The Imaginative Geography of the West Country

Abstract

By choosing to set his novels in ‘Wessex’, Hardy selects ‘the south-west counties’, an identifiable as well as imaginary part of England.1 One motive for the choice was Hardy’s familiarity with the area, his nativeborn local knowledge. Yet his local knowledge is nationally situated. Hardy’s map of ‘The Wessex of the Novels’ (first published in the 1895 collected edition) shows Casterbridge, Melchester, Port Bredy and all the other named places of Wessex located in the British Isles. These imaginary places have an obvious connection of some kind with Dorchester, Salisbury and Bridport; similarly, ‘South Wessex’ is evidently some sort of equivalent to Dorset. Hardy’s home ground, therefore, is set within the country as a whole. The private experience of home, which one might expect to offer a retreat from the noisy, social world outside, is presented here as lying within range of the communal knowledge that establishes maps and puts places on them. The presence of the map, confirming the correspondence between fictional and real places, prevents one from reading the novels solely within a dichotomy between country and city; the particular part of the country involved is pushed to the fore. The novels are set in Wessex and this is visibly part of England, ‘South Wessex’ exactly corresponding to the county of Dorset.KeywordsEighteenth CenturyLake DistrictLocal IndependenceCentral RoutePrivate ExperienceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.