Bournemouth, the “Sandbourne” of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and of minor incidents and passing allusions in others of Mr. Hardy’s novels, is one of the principal gates of entrance to his Wessex. Just within the western borders of Hampshire, or what he would call “Upper Wessex,” the heart of his literary country is within the easiest reach of its pleasant districts of villa residences, by road or rail, or indeed by sea; for Swanage, the “Swanwich” of a Hardy gazetteer, and Lulworth Cove, his “Lullstead,” that azure pool within “the two projecting spurs of rock which form the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean,” are the destinations in summer of many steamboat voyages.
“Sandbourne has become a large place, they say.” Thus Angel Clare, seeking his wife somewhere within its bounds. Large indeed, and growing yet. Census officials and other statisticians toil after its increase in vain. I find a guide-book of 1887 speaking of its population as “nearly 18,000.” I find another, of 1896, putting it at “about 40,000,” and then referring to the last census returns, discover it to have further risen to forty-seven thousand souls, and a few over. By now it doubtless numbers full fifty thousand, and has further rubricated and underscored its description in the last pages of Tess: “This fashionable watering-place with its eastern and its western stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was to Angel Clare like a fairy place, suddenly created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty. An outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon waste was close at hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up. Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British trackway; not a sod having been turned there since the days of the Cæsars. Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet’s gourd; and had drawn hither Tess.”
“By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding ways of this new world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous fanciful residences of which the place was composed. It was a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel; and as seen now by night it seemed even more imposing than it was.
“The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he thought it was the pines, the pines murmured in precisely the same tones, and he thought they were the sea.”
This rich and populous seaside home of wealthy valetudinarians was until well on into the nineteenth century a lonely waste, whose only frequenters were smugglers, fishermen, rabbits, and seagulls. In the midst of its pine-woods, sands, and heather a little stream, the Bourne, which now gives this great concourse of villa paradises, palatial hotels, and fashionable shops its name, flowed into the sea, just where, in these days, tricked out with cascades, and fountains, and made to wander circuitously at the will of landscape-gardeners amid the neatest of lawns and the gayest of flower-beds, it at last trickles exhaustedly into the sea, under the pier. Its natural course from the neighbourhood of Kinson, down Bourne Bottom, to that smallest of “mouths,” is some six miles, but in these days it is made to work hard in the last stretch, through the public gardens, and where it once covered one mile, is now looped here and turned back there upon itself, and exploited generally, until it has become as sophisticated a stream as anywhere to be found. The Bourne is, indeed, like the humble parent of some overwhelming social success, made to alter its ways and put aside its rustic manners, to do credit to its offspring.
The country folk who live in the background of this oft-styled “City of Pines,” still call it merely “Bourne,” as it was when, many years ago, Dr. Granville made the fortunes of the hamlet, frequented by a few invalids and others rejoicing in the spicy odours of the pine-woods, that had grown in a scattered and chance fashion upon the heath. “No situation,” said that authority upon spas and watering-places, “possesses so many capabilities of being made the very first sea watering-place in England; and not only a watering-place, but what is still more important, a winter residence for the most delicate constitutions requiring a warm and sheltered locality at this season of the year.” Then follow comparisons favourable to the site of Bournemouth, and derogatory to other seaside resorts.
Every circumstance insured attention being drawn to this weighty pronouncement, and advantage being taken of it. Consumptives came and found the air beneficial, and Bournemouth grew suddenly and astonishingly upon a lonely coastline; arising in that residential all-round-the-calendar character it has kept to this day, in spite of those holiday-folk, the excursionists and trippers whom its “residential” stratum discourages as much as possible. But when even so thoroughly exclusive a residential health-resort has been so successful, and has grown so greatly in that character as Bournemouth has grown, there comes inevitably a time when the workers and tradesfolk, ministrants to the wants of those residents, themselves become an important section of the community. It is a time when suburbs and quarters, invidiously distinguished from one another in the social scale, have established themselves; when, in short, from being just the resort of a class, a place becomes a microcosm of life, in which all classes and degrees are represented. The seal was set upon the arrival of that time for Bournemouth with its admission to the dignity of a municipal borough, fully equipped with Mayor and Town Council, in the summer of 1890, and again, later, with the opening of electric tramways. Railway-companies urge the attractions of Bournemouth upon holiday-makers, with great success, and nowadays one only perceives the place in anything like its former characteristic air at such time when the summer has gone and the holiday-maker has returned to his own fireside.
Bournemouth has already gathered together some odds and ends of sentimental associations. Mary Wollstonecraft, widow of Shelley, died here in 1853, and lies in the churchyard of St. Peter’s, beside Godwin and his wife, whose bodies were brought from the London churchyard of St. Pancras. Keble died here in 1866, and the present St. Peter’s is his memorial. Robert Louis Stevenson, Bournemouth’s most distinguished consumptive, resided at “Skerryvore,” in Alum Chine Road, before he took flight to the South Seas.
But—singular and ungrateful omission—one looks in vain for a statue to Dr. Granville, who, by his powerful advocacy, made Bournemouth, just as Dr. Russel made Brighton a century earlier. In this it is not difficult to find another instance of “benefits forgot.”