Thomas Hardy's Gargoyle

Chapter 46 of Far From the Madding Crowd is titled The Gurgoyle : Its Doings.
Here, following Fanny Robin's burial in the Weatherbury churchyard, Sergeant Troy
spends a long night sheltered from a torrential rain inside the porch of the church. The
flood of water from a gargoyle, meanwhile, destroys the flowers and the very earth
atop poor Fanny's fresh grave. Here are excerpts from the beginning of the chapter.

The tower of Weatherbury Church was a square erection of fourteenth-century date, having two stone gurgoyles on each of the four faces of its parapet...

...All the eight were different from each other. A beholder was convinced that nothing on earth could be more hideous than those he saw on the north side until he went round to the south. Of the two on this latter face, only that at the south-eastern corner concerns this story. It was too human to be called like a dragon, too impish to be like a man, too animal to be like a fiend, and not enough like a bird to be called a griffin. This horrible stone entity was fashioned as if covered with a wrinkled hide; it had short, erect ears, eyes starting from their sockets, and its fingers and hands were seizing the corners of its mouth, which they thus seemed to pull open to give free passage to the water it vomited.

Note: Hardy uses the variant spelling "gurgoyle" in this chapter.

Pictured right St. Mary's, Puddletown: Hardy's "Weatherbury Church".

We can be sure that Hardy, as architect and restorer of churches, had seen many a "gurgoyle"
by the time he wrote Far From the Madding Crowd during 1873/74. We also can be quite sure
that the first gargoyles he ever saw were on St. Michael, Stinsford, where he was baptized and
where he and his family were active churchgoers throughout his youth.


Here pictured is the largest, most hideous, most grotesque gargoyle to be found at Stinsford church, easily seen from the ground as this photo attests. Might we conjecture that in his tender years Hardy, to one degree or another, became fascinated with this prominent and imaginative image? Might it be significant that it occupies the south-eastern corner?

From the situation thus described, we could easily suppose that this is the gargoyle that inspired Hardy's "gurgoyle" in his novel whose setting is but three miles distant.

In this regard, Hermann Lea, photographer and close Hardy friend, wrote that Hardy's gargoyle, described as "too human to be... called a griffin," has been imported from another parish. Apparently Hardy confided to Lea that the imaginary gargoyle on Weatherbury Church was based, at least in large part, on that of another place. What place, what parish, goes unnamed. Was it Stinsford?

No one alive today knows with certainty, of course, that such is the case, but we've had fun surmising. Hardy knew the church in Puddletown well, and we have from a credible source that he imagined an "imported" gargoyle on the south-eastern corner of its tower. The question remains -- was this one the inspiration of that image? What did he see with his mind's eye as he composed the description?

You decide.



Thanks to the booklet, Guide to St. Michael, Stinsford, by C.J.P. Beatty, 1989
for the idea that prompted this presentation.

And thanks to John Gould of Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts for the
reference quoted above from Thomas Hardy's Wessex, by Hermann Lea, 1913.

NOTE: Timothy O'Sullivan, in his book Thomas Hardy : An Illustrated Biography,
includes a black and white photo of this same gargoyle. He states flatly, "For the
purposes of Far From the Madding Crowd Hardy transferred it to Puddletown".


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