Review: The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

University of Wisconsin Press.
2016. 184 pages

2016 has been something of a remarkable year in that it has seen the release of three novels featuring Thomas Hardy as a character. I wrote earlier in the year about the first two of these, Winter by Christopher Nicholson and Max Gate by Damien Wilkins. The third, The Phantom of Thomas Hardy, is perhaps the most engaging to the admirer of Hardy's work who will, in its pages, recognize a common kinship with its author, Floyd Skloot, through his very personal quest to connect with Dorset and the places that shaped Hardy's life and his writing.

The Phantom of Thomas Hardy sits on the bleeding edge of modern fiction in that it poses as a memoir while slyly inserting elements of fiction alongside Skloot's very believable and vulnerable writing about himself, his wife, and their journey to Dorset. He expands the range of the novel beyond an extended trip to Hardy country with his wife by including in a much larger narrative about Hardy's longstanding presence in his intellectual life. Skloot's presence in the work is also informed by his decades-long process of coping with neurological eccentricities that came with the development and recovery from brain lesions in the 1980s.

These eccentricities, in fact, form the fulcrum of the suspension of our disbelief throughout the novel as Skloot is visited, numerous times throughout the novel, by the titular phantom of Thomas Hardy as he explores the locales that served as the backdrop for the pivotal moments in Hardy's life. Even as Skloot questions the validity of his own experiences against the expectations of a mundane world, the reader is invited to wonder where the line between what happened and what is imagined within the book actually lies.

It will be difficult for Hardy's admirers not to identify with Skloot and his journey in this book. His trip to Dorset is informed by a lifetime shared with Hardy's work. The narrative isn't merely a travelogue to Dorset. Skloot cuts directly to the heart of why Thomas Hardy and his work still speak to an audience more than a century removed. His first-person account serves as a crucible for the work, the man, the place and the reader to intermingle in a way that reflects my own internal experience with Hardy's work and, I suspect, that of many others.

The ending of the book wraps up just a little too neatly for my taste, having the effect of showing how a magic trick is performed just before its awe-inspiring climax. I was enjoying Skloot's high-wire act, balancing fact and fiction so deftly that I couldn't distinguish between them and the close of the novel definitely dispels that in a way that is unmistakable. It reminded me of an element of Max Gate that drew me out of the narrative at nearly the same point in the book. Perhaps both intended it to serve as a kind of narrative frontality to underscore the fictional nature of all seemingly biographical writing?

It didn't spoil the book for me in either case but I was perfectly happy to let this one close without being reminded that the otherwise note-perfect writing was not just a love letter to Thomas Hardy but also to his many fans. As Hardy himself might note, there is nothing unsavory in giving oneself over to the passion evoked by a well-written love letter but there is wisdom in retaining some small piece of the self in skepticism because love is prone, by the very selflessness of its nature, to overselling its own durability.

Under the Greenwood Tree Part 5 - The Social Contract

A cordwainer, that is, a maker of shoes;
differentiated from a cobbler
who merely repairs them.

The last major facet of Thomas Hardy's Dutch portrait of his Dorchester community in decline is more nebulous than the others I've outlined so far; specifically, the relationship between the individual and the larger community or social convention. I say that it's more nebulous because, unlike landscape descriptions or dialogue, it's rarely explicit in the text. It's implied in the ways that characters interact with one another.

It is, however, one of the central themes of the book, embodied in the disruption that Parson Maybold's installation brings to the community. Before the nature and scope of that disruption can be appreciated, it will be valuable to understand what it is that is being disrupted. There is a relationship between the land, the individual, the family and the community that can be thought of as a web that has been undisturbed for generations prior to the opening of the book. Individuals assume vocations (and in fact are defined by those vocations) based on the needs of the community and, in some cases, by the traditions that exist within the family into which they are born.

As the members of the quire gather in Reuben Dewy's home to drink cider and rehearse prior to the long night of caroling, Hardy uses this curious sequence, from the mouth of Mr. Penny, the shoemaker, to underscore the intimate nature of the relations between members of the community.

