Hardy's Dorchester

Hardy's Dorchester. . Poet and Novelist, Born at Higher Bockhampton 1840, Died at Max Gate, Dorchester 1928., Hardy's Statue , was unveiled at Top o' Town by his friend, James Barrie, on 2nd September 1931. It was the work of Eric Kennington. The site would have appealed to Hardy because it stands upon old Roman walls and is close to the very centre of the Dorchester he knew, loved, and immortalised in his novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)., Casterbridge , Looking cast down the High Street can be seen many buildings which were there in Hardy's time including St Peter's Church, mentioned in several of his works, the Dorset County Museum which he knew well, the Corn Exchange, and the King's Arms Hotel, scene of the banquet in The Mayor., To the west is the Bridport Road and the barracks which for most of Hardy's life were the home of the soldiers who frequently come into his novels and poems. Hardy described Casterbridge in the 1840s as being as, "compact as a box of dominoes... Casterbridge was the complement of the rural life around, not its urban opposite. Bees and butterflies in the cornfields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew straight down High Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing strange latitudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people's doorways into their passages, with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors."