallen into this trap and read far too much into three little words and in the process elevated a young Dorset born school teacher into something approaching cult status.
There are photos of Tryphena Sparks in the photo gallery
