Wessex Poems & Other Verses

Thomas Hardy was born in the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton about three miles east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, on 2nd June 1840. Despite a fairly wide education and being an avid reader his parents thought it unlikely he would lead a successful scholarly or clerical career and he was apprenticed in 1856, at age 16, to a local architect whose speciality was in church restoration. Hardy’s only opportunity to read was in the morning before work between the hours of five and eight. On the back of