In Dorchester Gaol—we have no space here for those merely actual persons of flesh and blood who have been incarcerated, or who have suffered in it—those more real characters of fiction, Boldwood and Marston were confined; and hence the Shottsford watchmaker of The Three Strangers, lying under sentence of death, escaped along the downs to Higher Crowstairs, where, while sheltering in the ingle-nook of the cottage, two other strangers, one of them the hangman deputed to execute the demands of the law upon him on the morrow, take shelter from the weather.
To follow this gloomy train a little longer, the veritable Hangman’s Cottage, home of this erstwhile busy functionary, at a time when Dorchester demanded the whole time and energies of a Jack Ketch, and not a very occasional visit from one common to the whole kingdom, may be seen, at the foot of Glydepath Lane, in a fine damp situation near the river. It is one of a tiny group of heavily thatched old rustic cottages built of grouted flint and chalk, faced and patched with red brick, and held together with iron ties, so that in their old age they shall not, some night, altogether collapse and deposit their inhabitants among the potatoes, the peas, and cabbages of their fertile gardens. Dorchester paid its hangman a regular salary, and in the intervals between his more important business, he was under engagement to perform those minor punishments of whipping and scourging, of putting in the stocks, and of pillorying, by whose plentiful administration Old England was made the “Merry England” of our forefathers. Let not the reader, however, seek a covert satire here. It is not to be gainsaid that it was a “Merry England,” for the times were so brutal that, in all such degrading and pitiful spectacles as these, the populace took the keenest delight. Sufficient for the day—! and those who made merry did not stop to consider that they who were now spectators might soon very likely afford in their own persons the same spectacle.
Miserable times! Proof of them, do you need seek it, is to be found in the Dorchester Museum, where the leaden weights, boldly inscribed “MERCY,” are pointed out as the contribution, years ago, of an exceptionally tender-hearted governor of the gaol to a more pitiful method of ending the condemned man who was to die for his crime of arson.
The man was of unusually light weight, and, as those were the times when men really were slowly and painfully hanged and choked by degrees, before criminals were given a drop and their necks broken, it was thought a kindly thing on the part of this governor that he should have provided these heavy weights, to attach to this particular victim’s feet and so help to shorten his misery.
This museum it was that Lucetta, keen to get the girl out of the way, suggested for Elizabeth Jane’s entertainment; with affected enthusiasm and a good deal of veiled womanly sarcasm at the expense of antiquities, describing how it contained “crowds of interesting things—skeletons, teeth, old pots and pans, ancient boots and shoes, birds’ eggs—all charmingly instructive.”
But enough of such things, let us to other quarters.
Looking on to the cheerful and prosperous South Street from the corner of Durngate Street is the substantial “grey façade” of Lucetta’s house, where lived Henchard’s lady-love, whose affections were so readily transferable. The lower portion of this, the “High Place Hall” of the story, has suffered a transformation into business premises, but the resounding alleyways of Durngate Street and neighbouring lanes are as gloomy as those spots are described. “At night the forms of passengers were patterned by the lamps in black shadows upon the pale walls,” and so they are still.
But the description of Lucetta’s house in those pages is a composite picture; a good deal of it deriving from an old mansion in another part of the town. This will be found by taking a narrow thoroughfare leading out of the north side of High West Street, and called, in different parts of its course, Glydepath Lane and Glydepath Street. In this quiet byway is the early eighteenth-century mansion known as Colyton House, sometime a town residence of the Churchill family, and so named from the little Devonshire town of Colyton, near which is situated Ash, that old dwelling, now a farmhouse, whence the historic Churchills sprang.
Readily to be seen, in a blank wall, is the long-filled-in archway, with the dreadful keystone mask, alluded to in the pages of The Mayor of Casterbridge.