(Gyles Brandreth) From the epic sweep of the Yorkshire moors... (man) This is the landscape that sits at the heart of the Bronte story.

(Gyles) ...to the cobbled sprawl of Victorian London...

I can just imagine Dickens walking down this very street.

...and the jagged beauty of the Jurassic Coast.

Talk about a cliffhanger!

(bright music) Join me, Gyles Brandreth, as I travel the country to uncover the real-life stories... Go on!

I'm liking the goss.

...and places... -But where are we now?

-We're in Mad Mary's room.

(Gyles) Good grief!

That is amazing!

...that inspired some of our most famous authors: Charles Dickens, The Bronte Sisters, Thomas Hardy, and Jane Austen.

(woman) We have Jane Austen's writing table.

(Gyles) Wow!

With the help of some friends... (gasping) Good afternoon.

...I'll unlock the secrets behind their unforgettable novels... Oh, I love it!

...delve into their lives and uncover the true life events that inspired some of the greatest stories ever told.

(woman) The sale of a wife... (Gyles) Oh, this is literally detective work.

They may be gone, but their tales live on, brought to our TV and cinema screens by some very familiar faces.

♪ So come with me as I discover Britain just as it was written.

That's what I call a story.

♪ (birds chirping) (vibrant music) (train rumbling) (whistle blowing) (train whistle blowing) ♪ (train hissing, clacking) ♪ I'm on a journey to one of the most breathtaking corners of Britain.

(train rumbling) An area covered by an ancient patchwork of fields and farms.

(bleating) Dotted with quaint villages and sprinkled with chocolate box thatched cottages.

So historic, so scenic, so downright charming.

No wonder the locals like to shout about it.

(bell ringer) Oh, yay!

(bell ringing) Welcome to Wessex!

(chuckles) (upbeat music) ♪ (Gyles) Thousands are drawn here every week, so what's the secret of its attraction?

(woman) When I think of Wessex, I think of beautiful countryside.

(cow moos) (man) Wessex, I love it for its history, mainly, its long tradition.

(woman) What does Wessex mean?

Wessex means really lovely cream teas.

♪ (applause) (Gyles) Can't argue with any of those reasons for coming here.

But the actual name of the place, well, that's a different matter because Wessex is a fiction.

There isn't any such English county.

Yes, once upon a time, there was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom called Wessex, but the Wessex of today, that's a re-invention.

It's the product of the imagination of just one man, a poet, a novelist, Thomas Hardy.

Hardy lived most of his life in the southwest of England, and his fictionalized county of Wessex, larger than the ancient kingdom, stretched all the way from Hampshire to Cornwall, and it's where he set his most popular stories, conjuring up images of a perfect green and pleasant land.

Scratch below the surface of his work, though, and a much darker world is revealed, one of scandal, adultery, wife selling, and murder.

(grim music) ♪ Hardy's heyday was in the 1800s, but his stories continue to cast a spell.

His most famous works have all been turned into successful TV and film dramas over the years: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure, and one of my favorite heroines, Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Hardy is one of the best sellers because he's adaptable and he brings in people that probably didn't know much about him because they enjoyed the film and want to read the book.

(Gyles) Hardy's breakthrough came nearly 150 years ago, when he wrote the original Far from the Madding Crowd.

Basing it in his historical rural idyll, he blew Victorian readers away with an unforgettable tale of infatuation, jealousy, passion, and sheep.

These aren't just any old sheep, you know.

They are Hollywood sheep, stars of the 2015 movie version.

It starred Carey Mulligan, and these woolly beauties, a breed called Dorset Horns, were hers.

Well...she borrowed them from Francis.

(Francis) They've been in the family since 1906.

It was my great-grandfather that started the flock, and so the same blood lines that are in the Dorset Horns now has come all the way through from 1906.

If Thomas Hardy looked out of his window and saw these sheep and he saw the Dorset Horns, they'd be exactly the same as they were back then in that day.

They would have been very, very prominent all over Dorset.

(Gyles) The film drew praise for its authentic depiction of 19th-century rural life, but of course it wasn't just the sheep that had got everyone hooked on the tale.

Famously played by stars from Carey Mulligan to Julie Christie, it was the story of Hardy's wonderful main character, the gutsy temptress Bathsheba Everdene.

