DORCHESTER

Dorchester, the “Casterbridge” of the novels, stands upon or, more correctly, above, the River Frome, and from that circumstance derived its ancient Roman name of Durnovaria, whose Latinity Mr. Hardy has exploited in the name of “Durnover” he confers upon Fordington. The Romans themselves did by no means invent their name for the station they founded here, but just adapted the title given by the native tribe of Durotriges to their settlement. Those natives, who were of Welsh stock, styled their habitation by the sufficiently Welsh name of Dwrinwyr, which, like all Cymric place-names, was descriptive and alluded to its watery situation.

The approach to Dorchester has suffered in late years, in the pictorial point of view, from the decay and destruction of many of those magnificent old elms that once formed a noble introduction along this, the “London Road”; but it is not wholly to be bankrupted of beauty, for, although Dorchester may continue to grow, it is not in this direction that its suburbs will be thrown out. The flat water-meadows of the Frome forbid building operations here, and in effect say, at the bridge immediately below where Fordington on its ridge stands on the thitherward bank of the stream—“thus far and no farther!” From this approach, looking to where Fordington’s houses die away on the left hand, and to where the chalky downs begin to rise, you may obtain a distant view of the novelist’s residence, a house he himself designed, standing beside the Wareham Road near where an old turnpike-gate stood, and called from it “Max Gate.” Looking, however, straight ahead, the road into Dorchester is seen becoming a street and going with inflexible Roman directness through the town, with the ancient church tower of Fordington slightly to the left, and the equally ancient church of St. Peter’s immediately in front, in the centre of the town, where the two main streets cross. Attendant modern churches and chapels, and the Town Hall, with spires, act as satellites. To the right hand, rising bulky from the huddled mass of houses, is a grey building which but a little experience of touring in England identifies without need of inquiry as the gaol.

Dorchester, figuring as the “Casterbridge” of that mayor whose surprising history is set forth in that powerful story, bulks large in the whole series of Wessex novels—as how could it fail of doing, seeing that the novelist himself was born at Upper Bockhampton, only three miles away? In masterly fashion he has described its salient points, as they were before modernity had come to obliterate them, or at least to take off the sharp edge of their singularity. He has expended much thought upon Roman Dorchester, and speculated upon what manner of place it was fifteen hundred years ago. “Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a space of fifteen hundred years.” Nay, even within the precincts of his own garden, on the edge of the rotund upland that looks so wanly down upon the railway, relics of the legionaries have been discovered. Three of those stout warriors were there found. “Each body was fitted with, one may almost say, perfect accuracy into the oval hole, the crown of the head touching the maiden chalk at one end and the toes at the other, the tight-fitting situation being strongly suggestive of the chicken in the egg-shell.”

More attuned to modern times is that description of Dorchester as it appeared when Susan, Henchard’s wife, with Elizabeth-Jane, entered it from the London Road that evening. Wonderfully observed and true is that passage where the light of the street lamps, glimmering through those engirdling trees that were then, even more than now, the great feature of the town, is made a snug and comforting contrast with the outside country, seeming “strangely solitary and vacant in aspect, considering its nearness to life.” Then the agricultural and pastoral pursuits of the people, as reflected in the character of the goods displayed in shop windows, is neatly shown, in a list of those objects: the hay-rakes, the seed-lips, butter-firkins, hoes and spades and mattocks; the horse-embrocations, scythes, reaping-hooks, and hedger’s and ditcher’s gloves, articles all of everyday requirement.

