The Evolution of Wessex

Abstract

The manuscript of Under the Greenwood Tree already contains some of the disguised place names which Hardy was to employ throughout his later work, and it was in this novel that he established the basic topographical framework of Mellstock (with Yalbury Wood), Casterbridge, and Budmouth. Far from the Madding Crowd developed the presentation of Casterbridge and Budmouth, introduced a number of minor settings, created the village of Weatherbury in all the rich variety of its agricultural life, and introduced the name Wessex into Hardy’s fiction for the first time. In his 1895 Preface to Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy recalled : “The series of novels I projected being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed to require a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity to their scene. Finding that the area of a single county did not afford a canvas large enough for this purpose, and that there were objections to an invented name, I disinterred the old one.” (vii) It is hard to believe that Hardy, by the autumn of 1874, had in fact gone much beyond a rather general recognition of the attractions and advantages of choosing the settings of future novels from a fairly limited geographical area. Despite The Trumpet-Major and the sketch-map of Egdon Heath drawn for the first edition of The Return of the Native, he seems to have retained throughout the 1870s a fairly limited conception of Wessex and of its potentialities for development, and the publication of A Laodicean and Two on a Tower in the early 1880s suggests that he remained fundamentally uncertain as to the kind of novel, of setting, and of period most appropriate to his talents.