Far from the Madding Crowd

In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in the chapters of "e;Far from the Madding Crowd,"e; as they appeared month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt the word "e;Wessex"e; 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. 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, "e;a Wessex peasant,"e; or "e;a Wessex custom,"e; would theretofore have been taken to refer to nothing later in date than the Norman Conquest