It is difficult to say in what form of topography Mr. Hardy is at his best within his “kingdom”—his patient and precise creation of a town such as “Casterbridge” (Dorchester), the architectural individuality of his great houses, or his knowledge of “those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world,” and of woodlands and wildernesses. He has the knowledge with which he credits Angel Clare of “the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, in their temperaments; winds in their several dispositions; trees, waters, and clouds, shades and silence, ignes fatui; constellations and the voices of inanimate things.” In most cases, the birthplace of a novelist has no particular significance in relation to his work. Very often a writer’s county is like Matthew Prior’s, exchanged for Middlesex. But in the case of Mr. Hardy it is different. The fact that he was born in a “mere germ of a village” near Dorchester, and within sound of a heath; that his life has been spent, for the most part, in Dorset; that he now lives on the outskirts of Dorchester, and that he comes of a Dorset stock—tracing his descent, however, from John le Hardy (son of Clement, Governor of Jersey in 1488), who settled in the West of England before the end of the fourteenth century—are significant points in his biography.[78] By the circumstances of birth and lifelong residence the background of his novels, Wessex, has become mainly limited to Dorset (South Wessex), and especially to the neighbourhood of Dorchester.
The interest of Mr. Hardy’s backgrounds is twofold. There is their purely artistic interest as intensifying action and character; there is also their topographical interest. Mr. Hardy’s imaginary kingdom was so unlike the photographer’s “studio backgrounds” of other novelists that long before sketch-maps of Wessex were prepared and published in the uniform edition of his works the identity of many of his scenes afforded no manner of doubt to Dorset readers. The precision with which he describes a building or a neighbourhood, notes position, distance, proportion, has been a clue and a perpetual interest to those who follow the intricacies of Wessex geography, in spite of Mr. Hardy’s half-discouragement of those who sought to localise the horizons and landscapes of his “merely realistic dream country.”
His “illuminative surnames” have been spoken of by some writers. His place-names are no less illuminative, and his quaint or sonorous substitutes might be transferred to the map of Dorset with little loss. In some cases an older name is revived, such as Shaston, Middleton Abbey, and Kingsbere. Sometimes he has made a slight modification of the real name, or received a suggestion from it, as in Sherton Abbas, Emminster, Port Bredy, Chaseborough, Casterbridge. Other names are downright inventions, often a précis of the natural features of the town, such as Aldbrickham for Reading; or made with a fine ear for local probability.[79]
Mr. Thomas Hardy.
The county town of Dorset, with its core of old houses, and too many that are new, is the centre of the Hardy district, as it is the “pole, focus, or nerve-knot,” of the surrounding country. Its memories of Rome are preserved in Mr. Hardy’s name for it, “Casterbridge”; and its outward appearance in the days when Dorchester had no suburbs, and was “compact as a box of dominoes” behind its stockade of limes and chestnuts. A description of the old-fashioned place, in the mouth of one of Mr. Hardy’s characters, always quoted in the guide-books to Dorchester, is that “it is huddled all together, and it is shut in by a square wall of trees like a plot of garden-ground by a box edging”; and the unusual way the country came up to the town and met in one line is best described in his words:—
The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley mow and pitch a stone into the office window of the town clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by; and at executions the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately before the drop, out of which the cows had been temporarily driven to give the spectators room.
It has been said that the Dorchester in the Wessex novels had no suburbs; the North Street ended abruptly in a mill by the river; the South Street came to an end in a cornfield—but these bounds have been leaped over in several places, and to-day the east, or Fordington side of the town (Mr. Hardy’s Durnover) alone remains unchanged; and here the flat water-meadows stretch up to the garden-hedges and the actual walls of the houses. In spite of changes without the escarpments, the curfew still sounds at the stroke of eight from St. Peter’s with its “peremptory clang,” the signal for shop-shutting throughout the town. The brick bridge over the Frome, and the stone bridge over a branch of the same stream in the meads, have their well-defined peculiarities in Dorchester as in “Casterbridge.” The neighbourhood of “Mixen” Lane (Mill Lane), the “mildewed leaf” in the sturdy and flourishing Casterbridge plant, is recognisable at the east end of the town, near the town bridges.
Lucetta’s house, “High Place Hall,” at the corner of Durngate Street, has a modern shop-front inserted; while the most significant feature of her house is to be found at Colyton House, where, in the centre of the wall flanking the garden, is an archway, now bricked up, surmounted by a battered mask in which the open-mouthed, comic leer can hardly be discerned to-day. Without the town, on the Weymouth Road, is the immense Roman “Ring”—“Maumbury Ring, melancholy, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town”—which was to Dorchester what the ruined Colosseum is to modern Rome.
“Some old people said that at certain moments in the summer time, in broad daylight, persons sitting with a book, or dozing in the arena, had, on lifting their eyes, beheld the slopes lined with a gazing legion of Hadrian’s soldiery as if watching the gladiatorial combat, and had heard the roar of their excited voices; that the scene would remain but a moment, like a lightning flash, and then disappear.” The ancient square earthwork where Henchard planned his entertainment is Poundbury Camp, where the annual sheep-fair is held—“Square Pommerie” of the poems.