"Well," said the shoemaker, seeming to perceive that the interest the object had excited was greater than he had anticipated, and warranted the last's being taken up again and exhibited; "Now, whose foot do ye suppose this last was made for? It was made for Geoffrey Day's father over at Yalbury Wood. Ah, many's the pair o' boots he've had off the last. Well, when 'a died, I used the last for Geoffrey, and have ever since, though a little doctoring was wanted to make it do. Yes, a very queer natured last it is now, 'a believe," he continued, turning it over caressingly. "Now, you notice that there" (pointing to a lump of leather bradded to the toe), "that's a very bad bunion that he've had ever since 'a was a boy. Now, this remarkable large piece" (pointing to a patch nailed to the side), "shows a' accident he received by the tread of a horse, that squashed his foot a'most to a pomace. The horseshoe cam full-butt on this point, you see. And so I've just been over to Geoffrey's, to know if wanted his bunion altered or made bigger in the new pair I'm making."

In this one short speech, Hardy demonstrates that the whole of Geoffrey Day's life is bound up in Mr. Penny's shoemaking capabilities. The same is true of everyone else connected to the service he provides. He later asserts that he once identified a corpse otherwise unrecognizable from the bloat of drowning by the shape of the foot. It is no wonder then that when he produces a shoe intended for Geoffrey's daughter, Fanny, it is viewed by those in the room as an intimately tied to her person as if she'd suddenly appeared in the room. Reuben's son, Dick, uses it to fill in the gaps in his imagination about her, while noting that it filled him with "a delicate feeling that he had no right to do so without having first asked the owner of the foot's permission." Penny makes an interesting distinction about the boot though, noting that he "don't care to mend boots I don't make," (because he is a cordwainer, a maker of shoes, not a cobbler, a repairer of them) suggesting that, though born of the community, Fancy Day is apart from it in a way that her father is not.

Another passage, describing the exterior of Mr. Penny's shop, outlines a similar idea from another angle, noting that:

No sign was over his door; in fact--as with old banks and mercantile houses--advertising in any shape was scorned, and it would have been felt as beneath his dignity to paint up, for the benefit of strangers, the name of an establishment whose trade came solely by connection based on personal respect.

This notion that the labor and creativity of the individuals in the community belongs solely to the community asserts itself quite forcefully on one of the two central plots; namely, the eviction of the Mellstock Quire as the principal music providers in the church.

To Parson Maybold, someone with roots in the region but not a member of the community, there is little gravity in the decision to "modernize" the church by replacing the string ensemble with an organ. It is the most obvious outcome of having a) an organ b) someone who can play it (Fancy) and c) a wealthy supporter who has asked him to make the change (Fancy's other suitor, Farmer Shiner). Ironically, all three people who are involved in the decision --The Parson, Fancy, and Farmer Shiner-- are excluded by circumstances from the community: The Parson, by birth and education; Fancy by education and slightly elevated social status stemming from her father's relationship with the Earl of Wessex; and Shiner by his wealth.

Under the Greenwood Tree Part 4 - Dialogue and the Dorset Tongue

The Dorset accent has been featured in prominent roles
 in recent fantasy classics like Hagrid from the Harry Potter films. 

In Under the Greenwood Tree, Thomas Hardy employs a very different set of strategies to capture the language of Dorset than his literary ancestor, the poet William Barnes. Barnes, as demonstrated in part 3 of this series, wrote his verse in the Dorset dialect, painting the sounds of the region in purposeful phonetic spellings that deviate from modern English. Hardy retains his regular voice in describing the setting and action but hints at the peculiarities of Dorset speech in the dialogue. As the story features characters at different points on a continuum of class, caste and education levels, those devices ring with a particular clarity in scenes where socially disparate characters interact.

Dialogue dominates Under the Greenwood Tree. Conversations fill entire chapters and sometimes spill over into the next. Hardy paints his characters mainly through almost obsessive tics in their speech patterns. Reuben Dewy, the male romantic lead's father, is the most instantly recognizable with his habit of throwing in a "my sonnies"  as a prelude to filling half a page while talking to no one in particular.

