Far From The Madding Crowd - The Novel and Hardy's Wessex

The Novel and Hardy's Wessex

• Hardy first employed the term "Wessex" in Far from the Madding Crowd to describe the "partly real, partly dream-country" that unifies his novels of Southwest England. He found the word in the pages of early English history as a designation for an extinct, pre-Norman Conquest kingdom. In the first edition, the word "Wessex" is used only once, in chapter 50; Hardy extended the reference for the 1895 edition.
• The village of Puddletown, near Dorchester, is the inspiration for the novel's Weatherbury. Dorchester, in turn, inspired Hardy's Casterbridge.
• In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy briefly mentions two characters from Far from the Madding Crowd– Farmer Everdene and Farmer Boldwood, both in happier days.