The House that Hardy Built

The Telegraph takes note of Thomas Hardy's house, Max Gate, that's now open to the public.

From the article...

Will the public flock there? I wonder. Hardy is a huge draw, but Max Gate is an oddly uninviting house – a modest, turreted red-brick villa standing forlorn in a large untended garden on the outskirts of Dorchester. Little has survived of the forest of Austrian pines which Hardy planted against the winds of the nearby heath and the prying eyes of passers by. During the poet’s lifetime these progressively shaded the house – ‘‘I set every tree in my June time. And now they obscure the sky’’ – but many were cut down by the second Mrs Hardy in the interval between his death and hers nine years later.

Some of the fruit trees have survived and the garden, though unkempt, remains the size and shape it was in Hardy’s day, with a collection of dead-pet tombstones nestling among lords and ladies in the south-west corner and the slab of “Druid Stone” – standing still where it was when Hardy imagined the shadow of his dead wife on its surface “and to keep down grief/ I would not turn my head to discover/ That there was nothing in my belief”.

The house itself is empty of Hardy’s effects and was carpeted and papered over by the previous tenants. Two upstairs studies – used consecutively – will be on show for the first time, but there is nothing in them.