Searching for Thomas Hardy in Dorset, England
Birthplace of West County Author of Wessex Tales is near Dorchester
Oct 24, 2009
Born in 1840 in Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester, in Dorset, Thomas Hardy trained to be an architect, but later found that writing was his real love. He considered himself a poet, but the novels he wrote for money and serialized in magazines of the day, are why he is considered to be one of England’s greatest novelists.
Visitors to Dorset in search of Thomas Hardy will find him and his tales of rural England in the country lanes and quaint villages of the region he called Wessex. Here Hardy was born, grew up and was influenced by the West Country way of life that he depicted so vividly in novels such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far from the Madding Crowd.
Wessex and the West Country
When Hardy began writing about his beloved West County, he created a fictional region of England he called Wessex. The name was derived from the Medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that once spread across Southwest England. He changed the names of towns and villages, but Hardy fans know where to find them.
For instance Hardy’s Casterbridge is Dorset’s county town of Dorchester, and Melstock, the setting for his novel Under the Greenwood Tree, is Hardy’s home of Stinsford and Higher Bockhampton. Other Wessex to West Country towns include Melchester, which is Salisbury, Sandbourne, which is Bournemouth, Marshwood which is Middlemarsh, and Wintoncester, where Tess Durbeyfield is executed outside the Wintoncester Cathedral, is really Winchester.
Thomas Hardy and English Country Cottages
Hardy fans familiar with the descriptions of rural life in his novels, will marvel at the beauty of the landscape and the plethora of quaint English country cottages dotting the countryside of “Wessex.” In fact, this part of England has largely adopted Wessex as its nickname, due primarily to Thomas Hardy’s novels.
Thatched roofed cottages are still plentiful in the region, including the cottage where Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, and where he lived, except for a few years in London, until age 34. Here Hardy wrote two of his novels, Under the Greenwood Tree and Far From the Madding Crowd. The cottage has been beautifully restored and is owned by the National Trust.
In Search of Thomas Hardy and Wessex
Hardy fans searching for the novelist in the West Country will find him mostly in Dorset. His birthplace in Higher Bockhampton, which was built by his great grandfather in 1800, is open to the public Sunday through Thursday,11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., from March 15th to October 9th. There is a granite monument located behind the cottage erected “to his memory by a few of his American admirers” in 1931.
From 1876 to 1878, Thomas Hardy also lived a few miles east of Sherborne (Sherton Abbas) in the village of Sturminster Newton (Stourcastle) where he wrote Return of the Native. His home there, “Riverside.” is a private residence. His former home in Dorchester is not open to the public, but the Dorset County Museum has a number of his personal belongings as well as the Thomas Hardy Study.
When Thomas Hardy died in 1928, he was considered a major poet and novelist and was eligible to be buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London. However, due to a division among family members, only Hardy’s ashes lie in Westminster. His heart is buried in Stinsford churchyard, near his home in his beloved “Wessex.”
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