He was the son of Joseph Hardman, a London merchant from Manchester, who knew Samuel Taylor Coleridge and contributed to Blackwood's Magazine.
On leaving Whitehead's school at Ramsgate, he entered the counting-house of his maternal uncle Rougemont, a London merchant.
[1] A critical review of the Salon de Paris which Hardman sent to The Times led to his being taken on about 1850 as a foreign correspondent.
[1] Succeeding Laurence Oliphant as chief correspondent of The Times in Paris, Hardman died there on 6 November 1874.
In 1849 he edited Thomas Hamilton's Annals of the Peninsular Campaign; in 1852, he published Central America; and in 1854, he translated Charles Weiss's History of the French Protestant Refugees.