In the Footsteps of Thomas Hardy
On 2nd June 1847, the day of Hardy’s seventh birthday, was the day the first train pulled by the steam engine “Reindeer” came into the newly built Dorchester station, the terminus of the new Corkscrew Railway, joining Dorchester and rural Dorset and Hampshire with Southampton and on to London. You can imagine Hardy…. and his family…. standing and watching as that first train passed just the other side of the peaceful Frome valley…. a few miles from Hardys home.
Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet, national treasure, born on 2nd June 1840 and died on 11th January in 1928 at age 88….. a grand old man of the London literary scene, a man whose career straddled the Victorian and Edwardian eras…and also a man of the traditions and ways of life of rural Dorset.