Meeting Mr Hardy

Fanny Charles’ uncle was an antiquarian and Hardy scholar, which gave her a unique insight into the life of Dorset’s most famous writer

Thomas Hardy is almost synonymous with Dorset – you can walk the Hardy Way (thehardyway.co.uk), drink in pubs mentioned in his books such as The Acorn Inn at Evershot (The Sow & Acorn in Tess of the d’Urbervilles), visit his childhood home in Higher Bockhampton and the house he built at Dorchester and imagine his heroines in their cottages, at church or on the wild heaths and windswept coast of his beloved Wessex.

These days Hardy is a revered figure, loved by millions who know him through the film and television adaptations of his Wessex novels, often filmed in the locations in which he set the stories – although in his Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Roman Polanski notoriously filmed “Dorset” in a Normandy that was instantly recognisable to local audiences, and his Stonehenge looked like large cardboard boulders!

It was different 60 years ago, when Hardy was seen by many as a long-winded misery writer and was often badly taught to generations of O and A level students, forced to excavate metaphor and meaning from his lengthy books.

One pupil at that time, who went on to become a successful journalist and writer himself, recalls: “I did it under sufferance at school and I haven’t read it or watched it since. It left me with a lifelong antipathy. The way it was taught, and the subject-matter were worthy and wearing for a 12-year-old.“

One man who did much to return Thomas Hardy to wide public interest and popularity was the Hardy scholar and antiquarian James Stevens Cox, who was my uncle. For many years he lived in West Dorset; first at Beaminster, in the house that is now Brassica restaurant, and later at Morcombelake.