The “grizzled church” to which they came was St. Peter’s, whose tower showed “how completely the mortar from the joints of the stonework had been nibbled out by time and weather, which had planted in the crevices thus made little tufts of stone-crop and grass, almost as far up as the very battlements.” Yes, and so one vividly remembers it; but restoration has recently made away with all these evidences of age, and cleaned the stonework and renewed and pointed it, greatly to the aid of the tower’s structural stability, ’tis true, but the very death of picturesque effect. There is a pleasing thing here, at the foot of this tower, where High East Street and High West Street join. It is the bronze life-sized statue, in his habit as he lived, of “Pa’son Barnes,” otherwise the Reverend William Barnes, the Dorset poet, described by Thomas Hardy as he is represented here—“an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak, knee-breeches and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand.” This quaint figure, whose life and thoughts and writings were racy of the soil whence he sprang—he was born in the Vale of Blackmore—was for many years a quite inadequately rewarded schoolmaster, and only late in life was given, first the living of Whitcomb, and then that of Winterborne Came, near Dorchester. His poems in the Dorsetshire vernacular, long known and admired, were not pecuniarily successful. “What a mockery is life!” said he. “They praise me, and take away my bread! They may be putting up a statue to me some day, when I am dead, while all I want now is leave to live. I asked for bread, and they gave me a stone!”

Prophetic indeed! for here is the statue, with beneath it the inscription:

WILLIAM BARNES
1801–1886

and the quotation from one of his own folk-poems:

Zoo now I hope his kindly fËace
Is gone to vind a better plËace,
But still wi’ vo’k a’ left behind
He’ll always be a kept in mind.

The mural monument of a sixteenth-century Thomas Hardy, within the church, attracts attention. The inscription states him to have been “esquire” and of Melcombe Regis, and goes on to describe his benefactions to the town and the gratitude of the “Baylives and Burgisses” therefor. To “commend to posterity an example soe worthy of imitation,” they erected this tablet. He is said to be the common ancestor of Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, the friend and comrade of Nelson, and of Thomas Hardy, the novelist.

Still from this tower of St. Peter’s sounds the curfew chime, with the stroke of eight o’clock every evening, as described in the story; its “peremptory clang” the signal for shop-shutting throughout the town. “Other clocks struck eight from time to time—one gloomily from the gaol, another from the gable of an alms-house, with a preparative creak of machinery more audible than the note of the bell.”In High East Street stands, just as described, the principal inn—I suppose in these times one should, for fear of disrespect say “hotel”—of Dorchester, the “King’s Arms,” white-faced, with the selfsame “spacious bow-window projected into the street over the main portico,” the whole not too imposing for comfort, and not too homely for dignity. It was a coaching house in days gone by. From a step above the pavement on the opposite side of the street Susan and Elizabeth-Jane, amid the crowd, witnessed the dinner given to the mayor, and through the archway Boldwood carried Bathsheba, fainting at the news of her husband’s death.

Equally white-faced, but a good deal more picturesque, is the “White Hart,” down at the end, or the beginning if you will, of the sloping street, as you enter the town. By it runs the Frome, and in its courtyard on market-days may be seen such a concourse of carriers’ carts as rarely witnessed nowadays. Dorchester is a busy carrying centre, by no means spoiled in that respect by railways, which yet fail to reach many of its surrounding villages.

The brick bridge that here spans the Frome, and the stone bridge some distance farther away, spanning a branch of the same stream out away in the meads, have their parts in the Mayor of Casterbridge. “These bridges had speaking countenances. Every projection in each was worn down to obtuseness, partly by weather, more by friction from generations of loungers, whose toes and heels had from year to year made restless movements against these parapets, as they had stood there, meditating on the aspect of affairs. In the case of the more pliable bricks and stones, even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the same mixed mechanism. The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at each joint; since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench the coping off and throw it down into the river, in reckless defiance of the magistrates. For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of the town—those who had failed in business, in love, in sobriety, in crime. Why the unhappy hereabout usually chose the bridges for their meditations in preference to a railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so clear.” He goes on to tell how there was a marked difference in quality between the frequenters of the near bridge of brick and the far one of stone. The more thoroughgoing failures and those with the most threadbare characters, or with no characters at all, save bad ones, preferred the near bridge: to reach it entailed less trouble, and it was not for such as them to mind the glare of publicity.

“The misÉrables who would pause on the remoter bridge were of a politer stamp. They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is called ‘out of a situation’ from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient of the professional class—shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to get rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more weary time between dinner and dark.” These unfortunates gazed steadily into the river, never turning to notice passers-by, and indeed shrinking from observation. And so day by day they looked and looked in the stream, until at last their bodies were sometimes found in it.

