Puddletown into Weatherbury: The Genesis of Wessex

Abstract

It was in the manuscript of chapter 50 of Far from the Madding Crowd—“Greenhill was the Nijnii [sic] Novgorod of Wessex”—that Hardy seems first to have used the term Wessex; its first appearance in print dates from the publication of the chapter in the Cornhill as part of the November 1874 serial instalment.¹ The term did not appear elsewhere in the serial or the first edition—other occurrences are the result of later revision—but its revival in the opening sentence of Hardy’s next novel, The Hand of Ethelberta, confirmed beyond doubt that he was laying claim to a whole fictional region. A map of Wessex as it existed in 1874 would have been a simple affair : Budmouth and Melchester had been located, Casterbridge lightly sketched in, Mellstock and Weatherbury surveyed in some detail; a few other places had been mentioned, some of them under names later abandoned; the region as a whole had been placed in relation to the actual geography of England by the account of Bathsheba’s journey to Bath. Wessex was to be much developed in later books and in the process of revision, but the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd established the name and the broad framework, while the overlapping of Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd, slight as it was, already demonstrated possibilities not only of greater expansion but of greater density.