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Within weeks of Thomas Hardy’s return to his native Dorchester in June 1883, he began to compile his ’Facts’ notebook, which he kept up throughout the years when he was writing some of his major work - The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. From his intensive study of the Dorset County Chronicle for 1826-1830, he noted and summarised into 'Facts' (with the help of his first wife, Emma) hundreds of reports, many of them suggestive 'satires of circumstance', for possible use in his fiction and poems. Along with extensive reading in memoirs and local histories, this immersion in the files of the old newspaper involved him in a wider experience - the recovery and recognition of the unstable culture of the local past in the post-Napoleonic war years before his birth in 1840, and before the impact of the modernising of the Victorian era. 'Facts' is thus a unique document amongst Hardy's private writings and is here for the first time edited, the text transcribed in 'typographical facsimile' form, together with substantial annotation of the entries and critical and textual introductions.
In c.1713, Sir Richard Child, heir to a mercantile fortune, commissioned Colen Campbell, to build Wanstead House, ‘one of the noblest houses, not only in England, but in Europe’. Campbell’s innovative classical façade was widely influential and sowed the seeds for English Palladianism. Its opulent interior by William Kent was equal to Kensington Palace and its extensive gardens were attributed to leading landscape designers George London and Humphry Repton. Wanstead’s glory days came to an end in 1822, when a major sale of its contents was arranged to pay off financial debts. Two years later the house was demolished, its building fabric dispersed far and wide. A large crater on an east London golf course is all that remains of this once ‘princely mansion’. Based on scholarly research, Wanstead House: East London’s Lost Palace provides the first illustrated history of the lost Georgian estate, charting the meteoric rise and fall of the Child dynasty. By restoring Wanstead’s reputation amongst the leading houses of the era, this book demonstrates that those lost in actuality, should by no means be lost to history.