"Hullo, my sonnies, here you be then!" said Reuben Dewy at length, standing up and blowing forth a vehement gust of breath. "How the blood do puff up in anybody's head, to be sure, a-stooping like that! I was just going out to gate to hark for ye." He then carefully began to wind a strip of brown paper round a brass tap he held in his hand. "This in the cask here is a drop o' the right sort" (tapping the cask); "'tis a real drop o' cordial from the best picked apples --Sansoms, Stubbards, Five-corners, and such-like--you d'mind the sort, Michael?" (Michael nodded.) "And there's a sprinkling of they that grown down by the orchard-rails--streaked ones--rail apples we d'call 'em, as 'tis by the rails they grow, and not knowing the right name. The water-cider from 'em is as good as most people's best cider is."

(For readers not familiar with the Dorset accent, this video suggests reading it in Robbie Coltrane's delivery as Hagrid from the Harry Potter films.)

Drawing from this example (which is descriptive of the way Hardy's captures the Dorset speech from this particular social set), we can make a few broad generalizations about his strategy. First, there is the use of archaic pronouns like "ye" and "thee" and "thou," which show up with some regularity. Secondly, we see a lot of non-standard contractions like "'tis" and "d'mind" and "d'call."
One of the more interesting of these contractions that shows up regularly is a terminal 'n after a verb, (such as "that ever I should call'n such") as a substitution for the word 'him." This is also represented as an uncontracted "en" where we might expect to see a "him."

There is also an attention to cadence that shouldn't be overlooked. Hardy regularly employs the passive voice in his dialogue construction, which contributes to the feeling that it takes his characters a long time to say the simplest things. Consider how it affects the cadences of this passage, delivered by Mr. Penny, a member of the Mellstock Quire: "If so be I hadn't been as scatter-brained and thritingill [wrong-headed] as a chiel, I should have called at the schoolhouse wi' a boot and I cam up along. What is coming to me I really can't estimate at all!"

There are a few moments where the differences between common Dorset speakers and their more refined neighbors are contrasted directly, giving an even clearer sense of the devices Hardy is using to reinforce the dialect in the text. In a pivotal scene in the book, the Quire travels to the home of Parson Maybold in order to lobby against the installation of an organ in the church to replace them. Maybold, like Fancy Day, is representative of someone with roots in the area who has been elevated in status through education and his language and demeanor reflects it.

"What I have been thinking" --the tranter implied by this use of the past tense that he was hardly so discourteous as to be positively thinking it then--"is that the quire out to be gie'd a little time, and not done away wi' till Christmas, as a fair thing between man and man. And, Mr. Mayble, I hope you'll excuse my common way?"

"I will, I will. Till Christmas," the vicar murmured, stretching the two words to a great length, as if the distance to Christmas might be measured that way. "Well, I want you all to understand that I have no personal fault to find, and that I don't wish to change the church music by forcible means, or in a way which should hurt the feelings of any parishioners. Why I have at least spoken definitely on the subject is that a player has been brought under--I may say pressed upon-my notice several times by one of the churchwardens. And as the organ I brought with me is here waiting" (pointing to a cabinet-organ standing in the study), "there is no reason for longer delay."

Fancy's dialogue reads largely like Parson Maybold's but Hardy accentuates her attention to language in a passage connected to the after-wedding party that notes that [emphasis mine]: The propriety of every one was intense by reason of the influence of Fancy, who, as an added precaution in this direction, had strictly charged her father and the tranter to carefully avoid saying 'thee' and 'thou' in their conversation, on the plea that those ancient words sounded so very humiliating to persons of newer taste."

There is one last tidbit about language as it relates to class hidden in Geoffrey Day's introduction, although it probably reflects more on class than language. As the game-keeper for one of Lord Wessex's estates, Day develops two different protocols for talking with others; one for those considerably above him in status (his employer) and those considerably below him (as typified in this passage by his helper Enoch but just as easily applied to any member of the Dewy family).

