THE THOMAS HARDY
ASSOCIATION
LINKS
DIRECTOR: ROBERT SCHWEIK
© 2000
A GUIDE TO THE FICTIONAL LOCATIONS IN WESSEX
DESCRIPTION:
Address: http://humanities.byu.edu/Wessex [NOW CLOSED]
Contact: John S. Bennion (john_bennion@byu.edu)
Date:
10/14/99
Part of a site maintained by Bringham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA. The master, John Serge Bennion, author of a collection of Mormon tales titled Breeding Leah and Other Stories, is on the English Department faculty. He visited Dorset in the spring of 2000. The site was constructed with the assistance of students in Bennion's Hardy and British novel classes and is arranged in six sections:
- "Introduction" provides a brief explanation of the origin and purpose of the site.
- "Map Page" provides a map of Hardy's Wessex. It also contains the hyperlinked titles Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree, and The Woodlanders, as well as, not hyperlinked, The Hand of Ethelberta, A Laodicean, and The Trumpet Major. Hyperlinked titles lead to pages containing maps intended to show relevant "fictional scenes in Wessex and possible correlations with real locations in England." Clicking on asterisked map names, or on other location names beneath the map, leads to pages headed by a Hardy place name or description (e.g, "Stickleford") and some possible real correlation (e.g., Tincleton), beneath which are quotations from Hardy's texts and, sometimes, photographs taken by Professor Bennion.
- "List of Novels" gives the names and dates of Hardy's novels. Clicking on some of the novel titles can bring up a related map page.
- "Chronology"
is,except for the title, presently an empty page.
- "Index of Sites" is limited to structures or locations mentioned in Desperate Remedies, Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Two on a Tower, Under the Greenwood Tree, and The Woodlanders. It consists of an alphabetical list of actual place names in boldface with some or all of the following keyed information: Hardy's fictional name or descriptionin green type; detailed description of the location, including references to photos and maps in one or more of three sources in red type; description of the actual location of the site [within brackets]; "unique correlations between actual location and text" in italics; and "documentation"--i.e., name of relevant novel and page references to one or more of three sources (within parentheses). A short version of the key may be displayed with every page viewed. The index presently extends to the letter F.
- "Bibliography & Credits" lists three sources--Timothy O'Sullivan's Thomas Hardy: An Illustrated Biography (London: Macmillan, 1975); F.B. Pinion's A Thomas Hardy Dictionary (London: Macmillan, 1989); and F.P. Pitfield's Hardy's Wessex Locations (Oxford: Alden Press, 1992)--as well as the names of Professor Bennion and other persons associated with Bringham Young University who are credited for academic content, "technical content," and graphics.
COMMENT:
This site combines maps, pictures, and texts, as well as references limited to three secondary sources, to provide a guide to fictional locations in Hardy's Wessex limited to the texts of selected novels. In some cases these combinations are successful. For example, pictures of woodland scenes are related to Hardy's descriptions in the Woodlanders and do capture something of what is depicted by the accompanying quotations from the novel; similarly, the entry in the "Index of Sites" for "Cerne Abbas" provides an accurate descriptive note taken from F.B. Pinion's A Thomas Hardy Dictionary and helpfully combines that with a reference to a related picture that may be found in Timothy O'Sullivan's Thomas Hardy: An Illustrated Biography. Unfortunately, however, this site contains much that is factually erroneous, misleading, or confusing; moreover, it makes a practice of quoting material not marked as quoted.
The maps are among its most potentially confusing features. They derive from various unidentified sources and tend to be crudely and imprecisely prepared, so that geographical locations are sometimes wrongly or ambiguously located. The map for Under the Greenwood Tree provides but one example of the confusions that can result. In this case, the map originally had a key explaining symbols used for car park, church, footpath, and bridleway. The key was removed, but the different footpath and bridleway symbols remain in the map, their distinction now unexplained; on the other hand, a church symbol marking Stinsford was removed from the map, so that its location is now uncertain; but the car park location remains marked, though unidentified for what it is. And, to compound this confusion, the keeper's cottage and Yalbury Wood are labeled as if they were geographically remote from one another, when, in fact, the fictional cottage was "in the depths of Yalbury Wood," just as Hardy's model was (and is) in Yellowham Wood. Unfortunately, examples of this kind of erroneous, misleading, or confusing cartography abound in the other maps as well.
Similar confusions may be found in the way pictures and quotations from Hardy's novels are associated with one another and linked to the maps. Page numbers are given for the quotations, but the numbers are useless because no text is specified with which they can be associated. Some pictures are mistakenly or misleadingly titled; others are confusingly related to, or even at odds with, the accompanying text. For example, clicking on the words "Dewey's Cottage / Hardy's Cottage" on the Under the Greenwood Tree map brings up a picture quite unrecognizable as the familiar Hardy cottage and hence unrelatable to the accompanying quotation about "a long low cottage with a hipped roof of thatch, having dormer windows breaking up into the eaves, a chimney standing in the middle of the ridge." Similarly, clicking on "Yalbury Wood" on the map brings up a page with the headings "Yalbury Wood / Yellowham Wood," and it would be natural to assume that the two pictures that appear on this page would be of Yellowham Wood, particularly since both are accompanied by text with a heading including the words "Yalbury Wood." But, in fact, the pictures are predominantly of cows grazing in a field, with what appears to be Kingston Maurward barely visible in the distance. In such cases--and there are many others--the result is likely to be confusing rather than helpful because of the inaccuracy of the map, or the lack of clarity in the relationships between it and the accompanying pictures and texts, or of errors or confusions in the titling of the pictures, or of unclear connections between the pictures and the accompanying texts. Professor Bennion has stated that his pictures "should be thought of as examples of typical Dorsetshire landscape, culture and architecture, not as places where fictional characters actually [sic] lived"; but some of the pictures are not of Dorset scenes at all, and, in any case, the particular titles and texts he has associated with the pictures--if they are not intended to be ignored altogether--imply that the pictures are not to be taken as simply "typical."
Somewhat more reliable is the "Index of Sites," because entries here are often incorporated in large part verbatim--but without quotation marks--from one or another of the three sources to which Professor Bennion has limited himself. But even in this all but entirely derivative section there are inaccuracies and confusions, of which only one example must suffice. The Index heading, "Eggardon Hill," is followed by the word "Egdon" in green, signifying, according to Bennion's key, that it is "Hardy's fictional name." But "Egdon" is not Hardy's fictional name for Eggardon Hill, and Bennion's entry for "Eggardon Hill" compounds the confusion by providing extended quotation--with no quotation marks--from F.B. Pinion's entry for "Egdon" in his A Thomas Hardy Dictionary.
SUMMARY:
Because its major components have so many erroneous, confusing and misleading elements, this guide cannot be confidently used as a reliable source of information about Hardy's Wessex.
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