Thomas Hardy and his Wessex

"There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand, For thinking, dreaming, dying on at crisis when I stand, say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward or on Wylls-Neck westwardly, I seem where I was before my birth, and after my death may be." Thomas Hardy - Wessex Heights

Hardy first mentioned Wessex in Far From The Madding Crowd (1874). He descibed it in the preface to a later edition that the names usefulness was a means of giving his stories what we would now call a coporate identity and it was to become part of his own trademark.

"The series of novels I projected being mainly of a 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 tere were objections to an invented name, I disintered the old one.

Since then, the appellation which I had thought to reserve to horizons and landscapes of a partly realy, partly dream-country, has become more and more popular as a pratical provincial definition; and the dream country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a housein, and write to the papers from."

Wessex is in south-western England, encompassing Dorset and parts of Devon, between Plymouth and Southampton. This is the ancient kingdom of Wessex, which Hardy revived in order to emphasise the traditional lore that his stories and books are rooted in.