Architecture and Literature: Hardy’s Churches

Abstract

Among the many various ways in which Thomas Hardy’s works reflect his complex attitude towards Christianity, one of the most significant is the manner in which he handles the various motifs related to the central image of the church as a building — a place of worship where believers congregate to praise the Lord and through their prayer to participate in the mystery of their faith, but at the same time a physical object, an element in the landscape, an aspect of the everyday material experience of life in nineteenth-century Wessex; an embodiment of the religious spirit of the community, but at the same time a public meeting-place and a centre of social or even cultural life of the parish; a prayer in stone, but also a monument to human aspirations, artistic, professional, or personal, expressed through the medium of architecture, sculpture, painting, or stained-glass design.