Thomas Hardy Dorset Properties

Here is a listimg of properties associated with the real world of Thomas Hardy and they still can be seen to this day. Select the PostCode links to be taken to an online location map for each of the properties. Dorset is a romantic county and well worth a visit so during your time it would be well worth 'looking up' some of these Hardy associated locations.

Hardy's Cottage, Cherry Lane (Alley), Higher Bockhampton, Dorset DT2 8QJ - Thomas Hardy' place of birth. For a detailed description follow this link. Higher Bockhampton

 

St Michaels Church, Stinsford DT2 9QP For a more detailed description follow the link Stinsford Church

 

Kingston Maurward, Stinsford, Dorset DT2 8PY
At one or two points in his lifetime, the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy [1840-19281 came near to confessing that his infant affair with Mrs. Julia Martin, at Kingston Maurward, involved sexual love on both sides, but near the end of his life, when he concocted with his wife, Florence, the official biography" that was designed to frustrate investigation by biographers after his death, he and she decided to put a more innocent face on it. But the circumstantial evidence is strong. Strong enough for instance to have caused Robert Gittings, in his authoritative biography. The Older Hardy, to refer to his "juvenile love-affair with the lady of the manor, Julia Augusta.

The Kingston Maurward estate, around the eighteenth century house of that name at Stinsford was purchased in 1844, when Hardy was four years old, by Francis Pitney Brouncker Martin, a well-off and well-educated man with an inclination to experimental farming and amateur science. He took up residence with his wife, Julia Augusta, then in her thirties and earnestly devoted to the practice of the Anglican Christian religion.

Since they were the kind of couple who would have wanted to have children, and perhaps even felt an obligation to, it is reasonable to speculate on the reason for their childlessness, which could have a bearing on what happened after their arrival at Kingston Maurward.

As occupants of the cottage on the estate in which Hardy was born his family were life tenants of the Martins-, and Hardy's father was a self employed builder who was sometimes engaged to do maintenance work a the "big house" They were therefore in a world below the Martins in social class, on the wrong side of a barrier across which there could be little more than polite exchange of courtesies. In spite of this Julia began to develop an intense personal interest in little Hardy, of a kind which was quite inappropriate to her social relationship to his family, and therefore suspect as to motive. This interest started soon after her arrival at Kingston Maurward and before anything more than a formal acquaintanceship as between lady of the manor and a tenant's wife, could have developed between her and Jemima Hardy, Thomas's mother.

Freud did not invent infant sexuality. It existed before he wrote about it, and was exploited then as now by adults of both sexes.

It is on record, and never denied by Hardy, that Julia was accustomed to take [him] into her lap and kiss [him] until he was quite a big child ; and that he responded to these caresses as a lover. In his thirties he recalled the thrilling 'frou-frou' of her four grey silk flounces when she used to bend over him". She would have known of this effect on him, and attired herself accordingly.

This was not just a passing phase. Julia's behavior persisted for four years until, when Hardy was nine years old; Jemima put a sudden and decisive end to this alliance between an ostensibly innocent child and an ostentatiously religious woman in her late thirties.

When at the age of eight he was sent from the day of its opening to the new Stinsford parish Anglican school, the cost of building which had been paid by Mrs. Martin, the children chanted at him a cruel rhyme with a reference to "kissing". This is significant, as children invariably choose as their victim for this kind of treatment one of their number against whom a black mark has been placed for some supposed social non-conformity.

They would have heard gossip and criticism among their parents, many of whom were related to the Hardys, and some of whom were ill-disposed towards them, about his visits to the "big house". One can imagine the effect this mockery must have had on Hardy, who at that time was a painfully shy and withdrawn little boy. He would have arrived home from school in a state of distress.

It may well have been this which caused his mother to decide to take him away from the school. It was in September, 1849, at the beginning of his second year at the school, that Jemima took him away, and he never attended the school again. And later she took him away from the village, on a protracted visit to her sister at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, thus cutting him off completely from the influence of Mrs. Martin.

This was only part of the drastic action she took. The family transferred itself from the Stinsford parish church, where the rustle of Julia's clothing as she brushed past the font had excited Hardy, to the one at Fordington, to avoid encountering her at Sunday services. Hardy's father apparently stopped doing maintenance work at Kingston Maurward. After their return in January 1850 to Bockhampton, Jemima kept Thomas away from school altogether, until he entered the Dorchester school at the beginning of the autumn term.

