Far From the Madding Crowd

Far From the Madding Crowd

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Title: Far From The Madding Crowd
Author: Thomas Hardy
Release Date: February, 1994 [EBook #107] [This file was last updated
on March 28, 2002]

Edition: 11a
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAR FROM
THE MADDING CROWD ***

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
by Thomas Hardy
Preface
In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in
the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd" as they appeared month
by month in a popular magazine, that 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
country did not afford a canvas large enough for this purpose, and that
there were objections to an invented name, I disinterred the old one.
The press and the public were kind enough to welcome the fanciful
plan, and willingly joined me in the anachronism of imagining a
Wessex population living under Queen Victoria; -- a modern Wessex of
railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines, union
workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who could read and write, and
National school children. But I believe I am correct in stating that, until
the existence of this contemporaneous Wessex was announced in the
present story, in 1874, it had never been heard of, and that the
expression, "a Wessex peasant" or "a Wessex custom" would
theretofore have been taken to refer to nothing later in date than the
Norman Conquest.
I did not anticipate that this application of the word to a modern use
would extend outside the chapters of my own chronicles. But the name
was soon taken up elsewhere as a local designation. The first to do so

was the now defunct Examiner, which, in the impression bearing date
July 15, 1876, entitled one of its articles "The Wessex Labourer," the
article turning out to be no dissertation on farming during the
Heptarchy, but on the modern peasant of the south-west counties, and
his presentation in these stories.
Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the
horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream- country, has
become more and more popular as a practical 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. But I
ask all good and gentle readers to be so kind as to forget this, and to
refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any inhabitants of a Victorian
Wessex outside the pages of this and the companion volumes in which
they were first discovered.
Moreover, the village called Weatherbury, wherein the scenes of the
present story of the series are for the most part laid, would perhaps be
hardly discernible by the explorer, without help, in any existing place
nowadays; though at the time, comparatively recent, at which the tale
was written, a sufficient reality to meet the descriptions, both of
backgrounds and personages, might have been traced easily enough.
The church remains, by great good fortune, unrestored and intact, and a
few of the old houses; but the ancient malt-house, which was formerly
so characteristic of the parish, has been pulled down these twenty years;
also most of the thatched and dormered cottages that were once
lifeholds. The game of prisoner's base, which not so long ago seemed to
enjoy a perennial vitality in front of the worn-out stocks, may, so far as
I can say,