One can spend a profitable half day in Dorchester and a much longer time might be consumed in exploring the immediate vicinity. There are two fine churches, All Saints’, with a tall slender spire, and St. Peter’s, with a square, battlemented tower from which peal the chimes of the town clock. In the latter church is a tomb which may interest the few Americans who come to Dorchester, since beneath it is buried Rev. John White, who took an active part in founding Massachusetts Colony. In 1624 he despatched a company of Dorset men to the new colony, raising money for them, procuring their charter and later sending out as the first governor, John Endicott of Dorchester, who sailed for New England in 1629 in the “George Bona Ventura.” In both churches there is an unusual number of effigies and monuments which probably escaped because of Dorchester’s friendliness for the Parliamentary cause—but none of them commemorates famous people. Outside St. Peter’s there is a statue to William Barnes, the Dorset poet, with an inscription from one of his own poems which illustrates the quaint dialect he employed:
“Zoo now I hope his kindly feace
Is gone to find a better pleace:
But still wi’ vo’k a-left behind
He’ll always be a-kept in mind.”
The county museum, adjoining the church, contains one of the best provincial collections in England. The vicinity is noted for Roman remains and a number of the most remarkable have found a resting-place here. There are curiosities galore in the shape of medieval implements of torture, among them a pair of heavy leaden weights labeled “Mercy,” which a tender-hearted jailer ordered tied to the feet of a man hanged for arson as late as 1836, so he would strangle more quickly. There are relics of Jeffreys’ dread court, the chair he used when sentencing the Dorset peasants to transportation and death and the iron spikes on which the heads of the rebels were exposed to blacken in the sun. There is much besides horrors in Dorchester Museum, though I suppose the gruesome and horrible will always get the greater share of attention. And such things are not without their educational and moral value, for they speak eloquently of the progress the human race has made to render such implements of torture only objects of shuddering curiosity.
To the admirer of Thomas Hardy, the novelist, Dorchester will always have a peculiar interest, for here the master still lives, much alone, in a little house near the town, his simple life and habits scarcely differentiating him from the humblest Wessex peasant. I say “the novelist,” for another Thomas Hardy was also a Dorchester man—the admiral who supported the dying Nelson at Trafalgar. The great writer, however, is known to all the townsmen and is universally admired and revered. Shortly after our visit the people of the town essayed a fete in his honor, the chief feature being two plays adapted from Wessex tales. Mr. Hardy, though in his seventy-second year, followed the rehearsals closely, sitting night after night in a dark corner of the auditorium. A correspondent described him as “a grave, gray little figure with waxed moustache ends and bright vigilant eyes, who rose occasionally to make a suggestion, speaking almost apologetically as if asking a favor.” His suggestions usually had to do with the character and effect of word cadences. Nothing could exceed his sensitiveness to the harmonies of speech. “Will you let me see the book, please?” he would say. “I think that sentence does not sound right; I will alter it a little.”
He also personally arranged the hornpipe dance by shepherds in the cottage where three wayfarers take shelter from a storm. The music was played by a fiddler nearly eighty years old who used to make a living by such rustic merrymakings and who is perhaps the last survivor of the race of fiddlers in Dorset. All the actors belonged to the town. One is a cooper, another a saddler, and there were clerks and solicitors and auctioneers. The producer who designed all the scenery is a monument mason and ex-mayor of Dorchester.
It is perhaps too early to predict the place of Thomas Hardy in literature, though there be those who rank him with George Eliot. His home town, which he has given to fame as the Casterbridge of his tales, has no misgivings about the matter and freely ranks him with the immortals. The chilling philosophy of many of his books has not hidden his warm heart from his townsmen, who resent the word “stony” applied to him by an American writer. They say that his unpretentious life, his affability, his consideration for others and his modesty, all teach the lessons of love and hope, and that nothing is farther from his personal character than misanthropy or coldness.
The history of Dorchester differs not greatly from that of many other English towns of its class. A Roman station undoubtedly existed here. The town was mentioned in the Doomsday Book and was a village of good size in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1613 it was totally destroyed by fire—a calamity which the citizens declared a “visitacion of God’s wrath,” to appease which they founded an almshouse and hospital. With business foresight they also established a brewery, the profits from which were expected to maintain the hospital, and the grave records show no intimation of any question whether such a plan might be acceptable to the Deity they sought to placate.