Chapter LVII. A Foggy Night and Morning—Conclusion

Notes

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 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, “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, be entirely unknown to the rising generation of

schoolboys there. The practice of divination by Bible and key, the

regarding of valentines as things of serious import, the

shearing-supper, and the harvest-home, have, too, nearly disappeared in

the wake of the old houses; and with them have gone, it is said, much

of that love of fuddling to which the village at one time was

notoriously prone. The change at the root of this has been the recent

supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers, who carried on the

local traditions and humours, by a population of more or less migratory

labourers, which has led to a break of continuity in local history,

more fatal than any other thing to the preservation of legend,

folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities.

For these the indispensable conditions of existence are attachment to

the soil of one particular spot by generation after generation.

T. H.

February 1895