Wessex

It’s not the most original joke, I know.

Thomas Hardy is one of my favorite authors of all time. I’d love to be able to jump into his fictional world, except that all the women seem to come to unfortunate ends and that would make me fear for my life.

The extinct kingdom to which Hardy refers, of course, is that ancient kingdom of the West Saxons known as Wessex. From the sixth to the tenth centuries the boundaries of Wessex expanded and contracted as wars went favorably or otherwise, but the
heart of the kingdom, with its capital at Winchester, always lay in southwest England, and in large part approximated the area indicated by the map displayed above.

Hardy’s concept of Wessex, as we know it today, did not spring full-blown from his mind at an early stage. Rather, it evolved over the years in both size and exactitude as his imagination formulated a unifying geographic canvas for his novels and poems.

It was not until about 1884, when he began to write The Mayor of Casterbridge, that ”... Hardy achieved a full realization of the Wessex concept, a realization which depended on the establishment of Casterbridge itself… as the central point, the economic, adminis- trative, and social capital, of a whole region” (from Michael Millgate’s Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, which devotes a chapter to “The Evolution of Wessex”).

In 1895-96, Hardy painstakingly revised his novels for the Osgood, McIlvaine collected editions soon to be published. He systematically changed place names and topography to
conform consistently with the fictitious Wessex he had formulated. For example, actual place names were used in The Trumpet-Major when originally published in 1880; now Dorchester became Casterbridge, Weymouth became Budmouth, and so on. In other cases distances and directions were changed to conform to the actual landscape of the region. In Far From the Madding Crowd, for example, when driving the funeral cart from Casterbridge to Weatherbury, Joseph Poorgrass originally went up a hill, looked left to the sea, and saw high hills; this was modified to down a hill, looked right to the sea, and saw long ridges. The new wording more accurately describes what one would
actually experience in traveling that route from west to east. Further revisions were made in later years for later editions, until finally Hardy’s vast works conformed to the region
that he envisioned and called Wessex. But as Thomas Hardy himself always maintained, “This is an imaginative Wessex only”.