Dorset writers

The name that comes first to mind when Dorset and literature are considered together must always be Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Not only was he the greatest literary figure to have lived and worked in Dorset, but the county was also the backdrop to his novels and poems, and he even re-christened Dorset as “South Wessex”, with its towns and villages identifiable as real places under different names. Many people who have never visited Dorset, but who have read Hardy’s works, have gained an intimate knowledge of the place, as it was in Hardy’s time and before, without realising it.

The visitor to Dorset can also go to places associated with Thomas Hardy himself. For example, his birthplace and childhood home at Higher Bockhampton, four miles east of Dorchester, may be visited, as may his later Dorchester home, Max Gate. Both are preserved by the National Trust. At the Dorchester Museum you can see a reconstruction of Hardy’s study and items that once belonged to him. Hardy’s heart was buried in Stinsford churchyard, which is not far from Higher Bockhampton.

However, it would be a mistake to think that Thomas Hardy was the only literary figure to have come from Dorset. A much less well-known Dorset poet was William Barnes (1800-86) (pictured above), who wrote mainly in the Dorset dialect. He was the rector of Whitcombe and Winterbourne Came, two villages near Dorchester. He was also at one time a schoolmaster in Dorchester. He was a linguist and philologist of note, who tried to encourage the Anglo-Saxon elements of English as against the many Latinisms and words of Greek origin that he regarded as unwelcome intrusions, preferring, for example, to refer to photographs as “sun-prints”.

An earlier writer with Dorset connections was Henry Fielding (1707-54), who lived at East Stour, near Shaftesbury, as a child and again when he first married. He is renowned as one of the founders of the English novel, and some of his characters in “Tom Jones” and “Joseph Andrews” were modelled on people he knew when living in Dorset.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is always associated with the Lake District, where he was born and where he lived for the latter part of his life, but he also spent two very productive years as a resident of Dorset, living at Racedown Lodge, in the far west of the county, from 1795 to 1797. It could be said that he discovered himself as a poet during his Dorset years, gaining the self-confidence to write, and also developing the working relationship with Coleridge that led to their joint work “Lyrical Ballads”.

T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935), otherwise known as “Lawrence of Arabia”, lived for a time at a cottage called Cloud’s Hill in the heart of Hardy’s “Egdon Heath”. He wrote much of his mammoth work “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” here, this being the account of his activities during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in World War I, and which reads as an adventure story of great literary merit. The writing of the book was itself a great adventure, as much of it had to be rewritten from memory after the manuscript was lost at a railway station. Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident near Cloud’s Hill, which is now owned by the National Trust. He is buried in the churchyard at nearby Moreton.

Although now largely forgotten, the three Powys brothers (John Cowper (1872-1963), Llewelyn (1884-1939) and Theodore Francis, known as T. F. (1875-1953)) were well-respected in their day for their novels, stories, essays and journalism. They all had Dorset connections and were greatly influenced by the landscape and its people. Indeed, the work of T. F. was so closely associated with Dorset life that he can be seen almost as a latter-day Thomas Hardy. John Cowper and Llewelyn were educated at Sherborne School and Llewelyn and T. F. lived at Chaldon Herring near the coast, with T. F. moving to Mappowder in north Dorset in later life.  

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) also counts as a Dorset resident, if one allows for the fact that Bournemouth only became part of Dorset in 1974, long after Stevenson’s death. Stevenson lived in Westbourne (at a house only yards from the old county boundary) from 1884 to 1887. While here, he wrote “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and “Kidnapped”. The house was destroyed by enemy bombing during World War Two, but the outline of the house is marked on the ground and can be visited.

A more recent Dorset writer was John Fowles (1926-2005) who lived from 1968 at Lyme Regis, where his famous novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” was set. Fowles was greatly influenced by Thomas Hardy, seeing his heroine as a latter-day Tess of the d’Urbevilles. The film of the book, shot in 1981 and starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, reminds viewers of Jane Austen and “Persuasion”, as both feature scenes on Lyme’s famous harbour wall, The Cobb.

The literary heritage of Dorset is therefore extensive, with most of its writers being greatly influenced by the beauties of its landscape and the characteristics of its people. Perhaps as a footnote one should mention the little-known writer of detective fiction Vivian Collin Brooks (1922-2003), who was so taken with the name of a Dorset village near Weymouth that she used “Osmington Mills” as her pen-name. A glance at the map will show plenty of Dorset villages which could inspire others to do the same!

© John Welford