require a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity to their
scene. Finding that the area of a single county did not afford a
canvas large enough for this purpose, and that there were objections
to an invented name, I disinterred the old one. The press and the
public were kind enough to welcome the fanciful plan, and willingly
joined me in the anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living
under Queen Victoria;--a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post,
mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches,
labourers who could read and write, and National school children.
But I believe I am correct in stating that, until the existence of
this contemporaneous Wessex was announced in the present story, in
1874, it had never been heard of, and that the expression, "a Wessex
peasant," or "a Wessex custom," would theretofore have been taken to
refer to nothing later in date than the Norman Conquest.

I did not anticipate that this application of the word to a modern
use would extend outside the chapters of my own chronicles. But the
name was soon taken up elsewhere as a local designation. The first
to do so was the now defunct _Examiner_, which, in the impression
bearing date July 15, 1876, entitled one of its articles "The Wessex
Labourer," the article turning out to be no dissertation on farming
during the Heptarchy, but on the modern peasant of the south-west
counties, and his presentation in these stories.

Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the
horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-country, has
become more and more popular as a practical definition; and the
dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region
which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers
from. But I ask all good and gentle readers to be so kind as to