A blue ceramic plaque indicates the fictional home of Michael Henchard, Thomas Hardy’s “Mayor of Casterbridge”, in Dorchester. Dorset, England, UK.


The blue plaque on the wall of Michael Henchard’s house in South Street, Dorchester. Normally a blue plaque on the side of a building indicates that an important or famous person once lived there. In this case however the personage in question is the fictitional creation of the Dorset writer Thomas Hardy. Hardy had the eponymous protagonist of his novel “The Mayor of Casterbridge” live at this address, which when the story was written in 1885, would have been a prosperous merchant’s townhouse. Today the building is the premises of a well known high street bank. Many of the locations in Hardy’s stories are fictionalized versions of actual places, and the Casterbridge of Hardy’s novels was based on the author’s home town of Dorchester, which is the county town of Dorset.


Size: 2848px × 4287px
Location: South Street, Dorchester, Dorset, England, United Kingdom, UK, Great Britain, GB.
Photo credit: © Andrew Wood / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No

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