On Hardy's statement that his mother "stood up to" Julia Martin, biographers have based the legend of a row between the two women, caused by Jemima's decision to take the boy away from the village school and send him to a non-conformist school in Dorchester. It is highly unlikely that there was a row. It is more likely that Jemima took action without any reference to Mrs. Martin, and forbade her son to see her again. Julia's reaction on encountering the boy by chance a year later would confirm this. Even so it was a brave action indeed for a woman of her class to defy the lady of the manor in this way; and it would have needed more than a desire to transfer her son to an academically superior school to cause her to do so.

In fact teaching at the village school was exceptionally good, and Hardy had benefited from it. So keen was Jemima on the boy's continued education that she sent him to the local school at Hatfield for the short period they were there. She had obviously powerful reasons for keeping him away from the village school, with no alternative school to send him to, for best part of a year. At that time Thomas was still considered to be not very strong. She would have taken a long time to come round to the notion of sending him to Dorchester in spite of the almost impossible distance he would have to walk each day.

In 1850, when Hardy was ten years old and already attending the Dorchester school, an astonishing event occurred. For a year he had not seen Julia, and his mother no doubt made sure that he had no opportunity to see her; but one Saturday afternoon in autumn, when his mother was away from the house, the teenage daughter of a neighboring smallholder called and offered to take him to the annual harvest supper in a large barn on Kingston Maurward estate, to which she had been invited. He accepted the offer and went as an uninvited guest to the party, doubtless not thinking that Julia Martin would be there.

However, at the height of the festivities Mr. and Mrs. Martin made their appearance, in the role of the lord and lady of the manor making sure the estate workers and their guests were enjoying the feast. She must have been amazed to find there the boy who had been kept away from her for a year, but she kept her composure and decided to punish him publicly, as an unfaithful lover. "Oh Tommy, how is this?" she exclaimed. "I thought you had deserted me!" Utterly devastated, he tried to defend himself, and burst into tears. Preoccupied with the soldiers who had been invited from Dorchester barracks, the young woman who had brought him failed to take him home, and he had to wait until after midnight for her to do so, apparently too shocked and upset to venture near the food-tables.

With unbelievable ingenuousness, Florence Hardy comments in her biography of Hardy: "What the estate owner's tender wife would have given had she but known of his hunger and thirst, and how carefully have sent him home had she been aware of his dilemma!" And she had the nerve to suggest, in conversation with Richard Little Purdy, that Hardy's poem. In her precincts, in which he dwells on "the gloom of severance", refers not to Julia Martin, but to a young girl subsequently living at Kingston Maurward, with whom he was infatuated.

The influence on Hardy of the affair with Julia Martin, and the manner of its ending, was profound and lifelong. He must have known that it was an illicit relationship, and it seems to have left him with an incurable yearning for such relationships with women, which could have no satisfactory outcome, and over which he suffered feelings of guilt.

More important was the effect on his work, for he was quite unable to keep out of his writings his most intimate and secret private feelings. Illicit sexual relationships, love across the barrier of class and their ruthless ending by conformist social forces is a theme of his novels from the first one. The Poor Man and the Lady. In the poem In Tenebris III he writes of himself, "the smallest and feeblest of folk" as "weak from my baptism of pain", and more than hints at a suicidal impulse.

The clothes-fetishism to which he admitted, and which finds expression in, for instance, his novel Desperate Remedies, would have had its origin in the rustle of and contact with Julia's silken dresses. And he seems to have had analogous feelings of erotic association with the house itself, since so many of the objects of his amorous daydreams came from Kingston Maurward.

 

3 Wooperton Street, Weymouth, Dorset, DT4 7DX Whilst working as a church architect, for G.R. Crickmay in Weymouth, Thomas Hardy lodged at Woolperton Street, which is the second from the left of a terrace of four three-storey brick houses with bow-fronted first-floor windows that project over the pavement on to what is now a municipal car-park. He arrived in midsummer 1869, after Crickmay had taken over the Dorchester practice of Hardy's previous employer who had died, and left in February 1 870 to work on Desperate Remedies at Higher Bockhampton, Stinsford. A week later he had an urgent request from Crickmay to go to Cornwall where, at St Juliot Rectory, he met Emma Lavinia Gifford, who would become the first Mrs. Thomas Hardy. Thomas returned to Weymouth on 4 April 1870, and replied to a letter from Macmillans rejecting Desperate Remedies, and then went to London to push it into print. On 30 March 1871 he was back in Weymouth, still helping Crickmay to redesign churches. There was the prospect of another Cornish trip as the reward. 'Gothic Drawings' were still the order of the day in June and July 1871 and then after returning to the peace of the Bockhampton cottage to complete 'Under the Greenwood Tree', he was once more back with the architecture at Weymouth for the winter of 1871-1872.

