EVENING LECTURE: 'Roots and Boundaries: Enclosure and Belonging in Hardy’s Wessex' - Maisie Corkhill

Part of our 2026-27 Roots & Networks Lecture Series Join us for a drinks reception from 6pm. The lecture will start at 6.30pm and afterwards there'll be time for questions. 'Roots and Boundaries: Enclosure and Belonging in Hardy’s Wessex' Maisie Corkhill What does it mean to be rooted in a place that is shaped by forces far beyond the local? Maisie’s research explores how 19th century Parliamentary enclosures shape land, communities and narrative in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. Hardy’s rural world is often read through the lens of the local, with romantic and social dramas played out amongst contained communities. But the landscape that provided the stage for Hardy’s novels was one subject to privatisation, which in turn defined the narrative possibilities for Hardy’s world: who can own land, who can work it, who can move through it, and, ultimately, who can belong. Enclosure (literally the ‘enclosing’ of land arranged by Acts of Parliament) reorganised not only the physical landscape but also the relationships between people within it. My research has shown that the South-West of England was a hub of nineteenth-century enclosures, and I explore how this transforms Hardy’s idea of Wessex. Puddletown, which inspired Weatherbury in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) was enclosed between 1828-1844. An enclosure award and map of Marnhull, which corresponds to Marlott in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) reveals that in 1859, eighty-one acres of the parish were enclosed. Changes in ownership are often at the root of local tragedy in Hardy’s novels, from the Durbeyfield’s eviction from their cottage to Giles’s loss of his life-holds in The Woodlanders (1887). This talk will ask who gets to put down roots in an increasingly privatised landscape, and what happens to those who lack secure claims to land. It will explore how rootedness – and its absence – frame Hardy’s characters and narratives, from itinerant workers and tenants to lifeholders. While the literal boundaries of enclosure reshaped fields, roads and footpaths, this talk reveals how it also defined Hardy’s narrative pathways through Wessex.