(John) The most unusual thing is the heroine, who inherits a farm and a property and who has to run it.

She has to recruit men to help her do it.

But she is the person with the money and the power, and that's a really unusual story to tell.

Hardy's writing from a woman's perspective.

He does so very convincingly, and that's unusual for the time.

(Gyles) The 1967 film version with Julie Christie as Bathsheba captures the romance of the story perfectly, where she is courted by not one but three very different suitors.

Far from the Madding Crowd is certainly a page-turner.

It has strong themes, strong characters, and, perhaps above all, a strong sense of place.

(birds chirping) And that place is, of course, Wessex.

Coming up, my rural skills are put to the test.

I'm gonna have to work on my whistling.

-I'm not very good at whistling.

-Yeah.

It's a skill.

(Gyles) No, my whistle is pathetic.

And why all the stories he based here continue to attract readers and film fans in their millions.

(Russell) It's class and sex mixed, which is what the whole of my twenties was.

(Gyles) Wessex, the imaginary rural idyll of Thomas Hardy, a writer who introduced the Victorian reader to the beauty and traditions of the countryside.

Hardy drew from many locations he knew in his own county of Dorset.

In his breakthrough novel Far from the Madding Crowd, one of the inspirations for his main character Bathsheba's farm is an estate he often visited as a young man.

This is Athelhampton Hall.

Now, Hardy in the novel described Bathsheba's farmhouse as a Jacobean building.

"With fluted pilasters, worked from the solid stone, and above the roof, pairs of chimneys here and there.

Soft brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed patches upon the stone tiling."

Well, there you have it.

There are certainly elements of this that could belong in Bathsheba's farm house, but Hardy doesn't place his heroine as a genteel lady living in a grand manor house like this.

His heroine is more down-to-earth, feisty, intelligent, romantic.

This is the telling element for a Victorian novel: She runs her own business.

She's a woman in command of her own destiny.

Groundbreaking stuff for those Victorians.

(whistling, indistinct commands) To be successful, Bathsheba knew she had to put in twice the effort men did, and nearly 150 years on, the work of a female farmer doesn't get any easier.

Jemma Harding raises 450 sheep in this corner of Dorset, along with her dog, Ghost.

Hope it's not too hard though, as I am going to have a go myself.

-So, you've seen her in action.

-I've seen her in action and I like Ghosty's style.

(Jemma) Now is your chance to have a go.

-Good.

-But let's see, she's never worked for anyone else before, so let's see.

So, to send her left, so she goes round them left, it's "Come-Bye."

(Gyles) "Come-Bye," yes.

(Jemma) So, that is the instruction for her, and to go the other way is "Away," but you say it as "weeee."

(Gyles) Good.

"Come-Bye," we'll go to the left.

(Jemma) We'll go to the left.

Let's see...I don't know if she will listen to you because she's never worked for anyone else before.

She's only ever worked for me, so, we'll see.

(Gyles) Okay, Ghosty, I'm gonna get her attention.

Ghosty!

Ghosty!

Come-Bye, come on... Come-Bye!

Come-Bye!

(whistling) Come-Bye!

(mellow music) She's doing it.

(Jemma) She's going.

(Gyles) She's going and they're going too.

(whistles, sheep bleating) (Jemma) Send her the other way, so say, "Weeeee."

(Gyles) Weeeee... (Jemma) Ghosty, wee.

Wrong way, Ghost.

Ghost!

-We've confused her.

-Yeah.

-She's trying.

-She is doing her best.

I'm gonna have to work on my whistling.

-I'm not very good at whistling.

-Yeah.

It's a skill.

-It is a skill.

-Yeah.

(Gyles) No, my whistle is pathetic.

(Jemma) Okay, yeah, that's not gonna work.

(laughing) Yeah, she's not gonna listen to that.

(Gyles) I know, she's not gonna listen to that.

That's why I wasn't attempting it.

I wasn't attempting a whistle.

Just like Bathsheba, Jemma is one of the few female sheep farmers in Dorset.

And just like Bathsheba, she inherited her farm.

So, was Hardy's portrayal of his heroine accurate?

(Jemma) Yes, definitely.

He definitely understands how hard it would have been for her.

She was also quite young, quite pretty.

Think if she'd been sort of an old matron, ruddy-faced, stern, perhaps she would have commanded a little more respect immediately, but, um, she definitely had to earn her respect.

(Gyles) Bathsheba...unmarried?

-Yes.

-That's an issue.

There are nursery rhymes telling you about the farmer and his wife.

So, a farmer without a husband and she's a female farmer, what's your take on that?

Yeah, I think, again, that still rings a bit true, like I often would get asked, "Oh, is your hu--" They say, "What do you do?"

"I'm a farmer."

"Oh, so your husband's a farmer."

"No, no, no, I'm a farmer."

And there would have been a lot of expectation and pressure for her to have been married.

I think in that time, a lot of women, their ambition was to be married.

That was it, that was their role.

Hardy was possibly ahead of his time in writing a character like Bathsheba.

I don't think she was very well-received by critics in the day, who would've all been men, and it would have been threatening to have a woman, so strong and independent and not needing a man to provide for her.

Um, that would have been huge back then, so I think he was quite brave to write her.

You read about her when you were a teenager.

Was she, in any sense, a role model for you?

Yes, I could relate to her, in that independence and strength and determination, to prove herself and do more than anyone else.

I hope your love life has been more-- less complicated and more successful.

Eh... (laughing) (Gyles) Oh, I see, that rang true as well.

So sorry!

Cut!

(laughing) (bright music) (birds chirping) Hardy's own story begins here, at Higher Bockhampton in Dorset.

His childhood home would later inspire one of his novels, Under the Greenwood Tree.

"It was a long low cottage with a hipped roof of thatch, having dormer windows breaking up into the eaves, a chimney standing in the middle of the ridge and another at each end."

There it is.

♪ Places like this don't come cheap these days, but when Hardy was growing up in the 1840s, they were strictly for the workers.

His father was a stonemason, his mother a cook for wealthy local families.

When Thomas was little, she'd sit here in the kitchen and tell him tales and legends about the countryside.

He not only lapped them up, he was reading them himself by the age of three.

(Angelique) Hardy's mother, Jemima, was bookish, which was unusual for a woman who was in domestic service in the early Victorian period.

She encouraged him in his school work and his writing.

(Mark) Jemima had a tremendous influence on Hardy.

She had a terrible childhood that her mother married a ne'er-do-well who was an alcoholic, so Jemima consoled herself by reading.

(John) I think from a very young age, she was encouraging Hardy to think that life as an agricultural worker was going to be below him, that he could do something better.

(mellow music) (Gyles) Dorset, at the time, was one of the poorest counties in England, and the economy relied mainly on agriculture.

Farm laborers were at the mercy of the seasons and the often pitiful wages handed down to them by the landed gentry.

Thomas would have grown up seeing extreme poverty.

At the same time, he was gaining an understanding of authentic countryside life like no other writer and a knowledge of its traditions that would later course through his novels.

He introduced rural pastimes to the Victorian reader, such as country dancing and music.

(upbeat music) ♪ Bravo!

(clapping) Tim, that was magnificent, completely wonderful.

The music you're playing, is this music that Hardy would have known?

(Tim) It was music that Hardy grew up with.

He grew up hearing his father play the fiddle, play the violin, grandfather playing the cello.

He first of all had a little squeezebox, tiny little concertina, but very rapidly went on to playing the violin.

Well, I'm very excited because I thought of him as a poet and a novelist.

I had no idea that he was a man of music.

Yes, and he loved dancing as well, he was a great dancer.

I believe he last danced when he was in his eighties.

(Gyles) With his big walrus mustache at the end of his life, that severe face and the-- he does not look like a dancer.

Mind you, everybody had big walrus mustaches in those days.

Well, apart from women of course, but... (laughing) No, he was a wonderful dancer, very nimble apparently.

(Gyles) Well, if he was nimble, if he could do it in his eighties... -Yes.

-...I am going to have a go.

-I think you should.

-And this, what you were just doing is a country dance, a jig?

-What is it?

-Well, it's a hornpipe step, so it's a-- it's a one, two, three, hop.

So you start on your right foot.

One, two, three, and a hop on that on that one.

-Hold on.

-Yeah, so you go, right, left, right, hop on the right, and then do this... -One, two, three... -That's it.

-One, two, three, up!

