New Names on old Maps

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21156, 1 October 1938, Page 12

New Names on old Maps

WRITINGS OF HARDY AND BLACKMORE

It is pleasant to wander through the ancient towns, along the leafy lanes, and across the heaths of Hardy’s Dorset, the country which he has renamed Wessex (says an English correspondent of the “Christian Science Monitor”). Hardy was born in Wessex, in a thatched cottage at Higher Bockhampton (where he wrote “Under the Greenwood Tree” and “Far from the Madding Crowd”), just on the point where “Egdon Heath” begins, and a granite monument has been erected to his memory. He was brought up in Wessex. He tramped its many miles as an ecclesiastical architect intent on the restoration or repair of many a beautiful old church that was afterward to appear in his novels. He endowed it with names that are more to his readers than those on the current map. Dorchester is the “Casterbridge” of the Hardy novels, the place above all others where his folk are found, in many famous stories. It has changed in the 2,000 years since the Romans settled there, though the lie of its streets remains, and the fair, which was a day to come, a day to stay, and a day to go home, has shrunk to strictly commercial proportions. Still Walk Streets But Michael Henchard, Gabriel Oak, and Bathsheba Everdene still walk its streets. To lovers of Hardy, the chief hotel is that in which Michael Henchard, the “Mayor of Castlebridge," gave his great public dinner to “the gentle people and such-like leading folk, wi’ the Mayor (himself) in the chair.” So on the Maumbury Ring, where the Romans once held sport; but what is that compared to the fact that in Maumbury Ring the meeting between Henchard and his wife took place, after 20 years of separation? x One may easily find the avenue leadin to the “Chestnut Walk,” where Farfrae, armed with the borrowed rickclothes, gave his feast in opposition to that of Mayor Henchard in the neighbouring Poundbury. One may stand on the bridge over the Frome where Maybold lingered after hearing of the approaching marriage of Dick Dewey to Fancy Day. One may see in a narrow street the blind arch with the battered keystone mask which the novelist placed on Lucetta’s house; and in the market place surely that is Gabriel Oak, standing on hire after he had sunk “from his modest elevation as a pastoral king into the very slim pits of Siddlm.”

Traces of Tess “Tess of the D'Urbervilles” must be sought elsewhere. “Talbothays,” where she worked as a dairymaid under “Dairyman Dick,” cannot be Identified, for it was a composite invention of Hardy’s though Norris Hill Farm comes very near it; and any dairy in the Blackmore Vale must serve. Old Durbeyfield is still walking there. At Stinstead ("Mellstock") Tess’s marriage took place. At the Turberville Manor, near Woolbridge ("Wellbridge”), she spent her brief honeymoon with Angel Clare. He placed her in the abbot’s coffin at Bindon Abbey; and at mysterious Stonehenge, with her capture at dawn by the officers of the law, her pathetic story draws swiftly towards its close.

Wimborne also comes into Hardy’s novels, and for Americans the quaint old town has a further interest in the “chained library” in the Minster containing the copy of Raleigh’s “History of the World,” with a hole burned in it, tradition says, by Matthew Prior, the poet, who was born in the town. Weymouth is a delightful place for Hardy admirers, too, especially if they have read “The Trumpet Major" and “The Dynasts." The market place at Sherborne (“Sherton Abbas”) is pleasant to readers of “The Woodlanders.” Salisbury and Shaftesbury (“Melchester” and “Shaston”) are well worth a call, if for no other object than to see the place associated with “Jude the Obscure.”

The question is often asked, were the Doones real people? and the assertion often is made that Blackmore invented them, and that is was only after “Lorna Doone” was published that they were talked about in Somerset and Devon. Be this as it may, they were very probably cattle-lifters and freebooters, known on the countryside before “Lorna was born and Blackmore admitted later, when questioned about their identity, that a certain article in a magazine had first put him on the track of these fascinating scoundrels. Lorna Doone Country Blackmore knew Exmoor as well as Hardy knew Wessex. Exmoor was an ideal setting for his story, and those who study it on the spot will see how

he has not only captured its physical features but also the atmosphere.

An excellent starting place for seeing the Lorna Doone country is Porlock, where at the Spit and Gridiron Jan Ridd bought the powder from Mr Pook; and so on to Oare Church, where Lorna and Jan Ridd stood before the alter to be married, and blackhearted Carver Doone at the window fired the shot that almost killed her.

Half a mile away from the church you are at Malsmead, which some point to as the entrance to the real Doone Valley, where the Badgery Water joins the Lyn. It is hard by “Plover's Barrows,” the home of the Ridds, and after a “good step,” as they say, you come to the “long pale slide of water,” somewhat smaller than in Blackmore’s imagination, up which little Jan Ridd made toilsome ascent, saying the Lord’s Prayer as he went, to find himself for the first time in the presence of Lorna. The district of the “Wizard s Slough,” connected with the end of Carver Doone, and “Warren’s Farm,” where Simon Carfax slew several of the Doone family, is to be seen.

Allan Nevins, professor of history in Columbia University and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize in biography, is at work on an impartial biography of John D. Rockfeller, derived from all possible sources, hostile, neutral, and friendly. The book will be published next year.

Thornton Butterworth have published what is said to be a remarkable book. It is called “Germany Speaks,” and has a preface by Herr von Ribbentrop, the Reich Foreign Minister. In this volume 2 leaders of the Nazi Party and of the State furnish an authoritative account of their individual activities and enunciate the policy and aims of the New. Germany. One after another the various departments of Germany’s national life are reviewed—and whether readers are responsive or critical will not detract from the interest and importance of the book. The publisher says that a marked feature of it is the friendly attitude displayed towards England.

A new name, it appears, has been added to the short list—Neil Gunn, James Bridie, Eric Linklater, Catherine Carswell, and a few more—of writers whose work has created the strength and credit of Scotland's contemporary literature. This is Fred Urquhart, whose first novel, “Time Will Knit,” has been received with uncommon praises by very good critics. He writes, says Janet Adam Smith, of working-cass life on the outskirts of Edinburgh, but he has not been billed as a “proletarian writer." He is not concerned to state a political case, with examples, but to give a picture of a community from which the reader can draw his own political Inferences. The title is taken from a poem by Harold Monro;—

There'll be no great decision. Time will knit And multiply the stitches while we look.

The Influence which Thomas Hardy has exercised upon the poets of the post-War era is brought out in a book entitled “ 'The Dynasts’ and the Postwar Age in Poetry,” by Professor A. C. Chakravarty. The author, who was for a time secretary to Rabindranath Tagore, went up to Balliol in 1934, obtained the degree of Doctor of Philosophy for a thesis on post-War English poetry, and was later awarded a research fellowship from Brasenose. In his book he discusses the philosophical and political ideas which moved Hardy and which, through Hardy, have had their influence on the modern poets.