THE THOMAS HARDY
ASSOCIATION
LINKS
| A 101 |
DIRECTOR: ROBERT SCHWEIK
© 1998-1999
MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE PAGE
DESCRIPTION:
Address: http://room101.thoughtcrime.org/~whales/mayor/index.html [NOW CLOSED]
Contact: Matthew Parker (whales@room101.thoughtcrime.org)
Date: 06/08/99
Now part of a personal site of Matthew Parker that is in large part devoted to free speech, this "Mayor of Casterbridge Page" was originally created by him and two classmates as a Pace Academy school project. It is prefaced by an introductory paragraph on Hardy and Dorchester, and divided into five major parts:
COMMENT:
The two maps provided are reproduced with great clarity of detail. But the prefatory paragraph is full of misleading "facts." Thus, we are told that "real life Casterbridge is actually a town in Outer Wessex called Dorchester"; that Hardy "was fascinated with the romanesque architecture that was so abundant in the town" and that most of the sites Hardy used in The Mayor "have become small museums." Apart from many similar naive errors, there are other kinds of problems. What is identified as an "Interactive Map of Outer Wessex," for example, is not of Outer Wessex but is Hardy's map of the whole of Wessex--and it is not interactive; again, the "Complete biography of Thomas Hardy" is no more than a twenty-three paragraph biographical sketch derived from the Dorset Index Page (see Links A 90), as is a set of identifications of Hardy's fictional sites with real counterparts. On the "Casterbridge (Dorchester)" map page, a link is provided to download a text of The Mayor of Casterbridge, but no information is given about what the source of the text is or upon what print edition it is based. See our GENERAL CAUTION about such texts. Worse yet, the map itself, and the key to numbered sites on it, are both taken from Dennys Kay-Robinson's Hardy's Wessex Reappraised (New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1972), pp. 16-17, without identification or permission.
SUMMARY:
The quality of the two maps reproduced from other sources is very good, but one is incorrectly labeled and the other under copyright and reproduced without permission. As for the text that was originated at this site, it is an all but worthless mixture of the naive and the erroneous.