-That's it.

Well, you'll get it eventually.

(Gyles) One, two, three, up!

One, two, three, up!

I've mastered it!

(Tim) I'm trying to do what you're doing now.

(Gyles) If you do what I'm doing, it will look better, okay?

And one, two, three!

And one, two, three!

-It's looking good!

-It is looking good!

And the elbows go up.

And the elbows go up.

(humming) Well, let's do it with real music, okay?

-I think we should, yes.

-All right?

-Yes.

-Excellent!

You're more out of breath than I am!

-I know... -Excellent!

This is encouraging.

Start on the right foot.

(upbeat music) ♪ (Tim) That's it!

♪ Ah... Well done, my son!

(Gyles) I notice I'm the only one applauding.

(laughter, clapping) Thank you, thank you for your indulgence.

That's marvelous, and he loved this all his life.

-Yes, yes.

-The joy of the jig!

(Tim) The joy of the jig, that's right!

In his poem, Great Things, he talks about the three things he loved, the first of which was cider, the second was dancing and music, and the third was love.

(Gyles) Well, I love the way you dance, and the cider's on me and it's in the next room.

(Tim) Excellent!

(Gyles) It was Hardy's ability to celebrate rural traditions as well as explore the dark side of countryside life that marked him out as a unique writer, and after Far from the Madding Crowd's success, he would repeat the formula and become a literary superstar.

Coming up, his tragic tale of Tess.

It's nightfall, she's scared, she senses she's in trouble, terrible trouble.

(dramatic music) (upbeat music) Wessex, the dreamlike corner of England that Thomas Hardy invented and then introduced to millions of readers around the world.

As much as his stories and characters, it was his vivid descriptions of rural life that drew them in, a life he knew well after growing up in a small village in deepest Dorset.

Like most families in the area, the Hardys were self-sufficient.

See those apples in their orchard?

They won't only for eating.

(chatter) Today, Penny Cake and her family are keeping the West Country tradition of cider-making alive.

Want to see how the Hardys would have made theirs?

Over to Penny.

(Penny) First of all we've got to collect some cider apples, so we wait till they've fallen onto the floor.

We can't take them from the tree?

(Penny) No, because they might not be ripe, so we wait till they fall on the ground.

(Gyles) What types of apple do you have in these parts?

(Penny) Well, there's a mixture in this orchard.

We've got Bramleys, we've got russets, and we've also got some traditional Dorset cider apples.

We've got Warrior, Sunset, Slack-Ma-Girdles.

-Slack-Ma-Girdle?

-Yep.

(Gyles) I like the sound of that!

Slack-Ma-Girdle.

-Yes.

-As in loosen my girdle?

(Penny) Absolutely, to do with the effect that the cider has when you drink it.

(Gyles) I think it's Slack-Ma-Girdle I'm after.

In the 1840s, when Thomas Hardy was a little boy, are families all over Dorset doing this?

(Penny) Yeah, they would have used every bit of their apples, and making cider was a good way of storing them, and also, at the time, cider was a drink that was safe, whereas, a lot of the time, the water wasn't always that safe to drink.

(Gyles) So, it's a safe drink and it's relatively cheap, you got a tree in your garden.

Shall we see if we can carry this?

(Penny) Yeah, so now we take it off to the crusher.

(Gyles) Well, not just any crusher... Oh, it's getting more difficult now.

A genuine Victorian crusher.

Oh my goodness!

Got to keep the momentum going.

Come on now!

(Penny) There you go.

(Gyles) So, we've stirred all this up, and what's come out at the bottom?

(Penny) That's known as pomace, so it's the crushed-up apple.

So you see it's not too fine, so you can still get the juice out, and from there, we'll put it into the press.

(Gyles) Oh, it's getting a bit stiffer now.

Oh my goodness!

(juice dripping) They had to be strong, the people that did this.

-Absolutely... -Oh, look, look!

Excuse me.

-So, now if we stop for a sec... -It's a Niagara Falls of cider!

-Absolutely.

-It's just pouring through.

We've done it!

We're making cider.

I love it!

Look at the way it's cascading through, and how the wasps are enjoying swimming in it.

(Penny) Yep.

(Gyles) Fantastic.

Well, that's worth a celebratory drink, although it must be from a traditional mug made from cow's horn.