Although not an extraordinarily taciturn man among friends slightly richer than himself, he never wasted words upon outsiders, and to his trapper Enoch his ideas were seldom conveyed by any other means than nods and shakes of the head. Their long acquaintance with each other's ways, and the nature of their labours, rendered words between them almost superfluous as vehicles of thought, while the coincidence of their horizons, and the astonishing equality of their social views, by startling the keeper from time to time as very damaging to the theory of master and man, strictly forbade any indulgence in words such as courtesies.

In the next installment of JLS, we'll look at more of these social conventions and how the define the relationships and expectations between different members of the cast.

Under the Greenwood Tree Part 3 - Parson Barnes and the Warp and Weft of Wessex Words

Bronze statue of William Barnes outside the Church of St Peter
 on High Street in Dorchester, UK. Photo by Elliott Brown. 

While Thomas Hardy used his own words to great effect in sketching the Dorset countryside across four seasons in Under the Greenwood Tree, it isn't the only tool in his repertoire for capturing the essence of the people who inhabit it. Dialogue and, more specifically, dialect play an oversized role in the novel, often overshadowing the descriptions written in Hardy's own distinctive voice.

The idea of textually representing Dorset through dialect didn't originate with Hardy. The poet William Barnes began writing poetry in the region's dialect in the 1820s and is the originator of the conceit of referring to Dorset as Wessex; both, ideas for which Hardy is better known. It is no exaggeration to say that without William Barnes, there would have been no Thomas Hardy as we know him. He was, by all indicators, a genius and a polymath.

By the time Hardy would have known him by something other than reputation, Barnes had taken an official position in the Church of England. The pair appeared to establish an acquaintance when Barnes moved the school of which he was the headmaster next door to the office of John Hicks, for whom a young Thomas Hardy was apprenticing. Given what we know of Hardy's impressionable personality as a youth, it's hard to imagine that meeting a published poet with a profound interest in the peculiarities of the Dorset dialect didn't put ideas in his head about his own literary future.

Barnes's approach to approximating the Dorset speech is very different than Hardy's own solutions in Under the Greenwood Tree. The former's interest in philology and rendering the sound of the dialect (not unlike Robert Burns) transforms his poetry into almost a formal academic experiment.

The Fall by William Barnes

The length o’ days ageän do shrink 
   An’ flowers be thin in meäd, among 
   The eegrass a-sheenèn bright, along 
Brook upon brook, an’ brink by brink. 

   Noo starlèns do rise in vlock on wing— 
   Noo goocoo in nest-green leaves do sound— 
   Noo swallows be now a-wheelèn round— 
Dip after dip, an’ swing by swing. 

   The wheat that did leätely rustle thick 
   Is now up in mows that still be new, 
   An’ yollow bevore the sky o’ blue— 
Tip after tip, an’ rick by rick. 

   While now I can walk a dusty mile 
   I’ll teäke me a day, while days be clear, 
   To vind a vew friends that still be dear, 
Feäce after feäce, an’ smile by smile.

Barnes uses language here in some specific ways to evoke the Dorset dialect. The first is a certain freedom in spelling to emphasize its peculiar sounds that extends to the application of diacriticals to indicate dipthongs that occur naturally in speech but can be masked by text. "F''s also regularly transform into 'v''s ("vlock on wing," "bevore the sky," "(t)o vind a vew friends"). Although not demonstrated here, Barnes was also inclined to turn some 's' sounds into 'z's as in this line from his poem, "Zun-zet": "Sorrow-slightèn, work-vorgettèn, / Gambol’d wi’ the zun a-zettèn." Interestingly, in both examples, we can see that Barnes has a place for both the letters F and S in his ear but is differentiating specific placements of them (or perhaps their pronunciation in particular words) by use of the different consonant sound.

As we'll see in the next installment, Hardy may have been inspired by Barnes's experiments but goes about implementing them in very different ways.

Under the Greenwood Tree Part 2 - Word Weaving the Elements

Where the trees are separated from the water-meadow by the River Frome
in Lower Bockhampton, Dorset, UK. Photo by Mike Faherty.

