ABSTRACT
upon leaving Wimborne Minster in June 1883, Hardy and his wife spent a few days in London. The novelist dined with Edmund Gosse and shortly afterwards carried Gosse off with him on a house-hunting expedition into Dorset. They looked at houses as far west as Bridport and there had the experience—an unusual one for Hardy—of getting lost. On finding no house to suit him, Hardy finally decided to settle down in Dorchester and, still finding nothing to his taste, he came to the conclusion that there was only one solution to his housing problem: he would have to build. Meanwhile, he rented a house in Shire Hall Lane and to it brought Mrs. Hardy at the end of June. 'To her surprise she found herself in one of the little-used alleys of the town' where one of the neighbouring landmarks was an old arch with a keystone 'mask with a comic leer', the appearance of which was 'so ghastly', especially when seen by the weak glimmer of a street lamp, 'that she could not bear to look at it'. The words here quoted from Chapter XX of The Mayor of Casterbridge apply to Elizabeth-Jane, and one would hesitate to transfer them to Emma Lavinia Hardy if one had not learned from Hardy's past practice how ready he was to use for fictional purposes his own and his wife's experience in real life. He himself recognized the unattractive aspects of Shire Hall Lane and admitted that, in the house there, 'the sunshine flaps open and shut like a fan'. 1