West End Cottage, Belvedere Road, Swanage, Dorset BH19 2AN - Hardy's lodgings. West End Cottage, then the home of "an invalid captain of smacks and ketches", provided Thomas Hardy [1840-1928] and his first wife Emma with lodgings for the autumn and winter of 1875-76. This period widened his experience of tragedy with occasional bodies that came in naked with the sea. "The sea undresses them," ships' masters told him, about the victims of drownings that floated in with the tide from Portland and the west. "He has read well who has learnt that there is more to read outside books than in them," Hardy wrote in his diary. That winter he finished The Hand of Ethelberta. West End Cottage survives, in a cul-de-sac off Seymer Road, west of Peveril Downs open space (Ordnance Survey map reference SZ 034 785).

Llanherne, 16 Avenue Road, Wimbourne, Dorset BH21 1BT- Hardy's home.Thomas Hardy lived with his first wife, Emma, at Llanherne in The Avenue,Wimborne, from June 1881 to June 1883. The Avenue had a gravel surface at this time and the land between it and Grove Road was a grass field. The Osborne Road development was for the future. "Llanherne" was how Hardy spelt it but later versions have tended to lose the second T and the final 'e' - and the house is now 16 Avenue Road. These were Hardy's 42nd and 43rd years. A younger friend, George Pike, lived in Grove Road from 1877-94. Hardy also befriended his physician, Dr George Batterbury and allowed the town's Shakespearean Society to meet at Llanherne. George Lock was his hairdresser. Hardy went for country walks
with a local architect, Walter John Fletcher, who designed St John's church, consecrated in 1876.

As for literary output, Wimborne can only claim that Two on a Tower, the Drax tower at Charborough Park, was written at Llanherne. It is hardly among Hardy's most inspired works and neither is the author's name for his adopted town - "Warborne".
His nostalgic tribute would come in later life, recalling the young limes of The Avenue:

They are great trees, no doubt, by now
That were so thin in bough -
That row of limes -
When we housed there, I'm loth to reckon when.
The world has turned so many times,
So many, since then.

 

39 South Street, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 1DF- 39 South Street is among the current shops on the west side of South Street on the opposite corner of New Street from the Post Office, in the centre left of the terrace of these three-storey houses stone built houses, with a frontage of Braodmayne brick, in 1847.

It was here that the young 16 year old Thomas came to work as a trainee draughtsman for the architect john Hicks. That was 1856 and here stayed there until 1862 when he went to London to continue his career with Arthur Blomfield. He later returned to Hicks's in 1867.

Hardy's statue: by Eric Kennington
rubbished by Augustus John
There had to be a monument to one of England's greatest writers but Thomas Hardy was not, Augustus John [1878-1961] remarks in Chiaroscuro, of "monumental build, though he had a fine head", and his suggestion was for a statue of Tess of the d'Urbervilles instead, to be erected on an elevated point in Egdon Heath. Anyway, as John continues, "my project was turned down, and Tess rejected in favour of the depressing object we now see at the top of the High Street, Dorchester". Sydney Cockerell [1867-1962], Hardy's literary executor, had also fought for something better. He wrote to The Times on 16 January 1928 suggesting that Hardy should be commemorated by the erection of a tall tower on the heath beside his Stinsford (Higher Bockhampton) birthplace. He said that Hardy had "a particular objection to what he called 'utilitarian memorials'. In this phrase he condemned the common practice of making the
death of a famous person the excuse for raising money for drinking-fountains, lecterns, village halls, and other useful purposes, however commendable they might be on general grounds. He preferred a monument to be commemorative and nothing else. "As an example he often pointed with approval to the column raised to his famous namesake on a Dorset hilltop within sight of Max Gate" - Vice-
Admiral Hardy's Monument above Portesham. "I have heard him admit, when the topic came up in conversation, that if any local memorial were to be raised to him he would like that column to have a fellow." It was not to be. What we have at Colliton Walks is the bronze of a seated Hardy; offering the interesting if wizened hook-nosed head but diminutive in form, with hat in hand, crossed legged and looking towards the Bridport Road from a plain sarcophagus of a plinth. The casting is by Eric Kennington [1888-1960] and though he had already sculpted the war memorials at Battersea Park and Soissons, France, it is a creation of his early period. The editors
of a reprint of Highways and Byways in Dorset noted that the author is portrayed in knickerbockers with his feet resting on a heap of horticultural specimens: "Criticism must be respectfully withheld, as it doubtless pleased the committee and subscribers who were responsible for its erection." Even the unveiling failed to please them. It was carried out in 1931 by Sir James Barrie [1860-1937] who with characteristic puckishness started by saying that at his birth Hardy was such a weakling that the nurse had put him in the washing-basket for dead and directed her attention to the mother instead. Hardy's widow, Florence Hardy, was outraged and later told Barrie that "T.H." had never mentioned the incident: "I asked Barrie to tell me about it when we returned to Max Gate. I said that I had never heard the story. Then he remarked: 'Well, I put that bit in. It was a good piece of drama. So I put it in!'" "That," Florence responded, "is how legends begin. Like Wellington's 'Up Guards and at 'em' at Waterloo. I think it monstrous."