Thomas Hardy's initial focus in Under the Greenwood Tree is, as his subtitle suggests, on the Mellstock Quire - a band of musicians and singers who perform weekly at church services as well as at social gatherings such as weddings and dances. At the ensemble's core is three generations of the Dewy family; the elder William, the patriarch Reuben and the young Dick. The novel opens with the quire meeting up at Reuben's house for a bit of cider before discharging one of its annual obligations - travelling house to house all throughout the night to carol for the people of the parish.

From this introduction, Hardy reveals the three principal threads from which the tapestry he intends to hang behind the plot is woven; specifically, location, language and convention. In this piece, we look at the first, location.

Unlike Desperate Remedies, which merely borrows from known places in order to make its setting believable, Under the Greenwood tree is a novel about a particular place, Mellstock, as well as the people who inhabit it. Mellstock is, in reality, Hardy's ground-zero, Stinsford and the associated communities at Lower and Higher Bockhampton, the latter of which being his birthplace. The geographic scope of the novel is limited to this area with only a brief foray south into Budmouth (the port city of Weymouth) and a few times to the north and east at Geoffrey Day's house in Yalbury Wood on the road to Weatherbury (Puddletown).

Hardy's captures its essence in winter in this description of the surrounding landscape, gliding adroitly between physical details and a poetic rendering of the sum effect of seeing it in this early passage.

The lonely lane...connected one of the hamlets of Mellstock parish with Upper Mellstock and Lewgate, and to his eyes, casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches with their characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the dark-creviced elm, all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the sky, wherein the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their flickering seemed like the flapping of wings. Within the woody pass, at a level anything lower than the horizon, all was dark as the grave. The copse-wood forming the sides of the bower interlaced its branches so densely, even at this season of the year, that the draught from the north-east flew along the channel with scarcely an interruption from lateral breezes.

Hardy manages to work in at least one such word painting per season, around the changing of which the novel is structured. As Dick Dewy makes his way from Mellstock to Yalbury Wood in springtime to engage Fancy Day in her father's house for the first time, Hardy paints the scene. Notice again how light is used to frame the scenery.

[H]e was journeying along with Smart the mare and the light spring-cart, watching the damp slopes of the hill-sides as they streamed in the warmth of the sun, which at this unsettled season shone on the grass with the freshness of an occasional inspector rather than as an accustomed proprietor...The distant view was darkly shaded with clouds; but the nearer parts of the landscape were whitely illumined by the visible rays to the sun streaming down across the heavy gray shade behind...

Later that summer, after Dick and Fancy have undertaken a secret engagement, Hardy places more emphasis on the interplay between water and the flora fed by it.

It was a morning...of lingering dews, when grass is never dry in the shade. Fuchsias and dahlias were laden till eleven o'clock with small drops and dashes of water, changing the colour of their sparkle at every movement of the air; and elsewhere hanging on twigs like small silver fruit.

In the autumn, as the certainty of Fancy and Dick's shared future begins to waver under pressure from multiple fronts, the sun and its associated effects take center stage again.

The landscape being concave, at the going down of the sun everything suddenly assumed a uniform robe of shade. The evening advanced from sunset to dusk long before Dick's arrival, and his progress during the latter portion of his walk through the trees was indicated by the flutter of terrified birds that had been roosting over the path. And in crossing the glades, masses of hot dry air, that had been formed on the hills during the day, greeted his cheeks alternately with clouds of damp night air from the valleys.

Returning to the tree imagery of the opening passage, Hardy blends it with his water theme from the summer as well as an interest in kinetic motion from the wind to stirring effect in this dramatic scene as Fancy travels to meet with the witch of Mellstock, Elizabeth Endorfield.

A single vast gray cloud covered the country, from which the small rain and mist had just begun to blow down in wavy sheets, alternately thick and thin. The trees of the fields and plantations writhed like miserable men as the air wound its way swiftly among them: the lowest portions of their trunks, that had hardly ever been known to move, were visibly rocked by the fiercer gusts, distressing the mind by its painful unwontedness, as when a strong man is seen to shed tears. Low-hanging boughs went up and down; high and erect boughs went to and fro; the blasts being so irregular, and divided into so many cross-currents, that neighbouring branches of the same tree swept the skies in independent motions, crossed each other or became entangled. Across the open spaces flew flocks of green and and yellowish leaves, which, after travelling a long distances from their parent trees, reaches the ground, and lay there with under-sides upward.

