ABSTRACT
Composition and serialization In january 1873, Hardy went back to live and work in the cottage where he had been born, and where his parents were still residing, at Higher Bockhampton, Dorset. It was here that he composed the 'pastoral tale' that he had offered Leslie Stephen for serialization in the Cornbill Magazine. In his training for an architectural career, Hardy had shuttled between office work in London and church-restoration work in Cornwall and elsewhere. Returning to the familiar scenes of his childhood seems to have given him the confidence and composure he needed to plan and write a successful serial closely based on scenes of rural life and labour. In a letter to Stephen he explained that his home was 'within a walk of the district in which the incidents are supposed to occur', and that he found it 'a great advantage to be actually among the people described at the time of describing them' (quoted in Millgate, 1982, p.153).
