This is, purportedly, the typewriter of Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) on display at Max Gate, the house where the author lived in Dorset, England:
The problem is, the earliest date we have for a Remington Portable Model 5 (boxy) is 1932, four years after the author’s death.
As an example of Hardy’s writing style, here’s an extract from For Conscience’ Sake, the second story in the 1927 edition of Life’s Little Ironies, a collection of short stories first published in 1894:
An extract from A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) as used by David Lodge to illustrate Suspense in Chapter 3 of his book The Art of Fiction:
Typecast on my 1963 Remington 11.
It’s fascinating to me when both movies and museums make small gaffes like this (not so small to some of us). I was perusing the antique mall a couple of weeks back, picking up a lovely SM9 (my current daily typing favorite) and the cashier told me about some folks who came in to pick up “any old typewriter” because they were making a film about one of our local heroes. It made me sad — I imagine I could have sourced the right model had I had the chance to talk to them! Oh well.
Looks like it was fun to type out those excerpts. I love that “old” writing style from the late nineteenth century. It persisted I some prose through the mid-20th, but nowadays it’s almost a foreign language. Both flowery and exacting at the same time.
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