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| Hardy's Cottage |
His understanding and depiction of the Dorset countryside of Victorian days ring true today. In The Woodlanders he lays before us in the village of Little Hintock a community of woodland workers living within social stratification, the poverty and privilege of the times. The layering of society is underlined to the point of tedium as Giles Winterborne (surely he would be the vanquishing hero in today’s tales of romance) suffers the ignominy of being passed over for his acknowledged childhood sweetheart Grace Melbury’s hand. At the urging of her aspiring father, a significant major employer, determined to deliver his daughter into the hands of her social betters, Grace agrees to marry the mysterious doctor who dabbles with scientific experiment, Dr Edgar Fitzpiers.
The character of Mrs Charmond at Hintock House hangs over the whole community having reached her station in the social order through her late husband’s status and thinks nothing, behind her curtain of respectability, of dalliance with whoever takes her fancy, but always on her terms.
The twenty-first century reader is often exasperated by the barriers controlling the lives of the players in this corner of rural Dorset. This no doubt is Hardy’s intention being a man who disliked the social constraints of the day. This tale woven around its woodland community rings true. This is the charm of Hardy’s storytelling. He wrote about his contemporary countryside as he observed it, we read about it as a countryside of yesteryear, a social history, a place that is convincing, a fascinating glimpse of the times our grandfathers and their grandfathers lived in whatever their place in it, labourer or landowner.
Thomas Hardy was a man of many parts living through an age of immense change and we are indebted to him as the author showing us how it was in this ‘Wessex’ corner of the realm.
He was born in 1840, the year of Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert and died in 1928 thus seeing nearly all of Victoria’s reign, all of Edward VII’s and most George V’s. As a sixteen year old he was at the public execution of Martha Browne at Dorchester out of curiosity and later regretted. His almost eighty-eight years, born in the summer and passing in the New Year, he witnessed the blossoming of Imperial power living through the horror of the Great War and into the depressions of the 1920s. Scholar, Architect - he won prizes at the Architectural Association - designer of Max Gate his final home built by his brother, prolific writer of novels, many first published in magazine instalments and a poet of note.
Hardy craved connection from his humble beginnings and became a cornerstone of English Society with many notables of the day visiting him at home in his later years and writers from Siegfried Sassoon to DH Lawrence acknowledging his influence. Twice married he became estranged from his first wife of many years, Emma Gifford, who moved herself into the upstairs while he lived with his much younger secretary, Florence Dugdale, who was to become his second wife. When Emma died in 1912 he devoted himself to her memory and concentrated on his poetry. Hardy considered himself a poet rather than a novelist.
Today Thomas Hardy’s fingerprints are seen across the Dorset countryside and will be after many important names of our times fade away.
CHIP TOLSON: Architecture (two years at the Architectural Association where unlike TH he won no prizes), National Service in the army and shipowning trades kept Chip busy before retiring to the joy of short stories, winning the Yeovil Short Story Competition in 2013. He has also written short plays and has two novels in want of a publisher.
