2 Locations

There's a close relationship between Far from the Madding Crowd and the area around this cottage. Hardy himself explained to Stephen that his home was within a walk of the district in which the incidents in the book are supposed to occur. Hardy's cottage is, in fact, halfway between the two major destinations in the book, the two places that people walk towards or away from along what is now the A35. Casterbridge or Dorchester is just under three miles away to the southwest and Weatherbury, or Puddletown, where Bathsheba's farm was located, a little less in the opposite direction. Much of the landscape here looks very different from how it did in Hardy's time. Much of what was originally bleak heathland has been planted with conifers. Behind Hardy's cottage, however, there is one part that has been restored to be more like the original heath. Hardy was a great walker. And there are many walks in Far from the Madding Crowd. These walks fall into a rough overall pattern. First of all, we get a movement from east to west. Then at the end, a movement back again, back to the east. The novel opens way over to the northwest in a quite different part of Dorset, near Beaminster or in Hardy's name for it, Emminster, where Gabriel keeps his sheep farm. Gabriel travels to the great county town, the great public centre, Casterbridge, to try to get a job at the hiring fair. Then he walks from Casterbridge towards the location of the next hiring fair but ends up instead in Weatherbury. At the end of the novel, there are two important bleak walks in the opposite direction, from Weatherbury, the little world of the novel, to the public institutional world of Casterbridge, as Fanny's agonising trek to the union workhouse and Boldwood's walk to the prison.

Far from the Madding Crowd has its grim or despairing moments. Fanny's death is a good example. But in comparison to some of his later and more controversial novels, it is overall an optimistic and cheerful work. Hardy continued to write novels for more than 20 years until, following the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure, he turned to writing poetry instead, revising his novels as they were reprinted. When Hardy died in 1928 at Max Gate, the house in Dorchester he'd designed for himself and where he was living very privately with his second wife Florence, he was perhaps the most eminent writer in the country. He wanted to be buried at the church he had gone to as a boy, at Stinsford alongside his parents, grandparents, and first wife Emma. And his heart is buried here. Although bizarrely, the rest of his body is buried in Westminster Abbey. Although Hardy was a religious sceptic, the church and the peaceful country churchyard represented continuity and a sense of belonging which was of great importance to him.