North Cottage, Riverside Villas, Sturminster Newton, Dorset. This was the house that Thomas and his new wife Emma first moved to in 1876 and stayed until 1878. Return of the Native was written here. North Cottage wasthe home of the Hardy's and not the adjoining South Cottage which has mistakenly been supplied with a Hardy plaque after Olive Knott has supplied the incorect inormation.

Hardy's Riverside Plaque: on the wrong house!
In 19851 published Professor Michael Millgate's protest, regarding Hardy's Sturminster Newton house, that "as I have demonstrated there can now be no question but that the plaque is on the wrong house". From July 1876 to
March 1878 Thomas Hardy and his first wife, Emma, lived in the Riverside Villa which looks out westward over the River Stour from the ridge at the north end of the town's recreation ground (Ordnance Survey map reference
ST 784137).

The trouble arose because Riverside is a pair of mid-Victorian semi-detached brick houses. Millgate wrote in his 1982 work Thomas Hardy: a Biography "In view of the erroneous tradition which has grown up in recent years it
is necessary to insist that the Hardys lived in the more northerly of the two houses - the one further from the present recreation ground. When the Hardy Players visited Sturminster Newton in June 1921 they were entertained by William Ponting and his wife, occupants of the more northerly house; they were also photographed in front of the house. Hardy was present, with his [second] wife, and indicated that The Return of the Native had been written in the first-floor front room, overlooking the river; a photograph of the same house carries on the back a note in Hardy's hand, 'House in which The Return of the Native was written - 1877'. That you would think decisive but local writer Olive Knott insisted that the monkey-puzzle he had planted stood in front of the southern house: "Hardy lovers who visit the house often take away a piece of wood from the stump as a souvenir." She could not grasp the fact that Hardy, not being able to do things by halves, planted a pair of monkey-puzzles - one in front of each house. It was a dumb thing for an ex-architect to do as they would totally block out the view he had celebrated in his poem Overlooking the River Stour. Both trees, inevitably, were felled and it was the southern one, unfortunately which left the relics that passed into Sturminster folklore. It is a pity that the town appear to have mismanaged their associations with Hardy as The Return of the Native is Hardy at his greatest and it was the achievement of a time which, in a retrospective poem, he called A Two Year Idyll. He looked upon Sturminster Newton as "our happiest times".

Shire Hall Place, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 1UP- In June 1883 the 43 yearold Thomas Hardy and his wife Emma moved into Shire Hall Place, behind Shire Hall on the north side of High West Street, Dorchester. They were searching for a permanent home which would become his own deigner-villa after the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) agreed to lease whatever corner of the Duchy of Cornwall lands that the novelist requested. It was a plot opposite the toll house known locally as Mack's Gate beside the Wareham Road on the outskirts of the country town. Hardy was to later rename it to Max Gate.

 

Max Gate, Allington Avenue, Dorchester DT1 2AB. Thomas Hardy is unique as the only major English novelist to design the house in which he was to produce most of his work. Hardy the architect built a large late-Victorian villa, its austere three storey lines being set-back from Alington Avenue, the old Wareham road out of Dorchester (Ordnance Survey map reference SY 704 899), on the west side of its corner with Syward Road and given its initial privacy by a brick wall and its more effective screen by the newly planted trees which grew to match the author's spreading fame. He called it Max Gate, adopting and improving upon the local name for the spot, derived from the Mack's Gate turnpike toll-house which was demolished in the twentieth century and is now under the present course of the town's A352 approach road. This has moved most of the traffic. Max Gate stands tothe east of the Trumpet Major roundabout/ behind the wall between Friars Close and Syward Road.