The autumnal section is closed as the final threats to the Dewys' future happiness are removed one after another and Hardy narrows his eye to the interplay of water and the landscape surrounding.

It was a foggy morning, and the trees shed in noisy water-drops the moisture they had collected from the thick air, an acorn occasionally falling from its cup to the ground, in company with the drippings. In the meads, sheets of spiders'-web, almost opaque with wet, hung in folds over the fences, and the falling leaves appeared in every variety of brown, green, and yellow hue.

The story ends with a spring wedding celebration that takes place, as we might suspect, under the titular greenwood tree. Hardy describes the march to the church in a curiously oblique fashion, as if it were happening to someone who was merely an observer and not a true participant, with this beautiful image while the actual wedding takes places off-stage, so to speak.

Now among dark perpendicular firs, like the shafted columns of a cathedral; now through a hazel copse, matted with primroses and wild hyacinths; now under broad beeches in bright young leaves they threaded their way into the high road over Yalbury Hill, which dipped at that point directly into the village of Geoffrey Day's parish.

By isolating particular elements (trees, wind, light and moisture) and manipulating our awareness of them across four seasons, Hardy makes the landscape in his tightly-framed story come alive. He uses these word-paintings to heighten the drama of certain scenes, perhaps to a tenor beyond what the sometimes flimsy story demands. It is a skill that would serve him well as the complexity and consequences of his socially driven plots grew with his skill as a writer of fiction.

Under the Greenwood Tree Part 1 - Going Dutch

A tree at the junction of the North & South Warren Hills
outside of Beaminster, Dorset. Photo by Graham Horn (2008)

Thomas Hardy's second published novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, bears the curious subtitle of "The Mellstock Quire: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School." It's easy to overlook this as an authorial eccentricity but, as it turns out, heeding it is of vital importance in the task of enjoying this novel for what it is, rather than what it half-heartedly pretends to be.

During Hardy's extended stay in London (beginning in 1860), he tried on a number of creative hats above and beyond his work as an architect's assistant, including that of an art critic, though he probably would have thought of it more as art journalism. He spent many hours in the museums of London studying the work of the great master painters, developing an eye to perceive what techniques could be used to achieve what ends as well as a language to articulate what he saw. Indeed, many of Hardy's novels rely a kind of painterly language to describe landscapes and scenery in particular and imbue those descriptions with a poetic register more often reserved for feelings or people in other novelists' work.

So when Thomas Hardy says that he's writing something as "A Rural Painting of the Dutch School," it behooves us to take that seriously as he, no doubt, did in proclaiming it. I am not an art expert so I'm drawing from ideas that can be gleaned from a Wikipedia article and a couple of YouTube tutorials. I have no doubt that Hardy may have found more levels on which to weld his rural idyll to the conceptual framework of Dutch painting but here are the ones that pertain most obviously to Under the Greenwood Tree.

The first is precision in detail. If Desperate Remedies offered a hint at Hardy's future gift for describing people, places and things, it is Greenwood Tree where this impulse sees it first full expression. We'll be looking in particular at how Hardy uses his descriptions to compose a kind of emotional soundtrack to lay beneath his rather simple plot that gives it more heft.

Second, painters in the Dutch school are remembered for their choice of subject matter, elevating the lower above the greater. They liked to paint landscapes with no people in them. They selected more mundane items to foreground in their compositions. The working class became the subject of their portraits in lieu of dignitaries.

I believe that this applies to Greenwood in two different ways. First, this is a story about simple Dorset folks of limited social importance in the grand scheme . The most elevated characters in the book (Geoffrey Day, Fred Shiner and Parson Maybold) are a land steward (like Manston in Desperate Remedies), a farmer and a clergyman respectively. The novel's primary energies are tasked with recreating the complex social web that exists among Dorset folk, which brings me to my third and final point.

