1. I discuss Hardy’s maps further below. Maps are a feature of children’s literature, perhaps particularly that designed for boys. A map is printed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883),
2. Richard Jefferies’s Bevis: The Story of a Boy (1882) and
3. Rider Haggard’s King’s Solomon’s Mines (1886). Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia are similarly presented via maps and, in all these, using and drawing maps, finding one’s way with a compass or a set of instructions are essential to the experience of adventure. Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series shares this feature. By contrast, Hardy’s map of Wessex offers no destination, no ‘X marks the spot’ or consequent primary narrative. Where the map is centred and who centres it seem open to question. See
4. Diana Loxley, Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990), p.95 for her discussion of maps and adventure narratives, particularly Captain Marryat’s Masterman Ready (1841).
5. J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.129; see also p.241. Pocock points out that country-party ideology had political consequences in the American Revolution and few, if any, in Great Britain itself: it was ‘of vast importance in the history of thought [but] of very little importance in the history of English practice’ (p.79).