Dorchester through the Lens of Thomas Hardy

Join Mark Chutter, Chairman and Academic Director of the Thomas Hardy Society, to explore how Hardy presents the town of Dorchester in his writing. The talk will consider the lens through which Hardy presents the town as ‘partly real, partly dream country’ within his fictional Wessex.
Hardy’s fictional name for Dorchester was ‘Casterbridge’. The talk will explore the descriptions and liminal private and public performance spaces of Casterbridge, described by the writer as ‘compact as a box of dominoes – it was untouched by the faintest sprinkle of modernism and it bespoke Old Rome in every alley, shop and precinct’.
The talk will consider Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, as well as the short story The Withered Arm’ (1888), and the poems ‘The Ruined Maid’ and ‘The Curate’s Kindness – A Workhouse Irony’.
Mark Damon Chutter is the Chairman and Academic Director of the Thomas Hardy Society. He has published papers in the Thomas Hardy Journal and for the Times Educational Supplement (TES). He has been teaching for over 25 years and was shortlisted for the TES’s ‘Most Innovative Teacher of the Year’ and ‘Teacher of the Year’ awards.

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