Thomas Hardy's Wessex is the fictional literary landscape created by the English author Thomas Hardy as the setting for his major novels, [1] located in the south and southwest of England. [2] Hardy named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. [3] For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in The Mayor of Casterbridge . [4] [5] In an 1895 preface to the 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as "a merely realistic dream country". [6]
The actual definition of "Hardy's Wessex" varied widely throughout Hardy's career, and was not definitively settled until after he retired from writing novels. When he created the concept of a fictional Wessex, it consisted merely of the small area of Dorset in which Hardy grew up; by the time he wrote Jude the Obscure , the boundaries had extended to include all of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire, much of Berkshire, and some of Oxfordshire, with its most north-easterly point being Oxford (renamed "Christminster" in the novel). Cornwall was also referred to but named "Off Wessex". Similarly, the nature and significance of ideas of "Wessex" were developed over a long series of novels through a lengthy period of time. The idea of Wessex plays an important artistic role in Hardy's works (particularly his later novels), assisting the presentation of themes of progress, primitivism, sexuality, religion, nature and naturalism. [7] [8] [9] However, this is complicated by the economic role Wessex played in Hardy's career. Considering himself primarily to be a poet, Hardy wrote novels mostly to earn money. Books that could be marketed under the Hardy brand of "Wessex novels" were particularly lucrative, which gave rise to a tendency to sentimentalised, picturesque, populist descriptions of Wessex [10] (which, as a glance through most tourist giftshops in the south-west reveals, remain popular with consumers today).
Hardy's resurrection of the name "Wessex" is largely responsible for the popular modern use of the term to describe the south-west region of England (with the exception of Cornwall and arguably Devon). Today, a panoply of organisations take their name from Hardy to describe their relationship to the area. Hardy's conception of Wessex as a separate, cohesive geographical and political identity has proved powerful, [11] although it was originally created purely as an artistic conceit, and has spawned a lucrative tourist trade, and even a devolutionist Wessex Regionalist Party.
Region of Wessex | Actual English County [12] | Position on Map |
---|---|---|
Lower Wessex | Devon | 9 |
Mid Wessex | Wiltshire | 37 |
North Wessex | Berkshire | 2 |
Outer Wessex | Somerset | 30 |
South Wessex | Dorset | 10 |
Upper Wessex | Hampshire | 14 |
(Note: The Isle of Wight, although today a separate administrative county, was considered to be a part of the county of Hampshire – and thus Upper Wessex – during Thomas Hardy's lifetime. Likewise, Alfredston (Wantage) and the surrounding area in North Wessex was part of Berkshire prior to the 1974 boundary changes but now lies in Oxfordshire.)
Outer Wessex is sometimes referred to as Nether Wessex.
The abbreviations for Thomas Hardy's novels that are used in the table are as follows:
Wessex Name | Region of Wessex | Actual Name | Appearance in Hardy's Novels [12] [13] |
---|---|---|---|
Abbot's-Cernel | South Wessex | Cerne Abbas | Where Mrs. Dollery was driving to in the beginning of the novel. (W) |
Abbotsea | South Wessex | Abbotsbury | |
Aldbrickham | North Wessex | Reading | Where Jude and Sue lived together after Sue left Phillotson. It is also where Arabella used to work as a barmaid before she met Jude. (JtO) |
Alderworth | South Wessex | Affpuddle | Clym rents a cottage here after marrying Eustacia. (RotN) |
Alfredston | North Wessex | Wantage | Jude Fawley becomes a mason's apprentice there. It is also where he works following his marriage to Arabella Donn. (JtO) |
Anglebury | South Wessex | Wareham | Where Thomasin and Wildeve's marriage did not take place due to an invalid licence (RotN) Where Ethelberta lodged in the beginning of the novel. (HoE) |
Bramshurst | Upper Wessex | Lyndhurst | Tess and Angel fled to an unoccupied manor house in Bramshurst near the end of the novel. (TotD) |