Ten Hatches, DorchesterWhen Henchard’s ruin was complete, he too began to frequent the stone bridge, and would have ended in the same way, not at the bridge itself, but over in the meadows where the many branches of the Frome are regulated and controlled by a number of sluices known as Ten Hatches. “To the east of Casterbridge lay moors and meadows, through which much water flowed. The wanderer in this direction, who should stand still for a few moments on a quiet night, might hear singular symphonies from these waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones, from near and far parts of the moor. At a hole in a rotten weir they executed a recitative; where a tributary brook fell over a stone breastwork they trilled cheerily; under an arch they performed a metallic cymballing; and at Durnover Weir they hissed. The spot at which their instrumentation rose loudest was a place called Ten Hatches, whence during high springs there proceeded a very fugue of sounds.”

The ruined mayor, to whom, and not the cold, successful Donald Farfrae, the reader’s sympathies go out, would have ended all his troubles here with a plunge in the waters, had it not been for the ghastly floating Skimmington effigy of himself he saw floating down the current as he was about to drop in.

“Gray’s Bridge,” as the stone structure on the London Road is known, is that toward which Bob Loveday, in the Trumpet Major, gazed anxiously, awaiting the coach bearing his Matilda, and across it, of course, on their way to Longpiddle, went those “Crusted Characters,” telling stories in the carrier’s cart jogging along with them so comfortably from the “White Hart.”

The fateful, almost sentient, character many natural objects are made to assume in the march of Mr. Hardy’s tragic stories is expressly shown in his description of the Roman amphitheatre of Maumbury, at the farther or western extremity of Dorchester, beside the road to Weymouth. He styles it “the Ring, on the Budmouth Road,” and explains how “it was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude.” It is not, as might be gathered from this passage, a building, like the Coliseum, but a vast amphitheatre formed by earthworks. Used by the Romans as the scene of their gladiatorial displays, it has doubtless witnessed many an act of savage cruelty, but is now a solitude. A sinister place it has been always, for, when executions were public affairs, the gallows stood within the old arena; and until well into the eighteenth century the populace came to it in thousands to witness the execution of felons where, before the dawn of the Christian era, fighting men had struggled to the death: where perhaps, in early Christian times, in the days of the Diocletian persecution, Christians had been sacrificed. It was here, in 1705, that Mary Channing was executed, under the most fearful circumstances of barbarity belonging to the penalties prescribed for petit treason. The crimes known by that name included several forms of rebellion against authority, among them the murder of a husband by a wife. A husband being then, much more than now, in the eyes of the law in a position of authority over his wife, to murder him was not merely murder—it was petit treason as well, and therefore deserving of exceptional punishment. Mary Brookes, married by the wish of her parents, against her own inclination, to one Richard Channing of Dorchester, a grocer, almost ruined him by her extravagance, and then poisoned him by giving him white mercury, first in rice-milk, and twice afterwards in a glass of wine. At the Summer Assizes, 1704, she was found guilty and condemned to death. On March 21st, 1705, accordingly, she was strangled here, in this arena, and then burned, the horrible spectacle being witnessed by ten thousand persons. She was but nineteen years of age. This Golgotha was disestablished in 1767, when the gallows was removed to the decent solitudes of Bradford Down, a mile and a half along the Exeter Road, on the way to Bridport. It was to this spot that a mayor of Dorchester desired to escort a distinguished traveller leaving the town, after being presented with the customary address. “May I be allowed to accompany your Highness as far as the gallows?” he asked, greatly to the dismay of that departing Serenity, to whom the allusion seemed more ill-omened than really it was. It is a tale told of many places and many mayors, and he would be a clever commentator who should distinguish the real original.

The lone amphitheatre of Maumbury has thus, it will be seen, real tragical associations fitting it for the novelist’s more sombre humours. He tells how intrigues were there carried forward, how furtive and sinister meetings happened within the rim of these ancient earthworks, and how, although the patching up of long-standing feuds might be attempted on this spot, seldom had it been the place of meeting of happy lovers. In this ring, then, the reconciliation of Susan and Henchard took place, after eighteen years, and was but the prelude to miseries and disasters.