Hardy Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd

Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT, SAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, and AP English Test Preparation.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