Dorchester is interesting from the fact that it is the only full-length portrait of a town drawn in the Wessex novels, and is the almost unshifting scene of one, the Mayor of Casterbridge, where the dramatic unity of place is preserved. In other novels the characters are wanderers and the scenes shifted; or the towns and villages are sketched in half-lengths or in small thumbnail sketches. Of these, certainly the most important historically is Shaftesbury, the Shaston of the novels, which seems to be set upon “a dominant cape or a far-venturing headland.” It is a town of shrunken importance, “familiar with forgotten years,” the ancient British Palladour, “which was, and is, in itself, the city of a dream.”
The houses now composing Shaftesbury are held high up above the Vale of Blackmore by the height, or cliff, upon which it is built; and Barnes, no less than Mr. Hardy, was alive to the vision of the old city on watch, straining her eyes to Blackmore’s “blue-hilled plain,” or shining “so bright” to those down miles below in the Vale.
Another ancient, shrunken town is Wareham, which reminds one to a certain extent of Dorchester, for it is square, ramparted, and defended by water on one side; but these are the only points of resemblance. The little diminished town “where only the presence of the river and the shallow barges on its bosom suggest the ocean,” goes by the name of “Anglebury”[80] in the Wessex novels, for it was a noted town in the Saxon age, when it was a place of strength. Sherborne, the “Sherton Abbas” of the novels, takes its fictitious name, like many other Wessex towns, from its most prominent feature, the Abbey. Cerne Abbas—called “Abbot’s Cernel” in the novels, one of its old names being Cernel—is a village “still loitering in a mediæval atmosphere”; while Bere Regis, which appears in the novels under the older form, “Kingsbere,” is another of the diminished places that Mr. Hardy delights to honour, a “blinking little one-eyed place” of thatched cottages, the measure of whose earlier magnificence is the fine church of St. John the Baptist that holds the dust of the Turbervilles. “Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” to give it its full Wessex title, owes the last limb of that compound name to Woodbury Hill (Greenhill)—a green hill partly covered with trees that overlooks Bere. Its ancient fair, now much decayed, is described rather as it was than as it is, as the “Nijni-Novgorod of South Wessex.” The fair is, however, still held in September, beginning on the eighteenth of the month. “Marlott,” really Marnhull, also connected with Tess of the D’Urbervilles, lies embedded in Blackmore Vale, “where the fields are never brown and the springs never dry,” between Sturminster and Shaftesbury.
Some six miles distant from Mr. Hardy’s home is the village of Piddletown, known by the name of Weatherbury in Far from the Madding Crowd. The church described there remains, but, as the novelist expressly warns us, “Warren’s Malthouse” disappeared years ago, with some of the village’s characteristic peculiarities.
Stinsford, a parish of which the Bockhamptons are hamlets, the original of “Mellstock,” is so carefully described by Mr. Hardy that each cottage might well be a literary landmark, while Sutton Poyntz, the “Overcombe” of The Trumpet-Major, like Piddletown, has lost one of Mr. Hardy’s landmarks, for the mill is demolished, but the colossal figure of George III. upon the chalk downs, which in the novel was being cut, is still to be seen.
Mr. Hardy’s special quality of precision that comes of knowledge is nowhere more closely shown than in his pictures of great houses, or, indeed, of buildings of any kind. They are all drawn from the real, from their cellars and foundations to their leads and chimney-pots. The only liberty he takes with the originals is to remove them, in one or two cases, to another position. For instance, Lower Waterstone Farm, the original of Bathsheba Everdene’s house in Far from the Madding Crowd—“a hoary building of the Jacobean stage of classic Renaissance”—is nearly two miles from “Weatherbury” (Piddletown). Again, Poxwell Hall, the “Oxwell Hall” of The Trumpet-Major, is really three miles from “Overcombe” (Sutton Poyntz), and, therefore, not the close neighbour of the Lovedays it is made to be. The original of “Welland House” is Charborough; but the “Tower,” as Mr. Hardy writes, “had two or three originals—Horton, Charborough, etc.”
Wool Manor-house, or “Well Bridge,” as Mr. Hardy, reverting to the older name, calls it, once a possession of the Turbervilles, is set on the bank of the rush-grown Frome, near the great Elizabethan bridge that gives the place half its name. The paintings of two women are actually, as in the novel, on the walls of the staircase, but they are now rapidly fading away, and can only with difficulty be made out to-day by the light of a candle.
“Enkworth Court” (Encombe), deep in the Glen of Encombe, approached by a long road gradually dropping into the cup-like crater by the only expedient of winding round it, is a “house in which Pugin would have torn his hair.” “Great Hintock House,” however, another house in a hole, has no original, though it has somewhat hastily been identified with Turnworth House, near Blandford. The situation is similar, but Turnworth House is largely a modern building, while the “Great Hintock House” of The Woodlanders had a front which was an “ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-coloured free-stone from local quarries.”
The sea-coast towns of Dorset, southern outposts of Wessex, make an occasional appearance in the novels and tales. The original of “Knollsea” is Swanage, which would scarcely now be described as the sea-side village “lying snug within its two headlands as between a finger and thumb.” With Bridport (“Port Bredy”) and its neighbour, West Bay, Mr. Hardy takes one of his rare liberties in altering the configuration of the country; for one story opens with the statement that “the shepherd on the east hill could shout out lambing intelligence to the shepherd on the west hill,” over the intervening chimneys. The cleft, however, in which the town is sunk is not so exiguous.
Georgian Weymouth is peculiarly the scene of The Trumpet-Major; while Portland, “the Isle of Slingers”—