Budmouth | South Wessex | Weymouth | Where Frank Troy goes to gamble on horse races. (FftMC) Eustacia Vye's hometown (RotN) The working place of Owen. (DR) On the way home from Budmouth, Dick and Fancy confessed to each other. (UtGT) One of the cities where Farfrae did his business. (MoC) The neighbouring village of Overcombe/(Sutton Poyntz), the principal location of TM, is sometimes called Budmouth-Regis in Hardy's novels, but that is more precisely Melcombe Regis, where George III popularised the watering place; Weymouth is the other side of the river.(TM) |
Casterbridge | South Wessex | Dorchester | The principal location of The Mayor of Casterbridge. (MoC) Where Fanny Robin dies at the poorhouse, and whose Corn Exchange is frequently visited by Bathsheba and Boldwood. (FftMC) Where Rhoda and Farmer Lodge's son is hanged. The Withered Arm. (WT) [14] When Tess's horse died while delivering goods from her home town to Casterbridge. (TotD) |
Chalk Newton | South Wessex | Maiden Newton | Site of Flintcomb-Ash farm, where Tess worked after Angel left her. (TotD) |
Chaseborough | South Wessex | Cranborne | Tess passed through Chaseborough on the way from home to Trantridge. (TotD) |
Christminster | North Wessex | Oxford | Where Jude Fawley goes to become a scholar, and is advised to give up his career choice. Sue Bridehead works in a shop which produces religious artefacts there, meets her cousin, and is thrown from her lodgings. (JtO) Cytherea and Owen's hometown. Although Christminster is technically not within the borders of Hardy's Wessex, as it is located to the north of the River Thames, he describes it in Jude the Obscure as "within hail of the Wessex border, and almost with the tip of one small toe within it". (DR) |
Cliff Martin | Outer Wessex | Combe Martin | Combe Martin is actually in Devon, indicating that Hardy's boundaries are not necessarily linked to current county boundaries |
Cresscombe | North Wessex | Letcombe Bassett | Arabella's hometown. (JtO) |
Deansleigh | South Wessex | Romsey | Sir Ashley Mottisfont and his Lady Philipa reside at Deansleigh Park (probably a reference to Broadlands). [15] |
Downstaple | Lower Wessex | Barnstaple | |
Durnover | South Wessex | Fordington | |
Endelstow | Off Wessex | St Juliot | The home of Elfride Swancourt and her Rector father (PoBE). In real life this was where Thomas met Emma whom he later married. |
Emminster | South Wessex | Beaminster [14] | The home of Angel Clare, and the site of Clare's father's vicarage. (TotD) |
Evershead | South Wessex | Evershot | Where Tess met Alec for the first time after they parted, when Alec was preaching. (TotD) |
Exonbury | Lower Wessex | Exeter | Where Grace went to after she found out Fitzpier's affair. (W) |
Falls Park | Outer Wessex | Mells Park | |
Flintcomb-Ash | Dole's Ash Farm at Plush [16] | The "starve-acre" farm where Tess undertakes hard manual field work. (TotD) | |
Fountall | Outer Wessex | Wells | |
Gaymead | North Wessex | Theale | (JtO and WT) |
Great Hintock | South Wessex | Melbury Osmond | The church of St. Osmund may be viewed as "the setting for the last scene in 'The Woodlanders' where Marty South is a solitary loyal figure at Giles Winterbourne's grave" |
Havenpool | South Wessex | Poole | Newson landed here on his return from Newfoundland. (MoC) The principal location for the short story 'To Please His Wife': the story begins in "St. James's Church, in Havenpool Town" which corresponds to St James' Church, Poole. (LLI) |
Isle of Slingers | South Wessex | Isle of Portland | The principal location of the Well-Beloved. (WB) |
Ivell | Outer Wessex | Yeovil | A location in the short stories 'For Conscience' Sake' and 'A Tragedy of Two Ambitions'. One character is curate of St John's, Ivell, corresponding to the Church of St John the Baptist, Yeovil. (LLI) |
Kennetbridge | North Wessex | Newbury | "A thriving town not more than a dozen miles south of Marygreen" (JtO) [17] between Melchester and Christminster. [18] The main road (A338) from Oxford to Salisbury runs past Fawley and through Hungerford, which may be Kennetbridge instead of Newbury, which is to the south-east of Fawley. |
King's Hintock | South Wessex | Melbury Osmond | The short story 'First Countess of Wessex’ is set in Kings-Hintock Court (based on Melbury House in Melbury Sampford). Hardy's mother was born in Melbury Osmond the family home is the model for the Knap in the Wessex Tale 'Interlopers at the Knap' it stands at the top of the village street. (WT) |
