Hardy and the country house

With the help of specially commissioned drawings by Matthew Rice, Jeremy Musson considers the abiding presence of the stone-built manor house in the stories of Thomas Hardy

- Susan Hill

THOMAS HARDY knew something about stone. We think of him as one of the giants of English literature, a poet and novelist who was lauded in his lifetime and memorialised alongside Charles Dickens in Westminster Abbey after his death in 1928. His vivid depictions of the lives of farmers and farmworkers such as Tess; of working men, including Jude, the studious stonemason; and his portrayal of provincial West Country town life and its characters, such as the Mayor of Casterbridge, is profound and perceptive. Throughout Hardy’s writing, there is also a notable sense of his interest in buildings, a reflection of his first intended career as an architect.

Above all, Hardy’s imagination was caught by the ancient stone-built manor houses of the Dorset of his youth, houses no longer occupied by old gentry families, but by tenant farmers, friends and neighbours of his parents. They provided models for the fictional Wessex that Hardy created, becoming his scenery, and setting the tone for many of his narratives. Fictional versions include the home of the independently minded Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy’s first bestseller, in 1874, the sales of which allowed him to give up a career in architecture for writing. Another fine old house appears as the home of the miser Benjamin Derriman in The Trumpet-Major (1880) and, most memorably, there is Wellbridge Farm (Fig 4), setting for the ill-fated wedding night in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891).

Two fictionalised versions of existing manor houses—one based on Stafford House in Dorchester; the other on nearby Athelhampton—appear in his early short story The Waiting Supper. The linked collection of stories in