Thomas Hardy's Cartography

Abstract

This thesis uncovers connections between the mapping of fictional spaces in nineteenth-century literature and other contemporary forms of real-world cartography. The study is centred on the novels of Thomas Hardy and their intersections with town mapping, county maps and the mapping of Empire in the production of Wessex. I argue that mapping functions through language and ephemera, enabling Hardy to create his fictional landscape of Wessex via an intertextual and extratextual literary cartography; a map that exists across and beyond his novels. I interrogate the perspective of the cartographic gaze that Hardy employs through his characters and narrators, through which the spaces of the novels are mapped to various degrees, and how his use of the gaze relates to the production of maps in the nineteenth century. The first chapter positions The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) within the specifics of town mapping, revealing that both this novel and the Ordnance Survey’s map of Dorchester were produced in the same time and space. The second chapter examines the history of county maps alongside Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and sees mapping as a proactive process through the act of walking. In the third chapter, I place The Return of the Native (1878) alongside imperial cartographies, both real and fictional, to argue that Hardy undermines attempts to map spaces that can only be known to their native inhabitants. Across these chapters, I also track the intertextual cartographic development of Wessex through his novels, while in the conclusion I turn to the maps of Wessex that have been created since Hardy’s death. Using archival research into historic material, I build a fuller picture of the environment in which Hardy was writing and the centrality of cartography to the construction of Wessex. Placing Hardy’s work within the previously unexplored field of cartographic history opens up new ways of understanding the internal workings of Hardy’s Wessex in a way that further intertwines character and environment, and sheds new light on plotting space and story. Cartography is not just a static, material element of Hardy’s work in the form of maps of Wessex, confined to the novels’ ephemera; through my thesis I argue that cartography in its various manifestations forms an active part of Hardy’s writing process.