Kingsbere | South Wessex | Bere Regis | Here is situated the Church of the d'Urbervilles. After Tess' Father's death, the Durbeyfield family take refuge outside the chapel. (TotD) |
Knollsea | South Wessex | Swanage | Where Lord Mountclere lived. (HoE) |
Little Hintock | South Wessex | Melbury Bubb/Stockwood/Hermitage | In his 1912 preface to 'The Woodlanders' Hardy confessed to not knowiing which village Little Hintock corresponded to. (W) |
Longpuddle | South Wessex | Piddletrenthide | A recurring location in the short stories called 'A Few Crusted Characters'. Sometimes split into Upper Longpuddle (Piddletrenthide) and Lower Longpuddle (Piddlehinton). (LLI) |
Lulwind Cove | South Wessex | Lulworth Cove | Where Sergeant Troy is thought to have drowned. (FftMC) Where Napoleon Bonaparte briefly visited under cover of darkness in the short story 'A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four'. (LLI) |
Lumsdon | North Wessex | Cumnor | It is there that Jude Fawley meets up with his old teacher Mr. Phillotson again. It is where Sue Bridehead starts to work as a teacher and promises herself in marriage to Mr. Phillotson. (JtO) |
Marlott | South Wessex | Marnhull | Tess Durbeyfield is born and brought up there. After becoming pregnant by Alec D'Urberville she returns to the village and gives birth to a baby boy, who dies in infancy. (TotD) |
Marygreen | North Wessex | Fawley | Drusilla Fawley runs a bakery there. It is the place where Sue Bridehead spent her childhood. Jude Fawley is brought there following the death of his father, and it is where he matures into a man. (JtO) |
Melchester | Mid Wessex | Salisbury | This is the place where Jude goes to prepare himself for the ministry, and where Sue Bridehead is studying to become a teacher. The latter runs away from her school there, and later marries Mr. Phillotson in the town. (JtO) Where Troy's military camp deployed. (FftMC) Where Julian moved to after Ethelberta refuse his love. (HE) Lord Helmsdale was the bishop of Melchester. (ToaT) Tess and Angel pass through this city on their way to Stonehenge. (TotD) The main location in the short story 'On the Western Circuit'. (LLI) |
Mellstock | South Wessex | Stinsford and Higher & Lower Bockhampton | Thomas Hardy's birthplace. Hardy's heart is also buried here, next to his first wife, Emma. Jude Fawley's father died there. (JtO) Nearly all of Under the Greenwood Tree is set in Mellstock. (UtGT) |
Middleton | South Wessex | Milton Abbas | Where Charmond lived. (W) |
Middleton Abbey | South Wessex | Milton Abbey | Where Charmond lived. (W) |
Narrowbourne | Outer Wessex | West Coker | Where the main character is a priest in A Tragedy of Two Ambitions a short story part of Life's Little Ironies. (LLI) |
Nether-Moynton | South Wessex | Owermoigne | Owermoigne village is described as Nether Moynton in Hardy's novels and his short story The Distracted Preacher in Wessex Tales takes place in the village. (WT) |
Nuttlebury | South Wessex | Hazelbury Bryan | Tess passes through here on her way back home. (TotD) |
Overcombe | South Wessex | Sutton Poyntz | The principal location of The Trumpet-Major.(TM) One of the places from where the vans of carriers in and out of Casterbridge hailed. (MoC) [19] |
Port Bredy | South Wessex | Bridport [14] | Where Lucetta and Farfrae secretly married. (MoC) |
Po'sham | South Wessex | Portesham | The home of Captain Thomas Hardy, one of Lord Nelson's commanders at the Battle of Trafalgar, who lived at Portesham House. (TM) |
Quartershot | Upper Wessex | Aldershot | An important military station near Stoke-Barehills. (JtO) |
Sandbourne | Upper Wessex | Bournemouth [14] | Where Tess Durbeyfield lives with Alec d'Urberville, and where she murders him upon the return of her husband, Angel Clare. (TotD). It is also where Sue Bridehead's freethinking friend was buried, and where she was the only mourner at his funeral. (JtO) The principal location of The Hand of Ethelberta. (HoE) |
Shaston | South Wessex | Shaftesbury | Jack Durbeyfield visits the doctor in Shaston and learns that he has a bad heart. (TotD) Mr. Phillotson moves there to run a school. Jude Fawley travels there to see Sue Bridehead, who, married to Mr. Phillotson, is working in the town, and they flee the place together. (JtO) |
