The Hardy Miscellany is interested in adding to these pages and will consider submissions in the form of electronic images. (Please do not send originals.) Email slides to John Gould, jgould@andover.edu. Include photographer's name and address, data about the photograph (location, date, e.g.), and a citation of the subject from one of Hardy's biographies. Photographers will be credited, and any commercial inquiries about particular photographs will be directed to them.

John Gould (1990)

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in this cottage at Higher Bockhampton, about four miles from Dorchester, Dorset. He was the son of Thomas Hardy, a builder and mason, and his wife Jemima Hand Hardy. This building was the model for Tranter Dewey's house in Under the Greenwood Tree, and was described in Hardy's "earliest known production in verse," "Domicilium."

"Domicilium" It faces west, and round the back and sides High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs, And sweep against the roof, Wild honeysucks Climb on the walls, and seem to sprout a wish (If we may fancy wish of trees and plants) To overtop the apple-trees hard by. Red roses, lilacs, varigated box Are there in plenty, and such hardy flowers As flourish best untrained. Adjoining these Are herbs and esculents; and farther still A field; then cottages with trees, and last The distant hills and sky. Behind, the scene is wilder. Heath and furze Are everything that seems to grow and thrive Upon the uneven ground. A stunted thorn Stands here and there, indeed, and from a pit An oak uprises, springing from a seed Dropped by some bird a hundred years ago....                In days bygone - Long gone - my father's mother, who is now Blest with the blest, would take me out to walk. At such a time I once inquired of her How looked the spot when first she settled here. The answer I remember. 'Fifty years Have passed since then, my child, and change has marked The face of all things. Yonder garden-plots And orchards were uncultivated slopes O'ergrown with bramble bushes, furze and thorn: That road a narrow path shut in by ferns, Which, almost trees, obscured the passer-by. Our house stood quite alone, and those tall firs And beeches were not planted. Snakes and efts Swarmed in the summer days, and nightly bats Would fly about our bedrooms. Heathcroppers Lived on the hills, and were our only friends; So wild it was when first we settled here.' -- ca.1860.

"Heathcroppers" (line 34) are wild ponies that once lived on the heaths. A few remain today on Exmoor and the New Forest in Hampshire. Kay Browning (1995)

John Gould (1997)

"#3 Wooperton Street": In 1869 while working for the architect G.R. Crickmay, Hardy lived in this house, #3 Wooperton Street, in Weymouth, which was identified with "Budmouth" in the novels. To this seaside town came Newson, the sailor who purchases Susan Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge. M.R. Skillings writes in "Walk Round Weymouth With Thomas Hardy": "One is tempted to think that, years later, when Hardy was writing The Mayor of Casterbridge, he recalled his own attempts to see the water of the bay from the upstairs window." In the novel, Newson's lodgings "had a bow-window, jutting out sufficiently to afford glimpses of a vertical strip of blue sea to anyone opening the sash, and leaning forward far enough to look through a narrow lane of tall intervening houses."

"Riverside Villa, Sturminster Newton": Early in their marriage, 1876-78, Hardy and his first wife Emma lived in this house in Sturminster Newton, overlooking the Stour River. Here he wrote a number of poems and a large part of The Return of the Native. Florence Hardy writes in The Early Life of Thomas Hardy: "'March 18. End of the Sturminster Newton idyll...' [the following is written in later] 'Our happiest time.'" (Chapter VIII)

John Gould (1996)

Kay Browning (1997)

"Riverside Villa, Dedication": In March 1997 a blue plaque was placed on the Hardy's house, and the house itself was repainted yellow. Present for the ceremony were James Gibson, editor of The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy; Miss Hill, the present occupant of the house; and Geoffrey Tapper, Chairman of the Thomas Hardy Society.

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Index

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Map Far from the Madding Crowd Jude the Obscure Mayor of Casterbridge Return of the Native

Tess of the d'Urbervilles Two on a Tower Under the Greenwood Tree The Well-Beloved

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Last Update: 2/22/03