The love story which drives Under the Greenwood Tree's plot serves only as a frame to dictate the span of Hardy's panoramic sketch of the rural life in which he'd grown up. This is a secondary inversion of the "lower above the higher" variety as the setting and supporting characters are the genuine subjects of this portrait. As a result, the main characters are only broadly sketched and offer little in the way of depth to examine except for the dimensions in which they relate to the explication of the social systems of which they are a part. I do think there is one macabre implication in the plot worthy of mention as it is so classically Hardy so we'll explore that a little as well.

Photo Credit - By Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13662099

Review: The King's England (Dorset) by Arthur Mee

The King's England: Dorset is a quaint book that offers an exhaustive survey of the towns and accompanying landmarks of Dorset as they stood in 1939. The author, Arthur Mee, wrote a series of these books, covering all the counties in England, and this one, published just over a decade after Hardy's death, is written through a filter of identifying landmarks that might appeal specifically to admirers of TH's work.

As one might expect, there is a LOT in here about the churches that serve as the anchor for most, if not all, of these towns but geography and history are given a fair amount of consideration as well. Mee focuses a lot of his description on delineating the layers of pre-Roman, Roman, Saxon, Norman and British influence on the architecture that really drives home how long these lands have been occupied.

There is a somber tone that underpins this book as one is regularly reminded of the trouble brewing in Europe as it is being written and published and it's hard not to read a "We better document this while it exists" subtext into it. This proved to be true, though not as apocalyptically as Mee might have feared, as later editions of the London volume had to be extensively re-written and broken into multiple volumes to accommodate the rebuilding after the bombing of the Second World War.

Judging solely from the Dorset edition, I enjoyed reading Mee's writing. He's not afraid to take an opinion or pass a judgment on an historical event or person and it feels like something written by a person and not a tourism board. His writing is, on occasion, lyrical and always thorough. The survey as a whole is undermined by the alphabetical listing of the towns, which makes the continuity of geographic proximity tougher to parse than it should be.

There are plenty of nods to Hardy and the many roles Dorset plays in his work to satisfy those who might consider this volume as a reference to their own interest in the West Country's favorite son.

Keeping Up with the Hardys

The cottage at Higher Bockhampton in Dorset where Hardy grew up.
Photo by Chris Downer

The greatest miracle of Thomas Hardy's life was that he became a celebrated writer at all. In Hardy's day, family status, class, vocation, geography and education carefully defined the parameters within which one was expected to thrive. This idea of a person's lot in life being decided by factors largely exterior to individual aspirations dominates his work.

In Hardy's case, he was able to leverage his relative social strengths to overcome his social liabilities. He was the eldest son of a stonemason. Hardy's father was the equivalent of a successful independent contractor; a man who could just afford to bankroll larger scale projects while providing unskilled laborers with the supervision needed to convert said labor into money. His family was not affluent in the way we might think of it today but their financial security was rarely in existential doubt.

Still, being from Dorset and essentially a manual laborer, Hardy's father was, from a rural perspective, a pillar among working class families in his area and, from an urban perspective, nobody from nowhere.

Hardy's mother Jemima played a vital role in his future success. Though she came from little means, she was well-read and instilled a love of reading and education in her young son. By the time he'd finished his formal schooling at 16, his own academic success put him in position to apprentice with an architect, rather than just taking up his father's profession. Though it wasn't a dramatic leap in social class, it was an upward step in status, which was about as much as anyone could have hoped for in that place and time.

It was this step upward that paved the way for him to marry Emma Gifford, the daughter of a solicitor of limited means. Though Emma's higher social standing served the Hardys well in his early years and transition to becoming a novelist, his own fortunes would rise far beyond hers and, in time, she was perceived as something of a social liability to him. This was but one of many strains on their marriage which I'll cover in much greater depth as the blog progresses.

Hardy's success makes it difficult to recognize the caricature of his own experience that he captured in Jude, that of an intellectually ambitious young man of low status who is thwarted in his life's dream of gaining the education that will allow him to escape the harsh conditions of the working poor. While Hardy managed to escape from the nexus of geography, status and education that might have otherwise held him to the position of a simple architect for the whole of his life, his books are a constant reminder that he and most of his peers were one bad decision, marriage or vice away from utter ruin.