Sherton Abbas | South Wessex | Sherborne [14] | The major neighbouring town of the Hintocks, where The Woodlanders took place. (W) |
Slingers | South Wessex | Isle of Portland | The principal location of The Well-Beloved. (WB) |
Solentsea | Upper Wessex | Southsea | The setting of the short story "An Imaginative Woman." (WT) |
Stancy Castle | Outer Wessex | Dunster Castle | The principal location of A Laodicean. (L) |
Stapleford | South Wessex | Stalbridge | Stapleford Park was owned by Timothy Petrick in the short story Squire Petrick's Lady |
Stoke Barehills | Upper Wessex | Basingstoke | Where Great Wessex Agricultural Show was held. (JtO) |
Stourcastle | South Wessex | Sturminster Newton | Tess travelled through here. (TotD) |
Street of Wells | South Wessex | Fortuneswell | The main street on Isle of Slingers, where The Well-Beloved mostly took place. (WB) |
Toneborough | Outer Wessex | Taunton | |
Trantridge | South Wessex | Pentridge | Site of the D'Urberville estate. (TotD) |
Warborne | South Wessex | Wimborne | Nearest town and railway station to Welland. (ToaT) |
Weatherbury | South Wessex | Puddletown [14] | Farms of Bathsheba and Boldwood, main setting for Far From the Madding Crowd (FftMC) |
Weatherbury Farm | South Wessex | Waterston Manor | Bathsheba's farm, in Far From the Madding Crowd (FftMC) |
Wellbridge | South Wessex | Wool | Where Tess told Angel her story after they married. (TotD) |
Weydon-Priors | Upper Wessex | Weyhill | Where Michael Henchard sells his wife while he is drunk. (MoC) |
Wintoncester | South Wessex | Winchester | Tess Durbeyfield is imprisoned and executed in this former capital of Wessex. (TotD) |
Artists such as Walter Tyndale, Edmund Hort New, Charles George Harper and others, have painted or drawn the landscapes, places and buildings described in Hardy's novels. Their work was used to illustrate books exploring the real-life countryside on which the fictional county of Wessex was based:
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain such as those from his native South West England.
Jude the Obscure is the thirteenth published novel by English author Thomas Hardy, which began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895. It is Hardy's last completed novel. The protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man; he is a stonemason who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main character is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is also his central love interest. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage.
Shaftesbury is a town and civil parish in Dorset, England. It is on the A30 road, 20 miles west of Salisbury and 23 miles north-northeast of Dorchester, near the border with Wiltshire. It is the only significant hilltop settlement in Dorset, being built about 215 metres above sea level on a greensand hill on the edge of Cranborne Chase.
John Cowper Powys was an English novelist, philosopher, lecturer, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929. He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934), and Maiden Castle (1936) have been called his Wessex novels. As with Hardy, landscape is important to his works. So is elemental philosophy in his characters' lives. In 1934 he published an autobiography. His itinerant lectures were a success in England and in 1905–1930 in the United States, where he wrote many of his novels and had several first published. He moved to Dorset, England, in 1934 with a US partner, Phyllis Playter. In 1935 they moved to Corwen, Merionethshire, Wales, where he set two novels, and in 1955 to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he died in 1963.
Far from the Madding Crowd is the fourth published novel by English author Thomas Hardy; and his first major literary success. It was published on 23 November 1874. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine, where it gained a wide readership.
The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character is an 1886 novel by the English author Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy's Wessex novels, it is set in a fictional rural England with Casterbridge standing in for Dorchester in Dorset where the author spent his youth. It was first published as a weekly serialisation from January 1886.
