Wessex, Hardy and the Nature Novelists

Bibliographic Data

ID8964367
AuthorsBereza Birch (corresponding author), B P Birch
Year1981
Volume6
Issue3
Pages348-348
Publication date1981-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.2307/622293
OpenAlexW2317439004
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited2

Although Hardy is the best-known regional novelist of south-central England and did most to revive the term Wessex as a regional name, a number of other writers since the middle of the nineteenth century have used aspects of the same region to give their literature a stronger environmental basis. Most attention in the past has been devoted to Hardy's selective use of settings from the real region to create his part-imaginary Wessex. But other features of his topographic approach, such as his attempts in his later novels to move his stories across different districts within Wessex, are of equal interest. This is partly because they parallel literary devices of a similar socio-ecological nature which other writers in the region-W. H. Hudson, for example, and the Powys brothers-were using, giving them the means to attract a readership to writing based on a then littleknown region. One of the main supports of the great span of English literature is its richness in regional writing, a support which in turn rests on twin pillars. One of these is the relatively small number of major authors, like Scott, Bennett and Hardy whose names are closely associated with particular parts of Britain and with regional literature at its best. The other pillar is made up of a galaxy of less eminent, less fashionable or less prolific writers who also set their works within particular districts but who often gained little more distinction than being thought of as 'local' authors. Nowhere does this seem truer than in south-central England, a region closely associated in the popular mind with Thomas Hardy and Wessex. Yet while Hardy created imaginary Victorian Wessex from out of various elements of those southern counties for his own literary purposes, the region also offered inspiration to a range of other storytellers, rural writers and poets who, in their own ways, used its landscapes and people to create their imaginative literature. Though not forming a distinctive 'school', these Wessex regionalists can be seen to have given, since the middle of the nineteenth century, a strong thrust to the environmental approach in English literature. It was in 1874, on the publication of his fourth major novel Far From the Madding Crowd, that Hardy revived the regional term 'Wessex', which had been largely unused since Saxon times. Over the next 30 years he wrote a series of 15 novels as well as many short stories which were set in various parts of the six counties of southern England, centred on Dorset. As Hardy later explained: I first ventured to adopt the word 'Wessex' from the pages of early English history, and give it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once included in that extinct Kingdom. 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... I believe I am correct in stating that, until the existence of this contemporaneous Wessex in place of the usual counties was announced. . . it had never been heard of in fiction and current speech.' In fact William Barnes, the Dorset poet, had disinterred Wessex as a regional name in the 1860s but it was the popularity of Hardy's tales which was to bring it back into common use. Yet if we are to believe what Hardy later wrote of his reasons for using this regional definition, it seems clear that whereas at first it was a mere term of convenience, the region he Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. N.S. 6, 348-58 (1981) Printed in Great Britain This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 04:40:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Wessex, Hardy and the nature novelists 349 thus created later took on a greater significance for him. As a young writer seeking recognition and a long-term career in literature he needed a territorial frame to help link together the rather local, parochial scenes and characters with which he peopled his stories, tales based partly on real-life situations he had witnessed or learned about in his early life in Dorset. Looking back some 20 years after he first employed Wessex as a term, he wrote of his surprise to find his invention had become popular as a practical regional definition: Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons and landscapes of a partly real, partly dream-country, has become more and more popular as a practical provincial definition; and the dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from.2 Though he asked his readers not to believe in the real existence of the imaginary Victorian Wessex of which he wrote, so popular did his writings become and so numerous the readers who attempted to trace out his literary topography, that in the prefaces to later editions of his Wessex Tales he gave explanations of his geographical settings and the ways in which he had transliterated real places and place-names into fictional forms. He even provided a map of Wessex to aid the reader in locating these places. A few placesBlackmore, Stonehenge, Southampton and some others-retained their real names, but many others were changed in a style related to their current or former name, or took on an entirely fictional form. Weymouth became Budmouth, Bournemouth became Sandbourne, Dorchester became Casterbridge, while each of the counties from Hampshire to Cornwall took the name of Wessex with a variety of prefixes. Reconstructions of Hardy's Wessex and his imagipative use of the landscapes of southcentral England have proved an intriguing theme for literary topographers ever since Windle's The Wessex of Thomas Hardy was published in 1902.3 Several of these have noted the care Hardy took in choosing the settings for his stories, a care reflecting his belief in the need for a strong link between the fictional characters and their environments. Yet although events in Hardy's stories owe much to real places and the lives of real folk, his use of the topography of south-central England was selective to the extent that his Wessex bore only limited relation to the six counties he based it on. Attempts at using Hardy's writings to learn more of the topography and conditions in south-central England at the time he wrote will therefore founder unless note is taken of this deliberately introduced distortion. Cognizance should also be taken of the fact that, as Hardy's fictional style matured, there was a change in the mode and purpose of his use of environmental depiction. The distorted view of the real Wessex Hardy portrayed in his stories can be seen in several ways. While his region covered six counties, it was essentially focused on his own Dorset. Born and bred there, he wrote especially from his intricate knowledge of its rural folkways, although it should be noted that his purview of Wessex sometimes extended well outside Dorset's borders, especially as his literary skill matured. Pinion's study of Hardy4 enables us to map (Fig. 1) the distribution of places Hardy used as settings in his novels and shorter stories where the locations have been grouped according to their frequency of use and the relative importance of the events portrayed there. This confirms that Hardy drew the great majority of his settings from Dorset, or, as he called it, South Wessex, and especially the settings of the more important events in the novels generally accepted to be his best. Yet it is also clear that occasionally he set events and, sometimes, whole stories, in places well outside his Dorset. These outer locations were scattered and often governed as much by the needs of the stories as by his view of, or familiarity with, that part of southern England. One early This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 04:40:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms * Location of minor event in one story 0 Location of major event in one story * Location of minor event in several stories 0 Location of major event in several stories

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