There you go, now you just hold it underneath.

So, this is just pure apple juice.

(juice flowing) -It's delicious.

-It is.

It genuinely is delicious.

I'm doing it the way Thomas Hardy did it.

And to turn this into cider, what do we do?

(Penny) Well, traditionally we'd be putting it into an oak barrel, like that one behind you.

And it would stay in that for the whole winter and ferment into cider.

So, that's-- and what turns it into cider?

It's the yeast that's in the apples that turns the sugar into alcohol.

(Gyles) And it's all naturally done?

(Penny) Yeah, you don't have to add anything at all.

This is truly delicious apple juice.

I don't think I've ever tasted anything nicer.

-Brilliant.

-I love it.

(juice dripping) -Here's to you... -Cheers.

...and Thomas Hardy.

(solemn music) The young Hardy had a knack for rural traditions like this, but a future spent toiling the fields was not for him.

His parents wanted better, and with so much poverty around, who could blame them?

Instead, at a time when education was optional, they sent him to school.

Then, when he reached his twenties, they packed him off to London to train as an architect, but hoping for a future as a writer, Hardy spent his spare time penning poems, all of which were rejected by publishers.

By 1870, he was about to give up on his literary dream.

Then, he met and fell in love with a vicar's daughter, Emma Gifford, and she encouraged him to stick with it.

(Angelique) They both have a love of literature.

In Emma, Hardy had found a kindred spirit.

And particularly when it comes to the women characters in his stories, she could contribute emotional and practical details.

She could listen to him read out his writing and she could say, "No, no, we don't do it exactly like that."

(Gyles) Hardy was not only smitten by Emma but inspired.

He began to write a story in which the central heroine was based on her.

A Pair of Blue Eyes is a tale about a young woman courted by two suitors: one a worldly London gentleman, the other of a lower social order, but with huge ambitions.

Which one is she to choose?

Should she marry for love or to please her parents?

(bright music) The story was serialized in a monthly magazine.

The publisher demanded that every installment had to keep the reader hungering for more, and Hardy certainly came up with the goods.

(waves crashing) This is high drama.

With the wind whistling around them, Henry Knight, one of her suitors, is literally clinging on for dear life, hanging by his fingernails to the cliff's edge.

He calls out to her to go for help, but help is 45 minutes away.

She disappears only to return... "Yes, shortly afterwards she had taken off her whole clothing and replaced only her outer bodice and skirt.

Every thread of the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a woolen and cotton rope."

Does she manage to rescue him?

Well, if readers wanted to find out, they just had to buy the next installment.

By leaving his character holding on for his life, Hardy had unwittingly created a phrase that's still going strong today.

Talk about a cliffhanger!

♪ Oh, and for the record: the makeshift rope did its job and Henry was rescued.

♪ (mellow music) Fresh from the success of A Pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy went on to write his first blockbuster, Far from the Madding Crowd.

The money he made from it not only enabled him to marry Emma, in 1885, he took up residence in the house where he'd write all his future Wessex novels, Max Gate in Dorchester.

This isn't what I expected at all.

This isn't a Wessex thatched cottage.

This is a house of substance.

Hardy designed it himself and built it with the proceeds of his writing.

He was no longer a village boy, he was a man of achievement, and here, he has built for himself a curious building that's a cross between a gothic castle and a substantial suburban villa.

He's arrived.

Well done, Hardy.

(gentle music) Once completed, Hardy retreated into his study here for long hours, working on what would be one of his most successful novels.

Its title: Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Published in 1891, Tess's story is one of a lowly farm worker whose innocence is robbed by a country squire named Alec Durbeyfield.

She then goes on to have a child out of wedlock.

(Mark) Tess of the D'Urbervilles was a scandal when it came out.

Often there was no redemption for the fallen woman.

The subtitle of the novel is "A Pure Woman," and that was taken as a kind of slap in the face of, um, Victorian middle-class morality because he was saying although she had had sex, um, before she was married, she was pure.

(Gyles) Hardy isn't explicit about the abuse Tess suffers, but the reader definitely gets the gist.

In a chapter called The Maiden, Tess finds herself alone with Alec.

They're together in the woods.

She is lost.

It's nightfall, she's scared.

She senses she's in trouble, terrible trouble.

