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.
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Notes
Certainly as early as Bertram C. A. Windle, The Wessex of Thomas Hardy (London, 1902), p. 4.
Hardy to Marston (of Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington), [1885?] (Purdy coll.); for the revisions to the Osgood, Mcllvaine edn. see Purdy, p. 281, and W. J. Keith, ‘Thomas Hardy and the Literary Pilgrims’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 24 (1969), 84–88.
Hardy to Douglas, January 28, 1903, in W.M. Parker, ‘Hardy’s Letters to Sir George Douglas’, English, 14 (1963), 222.
Handley C. G. Moule, Memories of a Vicarage (London, 1913), pp. 31–32. The Rev. Henry Moule was one of the local committee responsible for arranging the Dorchester ceremony.
Weber, ‘Chronology in Hardy’s Novels’, PMLA, 53 (1938), 320.
Weber, Hardy of Wessex : His Life and Literary Career, revised edn. (New York, 1965), p. 224.
See, however, Albert A. Murphree and Carl F. Strauch, ‘The Chronology of The Return of the Native’, Modern Language Notes, 54 (1939), 491–497.
F. B. Pinion, in A Hardy Companion : A Guide to the Works of Thomas Hardy and Their Background (London, 1968), also has a few modifications to suggest: e.g., he notes (p. 21) the internal clue to the dating of Under the Greenwood Tree (see above, p. 57).
Weber, ‘Chronology’, p. 318, Hardy of Wessex, p. 149. This mis-understanding disqualifies much of the discussion in Carl J. Weber and F. B. Pinion, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge : An Anglo-American Dialogue’, Library Chronick of the University of Texas, 8, iii (1967), pp. 3–12. References in Hardy to Candlemas and Lady-Day are (I think invariably) to Old Style, February 14 and April 6: cf. ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, p. 259 (Personal Writings, p. 177). As late as 1902 H. Rider Haggard noted in Rural England, I, 280: ‘In Dorchester an annual hiring fair is held on February 14, that is, old Candlemas Day.’ And see above, p. 99.
G. M. Young and W. D. Handcock, eds., English Historical Documents, Vol. XII (1). 1833–1874 (London, 1956), pp. 530–531.
David St John Thomas, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain : Volume I. The West Country, revised edn. (Newton Abbot, 1966). p. 33.
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© 1994 Michael Millgate
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Millgate, M. (1994). The Evolution of Wessex. In: Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379534_20
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