It was Hardy's home from age forty-five on 29 June 1885 until his death there on 11 January 1928. Here he saw The Mayor of Casterbridge into print and wrote The Woodlanders [1887], Tess of the d'Urbervilles [1891], Jude the Obscure [1895] and most of his poetry, including the three-part poetic drama The Dynasts [1904-08]. Literary visitors included William Barnes, R.L. Stevenson, Lawrence of Arabia, E.M. Forster, Edmund Gosse, John Cowper Powys, A.E. Housman, John Galsworthy, Newman Flower and W.B. Yeats. The award of the Order of Merit did something to awaken Dorchester folk to Hardy's importance but it was only after the Prince of Wales [Edward VII] called for tea on 20 July 1923 that they fully realised the unparalleled reputation of the local talent in their midst.

Max Gate was left to the National Trust by Kate Hardy, the author's sister, in 1940, "to retain the same in the present condition as far as possible". It is not open to the public and Hardy's study has been rebuilt as an exhibit in the Dorset County Museum, High West Street, Dorchester. It is this writer's ultimate ambition that the National Trust will eventually lease Max Gate to the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society for them to restore to it Hardy's collection, so that it can resume its rightful and logical role as the place of principal literary pilgrimage in the county. The Society can use the space this frees in the County Museum for more tradi-
tional antiquities of the sort which its Victorian creators. Hardy included, would have approved.

 

Talbothays Lodge,West Stafford, Dorset DT2 8AL: T. Hardy, architect. A villa that is the work of Thomas Hardy the architect, a virtual copy of his own 1885-dated Dorchester home. Max Gate, stands on land at West Stafford that his brother Henry inherited from their father. It is known as Talbothays Lodge, and was designed in 1893. Taking its name from Hardy's fictional place name for Lower Lewell Farm, a little further along the road, it stands half a mile east of the village (Ordnance Survey map reference SY 734 896).

Henry would live there along with Mary and Kate Hardy, sisters of Henry and Thomas, and it was their home for the rest of their lives.

They had moved from the thatched "Birthplace" of the author at Higher Bockhampton. Talbothays has five bedrooms, a stable yard and outbuildings - the farthest out being the two summerhouses that were built by Henry. Here on 2 June each year, a flag was hoisted in honour of the birthday of the member of the family who had brought it into the middle classes, a flag for Thomas.

 

Thomas Hardy Memorial, Cottages, Sturminster Marshall, DorsetThe range of eight thatched cottages opposite the church are under one long roof of thatch. They were built early in the 1700s with cob walls and were at one time owned by a former neighbour of mine in Bournemouth who used to call to collect the shilling-a-week rents. Church Cottages, they were called in his day. By the 1960s they were semi-derelict and threatened with demolition, but the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings stepped in and renovated them as a memorial to the author Thomas Hardy [1840-1928]. A decade later they were gutted by fire and this time had to be totally rebuilt. So this attractive backdrop to the churchyard, with look-alike rebuilds of its brick and half-timbering, has survived against all the odds.

Misc:

Thomas Hardy: dug up Roman pots. Thomas Hardy [1840-1928] exaggerated somewhat when he wrote in the opening of The Mayor of Casterbridge [1886] that one could sense old Rome throughout the streets of the town - Roman Durnovaria is not on the visual scale of Chester or York - but in the choice of a building site for his Max Gate house (Ordnance Survey map reference SY 704 899) he had provided himself with some first class antiquities. They were discovered in 1884 as the workmen dug the trenches for the
foundations of his villa. Three burials were in elliptical graves, cut into the chalk, with skeletons contracted in womb-like pose rather than being laid out. One had a bronze brooch - present location unknown - at its head, where it was probably used to fasten the shroud. There were a total of six black-ware pottery vessels in a variety of native Durotrigic or imitation Roman shapes of the first century AD, together with a splendid 22.5 cm high cream-coloured ring-neck flask that had been made at the Corfe Mullen kiln in the time of Claudius, the emperor who had undertaken the AD 43 invasion of Britain. Other skeletons were found later. From the forehead of one Hardy took a pair of penannular brooches which had been joined by another early Roman fibula of the Maiden Castle class. Nearby, there was a pit with the burnt bones of a horse and an iron spearhead. Covering one of the skeletons was a large sarsen stone which Hardy had "set up at Max Gate as a menhir". Later finds, from his flower beds and vegetable garden, included decorated sherds of top-class imported Samian pottery from later in the first century. Hardy quite rightly cherished his private collection of conquest-period native and Roman pottery and other finds - they were kept in his private study, the contents of which went to Dorset County Museum in 1936.