The Hand of Ethelberta by Thomas Hardy - Bournemouth Pier, Bournemouth, Dorset, UK
Posted by: Dragontree
N 50° 42.958 W 001° 52.536
30U E 579378 N 5618843
Bournemouth Pier features as a location in 'The Hand of Ethelberta' by Thomas Hardy.
Waymark Code: WM4QQX
Location: Southern England, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 09/21/2008
Views: 13
This novel was written by the famous author in 1876 and the book describes the old wooden pier, since replaced. Bournemouth town is known as 'Sandbourne' in Thomas Hardy's books and Dorset as 'Wessex'. There is a famous Hardy trail with information boards detailing aspects of Hardy's life and novels throughout the county. One is pictured, located in the nearby Lower Gardens.
A synopsis of the novel can be found here: visit link
pportunistic yet ultimately loyal adventuress who begins life humbly and ends as the wife of a rakish aristocrat, THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA will surprise readers of Thomas Hardy's more familiar, and darker, Wessex novels. Hardy combines elements of domestic melodrama and drawing-room farce with calculated irreverence for literary form.'
A guide to Literary Bournemouth in the 19th Century
by http://www.boscombe.org.uk/v2/literature_1.html lists some interesting details:
'Thomas Hardy visited the town when shopping for a matrimonial home in 1872, calling it “a city set in a garden” and “a complete and extensive watering place ... a city of detached mansions”. It is a setting in his The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). He remarked that “on the very edge of that tawny piece of antiquity (Hardy’s beloved heath), such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up ... a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel”. He concluded: “The pines, the chines, steeply-rising cliffs, parks, gardens, heathlands, amusements, esplanades, sands, and sprawl add up to the strange unique character of Bournemouth. A fascinating, pine-scented phenomenon”.'