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