The Woodlanders is the eleventh published novel by English author Thomas Hardy. The novel is set between 1856 and 1858. It was serialised from 15 May 1886 to 9 April 1887 in Macmillan's Magazine and published in three volumes in 1887. It is one of his series of Wessex novels.
Max Gate is the former home of Thomas Hardy and is located on the outskirts of Dorchester, Dorset, England. It was designed and built by Thomas Hardy for his own use in 1885 and he lived there until his death in 1928. In 1940 it was bequeathed to the National Trust by Hardy's sister and is now open to the public. It was designated as a Grade I listed building on 8 May 1970.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses is a collection of fifty-one poems set against the bleak and forbidding Dorset landscape by English writer Thomas Hardy. It was first published in London and New York in 1898 by Harper Brothers, and contained a number of illustrations by the author himself.
Egdon Heath is a fictitious area of Thomas Hardy's Wessex inhabited sparsely by the people who cut the furze (gorse) that grows there. The entire action of Hardy's novel The Return of the Native takes place on Egdon Heath, and it also features in The Mayor of Casterbridge and the short story The Withered Arm (1888). The area is rife with witchcraft and superstition.
The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament is the fourteenth and final published novel by English author Thomas Hardy. It was written before Jude the Obscure, the last novel written by Thomas Hardy, but was published after it, in 1897. The novel spans forty years, and follows Jocelyn Pierston, a celebrated sculptor who attempts to create in stone the image of his ideal woman, while he tries also to find her in the flesh.
The Hardy Way is a waymarked long-distance footpath in southern England in the United Kingdom.
Walter Frederick Roope Tyndale (1855–1943) was a British watercolourist of landscapes, architecture and street scenes, book illustrator and travel writer.
In literature regionalism refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features, such as dialect, customs, history, and landscape, of a particular region. The setting is particularly important in regional literature and the "locale is likely to be rural and/or provincial."
Wolf Solent is a novel by John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) that was written while he was based in Patchin Place, New York City, and travelling around the US as a lecturer. It was published by Simon and Schuster in May 1929 in New York. The British edition, published by Jonathan Cape, appeared in July 1929. This, Powys's fourth novel, was his first literary success. It is a bildungsroman in which the eponymous protagonist, a thirty-five-year-old history teacher, returns to his birthplace, where he discovers the inadequacy of his dualistic philosophy. Wolf resembles John Cowper Powys in that an elemental philosophy is at the centre of his life and, because, like Powys, he hates science and modern inventions like cars and planes, and is attracted to slender, androgynous women. Wolf Solent is the first of Powys's four Wessex novels. Powys both wrote about the same region as Thomas Hardy and was a twentieth-century successor to the great nineteenth-century novelist.
Egdon Heath, Op. 47, H. 172, subtitled "A Homage to Thomas Hardy", is a tone poem by Gustav Holst, written in 1927. Holst considered it his most perfectly realised composition.
Maiden Castle by John Cowper Powys was first published in 1936 and is the last of Powys so-called Wessex novels, following Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934). Powys was an admirer of Thomas Hardy, and these novels are set in Somerset and Dorset, part of Hardy's mythical Wessex. American scholar Richard Maxwell describes these four novels "as remarkably successful with the reading public of his time". Maiden Castle is set in Dorchester, Dorset Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge, and which Powys intended to be a "rival" to Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge. Glen Cavaliero describes Dorchester as "vividly present throughout the book as a symbol of the continuity of civilization. The title alludes to the Iron Age, hill fort Maiden Castle that stands near to Dorchester.
Jude the Obscure is a British television serial directed by Hugh David, starring Robert Powell, Fiona Walker, and Alex Marshall, first broadcast on BBC Television in early 1971. It is based on Thomas Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure (1895).
The Hardy Players (1908–1928) was an amateur theatrical company, based in Dorchester, Dorset. The novelist Thomas Hardy adapted his novels for live performance in collaboration with the group. In some cases he made major changes to the story, such as changing the ending of The Trumpet Major, truncating Return of the Native and making other changes to the text to better fit dramatisation. Hardy wrote his play The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall specifically to be performed by the Hardy Players.