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Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy in Weymouth

Weymouth is a site of worldly pleasure in Thomas Hardy’s writing and is more or less the antithesis to Egdon Heath and other desolate areas. The town’s importance stemmed from the patronage of King George III, who spent his summers here, in his later years. In the afterglow of this regal splendour, Weymouth became the choice holiday resort in the south.

Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native describes the excitement of the place where ‘out of every ten folk you meet nine of ’em in love’. In Hardy’s poem in praise of cider, ‘Great Things’ he writes of ‘spinning down to Weymouth town / By Ridgway thirstily’ and in The Dynasts (1908) it is ‘King George’s watering-place’.

Thomas Hardy lived and worked in Weymouth in 1869, enjoying a morning swim in Weymouth Bay and joined a quadrille class, which provided ‘a gay gathering for dances and love-making by adepts of both sexes’. He lived at 3 Wooperton Street. Here he wrote poetry and, when his work took him to St Juliot in Cornwall, he embarked on a significant love affair.

He stayed in Weymouth in 1871-2 lodging at 1 West Parade, now Park Street, returning to the Bockhampton cottage to complete Under the Greenwood Tree. Weymouth’s Esplanade, the Gloucester Lodge Hotel and Old Rooms are featured in The Trumpet-Major (1880), renamed Budmouth in the 1895 edition to bring the novel within fictional ‘Wessex’.

Who is the other Thomas Hardy?

A British naval officer closely associated with Adm. Horatio (afterward Viscount) Nelson, two of whose flagships he commanded during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

A sailor from 1781, he met Nelson in the mid-1790s, while the future hero of Trafalgar was still a captain. After Nelson’s victory over the French in the Battle of the Nile (Aug. 1, 1798), Hardy was made captain of Nelson’s flagship, the “Vanguard.”

He also was flag captain of the “Victory” during the Battle of Trafalgar (Oct. 21, 1805), in which a British fleet under Nelson defeated a Franco-Spanish force.

Hardy was at Nelson’s side when the admiral was mortally wounded in the battle.

Given a baronetcy in 1806, Hardy became first sea lord in 1830, and in 1837 he was appointed vice admiral. From 1834 until his death he was governor of the naval hospital at Greenwich.

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