BleakChesneyWold

                                                                                 Painting :   October (1878) by Jules Bastien-Lepage  * 'Return of the Native' was Hardy's sixth novel and is centred around an area he called Egdon Heath. As a physical location it is not easy to place. Edward Parnell in 'Ghostland' has proposed that geographically Black Heath and Duddle Heath in Dorset fulfil this role PARNELL .Mr Parnell has also cited Hardy's  own view of  his own  creation of 'Wessex' as being "partly real, partly dream country". Egdon Heath also features  in 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' and Hardy's short story 'The Withered Arm'.  The novel opens with an anonymous narrator offering a description of the Heath (  " heathy, furzy, briary wilderness--"Bruaria"" )  Chapter One   , and there are some magnificent passages depicting a wild landscape with its stubborn soil. " T he face of the heath by its mer

                                                         A Lost Occult Horror Classic                       John Atkinson Grimshaw 'Nightfall on the Thames' 1880 in the public domain courtesy of Wikipedia Richard Marsh was born Richard Bernard Heldman in London  on 12th October 1857. The son of a lace merchant who married a lacemaker. The Heldman family were Jewish converts to Christianity. His father went bankrupt not long after Richard's birth, and became a school master. From 1880 up to 1883, Richard Heldman had short stories published in boy's fiction and adventure magazines, but appears to have stopped writing in June 1883. For the rest of the year, Heldman drifted through Britain and France, living from the proceeds of forged cheques. In February 1884, he was arrested and then convicted for forgery in April of that year at Maidstone Quarter Sessions, and sentenced to 18 months hard labour.  Upon leaving prison, Heldman adopted his mother's name, and started wr