By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
I was down in Dorset last week, so I thought I’d blog about that this week. Specifically, I thought I’d look into the significance the Isle of Portland has in the annals of English literature. If you’d be expecting Thomas Hardy to figure prominently, you’d be right – though Portland takes us to one of his lesser-known and more bizarre books.
But Hardy isn’t the only famous writer with links to Portland. There’s some Wordsworthian connections, too. And since Wordsworth came first, let’s start with him.
Wordsworth wrote his 1805 poem ‘To the Daisy’ in remembrance of his brother, Captain John Wordsworth, who drowned when his East India Company ship, the Earl of Abergavenny, sank off the coast of Portland in February 1805. This poem doesn’t actually make any specific reference to John Wordsworth’s death, but one of the ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ which Wordsworth wrote at the same time (May-July 1805) are more direct:
The Sheep-boy whistled loud, and lo!
Thereafter, having felt the shock,
The Buzzard mounted from the rock
Deliberate and slow:
Lord of the air, he took his flight;
Oh could he on that woeful night
Have lent his wing, my Brother dear!
For one poor moment’s space to Thee—
And all who struggle with the Sea
When safety is so near.
But now let’s turn to Thomas Hardy, the poet of Dorset.
The Well-Beloved occupies a strange place in Hardy’s oeuvre. Perhaps taking his cue from the traditional tripartite division of Shakespeare’s plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories, Hardy retrospectively divided his fourteen novels into ‘Novels of Character and Environment’ (which contains all of his best-known books, such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Mayor of Casterbridge); ‘Novels of Ingenuity’ (featuring his early sensation novels and his remarkably uncharacteristic but fascinating novel A Laodicean, which in some respects harked back to his early debts to sensation fiction); and ‘Romances and Fantasies’.
It was into this last category that Hardy placed The Well-Beloved, which appeared in 1897. That’s two years after his last novel, Jude the Obscure, appeared. If that sounds impossible, it’s because Hardy had already written an early version of The Well-Beloved (under the title The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved) but he substantially rewrote that book for the 1897 edition. So, in many ways, this, and not Jude, was his last novel.
It’s a curious novel in one respects. Its plot essentially follows an artist with the decidedly unmasculine name of Jocelyn pursuing three women who are from three generations of the same family. Not everyone’s cup of tea, perhaps, although you could probably reverse the genders and publish that as a contemporary dark romance novel on TikTok.
Jocelyn is motivated by what Robert Graves later (in 1948) identified as the ‘White Goddess’, the female muse who every poet (and artist) pursues in the name of their art. But the novel’s setting is what is relevant here, for Jocelyn lives on the Isle of Slingers: Hardy’s name for the Isle of Portland.
Hardy’s Wessex, of course, didn’t exist. Or rather, it did and it didn’t. He takes real places in the West Country, and especially his home county of Dorset, and changes the names: Dorchester becomes Casterbridge, Weymouth becomes Budmouth, and the Isle of Portland becomes the Isle of Slingers. Hardy wasn’t actually the first West Country writer to resurrect the old Anglo-Saxon name for the area: that honour goes to his mentor, William Barnes. But it was Hardy who put Wessex on the map – the literary one, if not the Ordnance Survey.
On the Isle of Portland, there’s a crumbling medieval castle named Rufus Castle. This becomes Red King Castle in Hardy’s novel, because the main theory in Hardy’s lifetime was that Rufus Castle got its name from the eleventh-century king William II, who was nicknamed Rufus on account of his red hair. But Rufus came a-cropper with an arrow in the New Forest in 1100 and construction on Rufus Castle didn’t begin until some time after that, so now it’s believed that Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester (the Red Earl) is the more likely candidate for the inspiration behind the name.
Actually, the Isle of Portland had also featured in an earlier Hardy novel, The Trumpet-Major (1880), which also happens to be one of my favourites. This is another oddity in his oeuvre as it’s his only historical novel, set during the Napoleonic Wars. In that novel Portland appears under its actual name, when we are told that the heroine of the novel, Anne, ‘strained her eyes wistfully towards Portland. Its dark contour, lying like a whale on the sea, was just perceptible in the gloom as the background to half-a-dozen ships’ lights nearer at hand.’
Anne has gone to Portland to watch the HMS Victory sail past, and shortly after this moment ‘she approached the extreme southerly peak of rock, and gazed from the cliff at Portland Bill, or Beal, as it was in those days more correctly called.’
And in his 1899 poem ‘The Souls of the Slain’ about the casualties of a later war (the Second Boer War), Hardy described Portland as the ‘Isle of the Race’, the ‘race’ being the powerful tidal currents which meet and clash off the island:
The thick lids of Night closed upon me
Alone at the Bill
Of the Isle by the Race –
Many-caverned, bald, wrinkled of face –
And with darkness and silence the spirit was on me
To brood and be still.
Hardy’s contemporary, A. E. Housman (who was, incidentally, one of the pallbearers at the former’s funeral in 1928), also immortalised Portland in verse, in his poem ‘The Isle of Portland’ (1896):
The star-filled seas are smooth to-night
From France to England strown;
Black towers above the Portland light
The felon-quarried stone.
On yonder island, not to rise,
Never to stir forth free,
Far from his folk a dead lad lies
That once was friends with me.
Lie you easy, dream you light,
And sleep you fast for aye;
And luckier may you find the night
Than ever you found the day.
The reference to ‘felon-quarried stone’ reminds us that the mining of the famous Portland stone was once undertaken by convicts, and Housman also references the prison-quarry on the island in his 1895 poem about the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde (who famously ended up in Reading Gaol among other places, but actually never did time on Portland):
Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet
And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.
I suppose I should conclude with Moonfleet, J. Meade Falkner’s 1898 tale of smuggling in Dorset. Portland gets a few mentions there, too:
Sunrise was very near; for though the cliff shut out the east from us, the west over Portland was all aglow with copper-red and gold, and the candle burnt low. The head of the pin was drooping, though very slightly, but as I saw it droop a month before, and I knew that the final act was not far off.
Unsurprisingly, when I was on the island last week I saw copies of Moonfleet, The Trumpet-Major, and The Well-Beloved displayed prominently for sale in the museum shop. But already possessing all of these, I departed with a copy of a P. G. Wodehouse omnibus from the charity bookcase in the museum, which also features a mummified cat (the museum, that is, not the bookcase).