Thomas Hardy and Puddletown
Introduction
As Hardy became a highly successful novelist and poet, masterfully weaving aspects of rural life into explorations of love, tragedy and Victorian social convention, he gave many Dorset villages a fictional name. Puddletown certainly did not miss out, becoming Hardy’s Weatherbury.
Hardy fans have long enjoyed visiting Puddletown as an idyllic starting point for exploring Hardy’s Wessex, with much of the countryside around Puddletown remaining as Hardy himself would have known it.
We are thrilled to feature Hardy expert Alban O’Brien as the guest editor for this page.
Our Guest Editor Alban O’Brien is a lifelong student of literature and a member of the Thomas Hardy Society. He is also a volunteer at Hardy’s Cottage.
Hardy's Association with Puddletown
Thomas Hardy was born at Higher Bockhampton on 2nd June 1840, a little under two and half miles from Puddletown. In an age when walking was the most common mode of transport for rural people this would have been a very short distance.
In fact Hardy says in one of this poems that for him the Roman Road which ran from near his doorstep to a short distance from Puddletown had not associations of brass helmeted legionaries but of walking that road with his mother as a child as she frequently visited her many Hand relatives in Puddletown. Of these the Antells and the Sparks were the closest, but Puddletown was also where her mother and two of her brothers would live and end their days.
On the Hardy side there was the family of his great uncle John, his grandfather’s brother, and especially the children of William Jenkyns Hardy. Charles Meake Hardy ended up living in a house in the village that Hardy had bought so that he had a place to live when he fell on hard times.
Hardy’s great grandfather, John, who lived in Puddletown had come over the hill of Puddletown Heath and in 1800 had been allowed to build the cottage in which Hardy was born on Kingston Mauward land. He built it not for himself but for his son, Hardy’s grandfather, who had just got married to Mary Head of Fawley in Berkshire – but married of course in our church of St.Mary the Virgin, the church where grandfather Thomas had played the bass-viol and led the West Gallery choir.
Ties to Hardy’s literature
It should come as no surprise then that when he was looking for an appropriate setting for the novel which would cement his career as a writer, Far From The Madding Crowd, that he chose the village of Puddletown as its location (see images below).
The village gets passing reference in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge and is the place where Fancy Day and Dick Dewey are married at the end of Under The Greenwood Tree, a wedding no doubt like that described in his poem The Country Wedding which even mentions Puddletown streets – Styalls Lane and Front Street – by name.
We can also find Puddletown in a whole host of other Hardy poems from the eerie tale of unfaithfulness in At the Mill (which you will find below), to the childhood memory of a drunk he saw as a ten year old recalled in the poem In The Weatherbury Stocks, to the effigy of the Martyn family knight recalled humorously in his poem about the Puddletown children who weren’t averse to giving it a good kick in the poem The Children and Sir Nameless.
And that is even before we get on to talking about At A Eweleaze Near Weatherbury and his relationship with his young cousin Tryphena Sparks when she was a teacher at the new Puddletown school built by John Brymer.
In fact it is very difficult to go anywhere in Puddletown without falling over Dorset’s most famous, some would say favourite, son.
Below are various illustrations from Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy’s first major success.
Below are the original Helen Paterson Allingham illustrations from the Cornhill Magazine serialisation of Far From the Madding Crowd (1874).
They show Sergeant Troy tending to the grave of Fanny Robin in Weatherbury Churchyard and Gabriel and Bathsheba in the rain, going through the churchyard to their wedding.
At the Mill
Hardy’s poem At the Mill is, according to Faye-Robinson, based on Puddletown’s mill, which is now a private house. There is a reference to nearby Yalbury Hill in the 5th stanza.
Watch this space for more.
Hardy tours
with Alban O'Brien
Alban O’Brien has long shared his extensive knowledge of Hardy literature with visitors to the village, often sharing appropriate readings on the way.
He is pleased to offer bespoke Hardy themed tours for locals or groups, with destinations including Thorncombe Woods – Rushy Pond – Rainbarrows – and Hardy’s cottage, and the Hardy gallery in the Dorset museum in Dorchester.