(ominous music) In the next chapter, Tess wakes up from her ordeal.

The name of that chapter: Maiden No More.

♪ As revenge for the abuse Tess suffered at Alec's hands, she murders him.

With her new lover, Angel, she tries to flee from the law.

But their attempt to escape ends with their arrest against the magnificent but menacing backdrop of Stonehenge.

(Tim) I mean, it's so sad.

It's almost unbearable.

I mean, in terms of both the evocation of the landscape and the tragedy, the meeting at Stonehenge with Angel is deliberately evocative of, this world has been around for a very long time and you are still only small people within it.

(laughs) And many, many more will feel like you and possibly be happy, but...will also die.

(Gyles) Following a trial for murder, Tess is executed, her last words simply "I am ready."

(dark music) The story underlines the barbarity of capital punishment, but it's even more disturbing when you discover it's based on real events.

Next, the public execution that moved Hardy to create his greatest heroine.

"The hanging itself did not move me at all, but I sat on, after the others went away, not thinking but looking at the figure turning slowly round on the rope."

Plus, the Hardy story that scandalized Victorian society.

(Mark) He gets drunk and he auctions his wife, and it is one of the most startling scenes in fiction and I don't think anyone but Hardy would have thought of it or written it.

(dramatic music) (Gyles) Britain in the 1800s.

Throughout that century, the state executed nearly 4,400 people for offenses ranging from simple theft to murder.

Of those who were hanged, 214 were women.

(grim music) For most, the journey to the gallows began with a trial.

In 1856, one of them took place here at the Shire Hall Courthouse in Dorchester.

The woman in the dock, was accused, and convicted, of killing her husband with an axe.

♪ Her name was Martha Brown, and she was the last woman to be executed in Dorset.

Like most of those grisly events, it drew crowds.

Three to four thousand people came from all over Dorset to witness the execution.

One of them was a 16-year-old Thomas Hardy who later recalled, "The hanging itself did not move me at all, but I sat on, after the others went away, not thinking but looking at the figure turning slowly round on the rope."

(solemn music) Only later did it emerge that Martha Brown was a victim of domestic abuse, and her tragic story clearly had a lasting impact on Hardy because, 35 years on, she became the inspiration for his own character, Tess.

So, what are the similarities between the two?

-How good to see you, Rose.

-Hi, Gyles.

(Gyles) I'm meeting historian and lawyer Dr. Rose Wallis.

(Rose) So, Tess of the D'Urbervilles ultimately kills Alec, the man who has violated and then kept her.

Martha kills her husband, so there's a parallel there, the fact they are both murderesses.

But the other perhaps really significant parallel between the two was the fact that both of these women couldn't escape judgment because they were women.

How women were thought to behave, what they should and shouldn't be like, permeates both their cases.

♪ (Gyles) Female killers were rare and therefore newsworthy in Victorian times, just as they are now.

Newspapers carried a statement from Martha in which she explained how she'd acted in self-defense.

"He then kicked out the bottom of the chair upon which I had been sitting, and we continued quarrelling until three o'clock, when he struck me a severe blow on the side of the head, which confused me so much that I was obliged to sit down."

So, he is attacking her.

This is an abusive relationship.

It's strong stuff.

Despite the abuse, in a courtroom dominated by men, Martha, like Tess, was found guilty.

The injustice of the verdict stayed with Hardy; the cruelty of the punishment, even more so.

(Rose) His description of witnessing Martha's execution is so powerful, and he's clearly, in really quite a...strange way, kind of struck by this figure, he cannot look away from her.

But I think he must have, even at that young age, just been wondering what brings you there.

What takes you to the point where you would... yeah, kill your husband or kill another person?

And he explores all of these things in Tess's story.

(gloomy music) (Gyles) And that story struck a chord.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles became a bestseller not only in Britain but around the world.

Women wrote thanking him for shining a light on an issue, domestic abuse, that was rarely, if ever, discussed, and for highlighting the double standards of the justice system.

This letter is from a reader in New York.

"Dear Mr. Hardy, I recently read Tess of the D'Urbervilles and feel I would like you to know how much it has meant to me.

I am 20 years old and am sympathetic with Tess, the more so because some of my own experiences in life have not been unlike hers."

And there's another one here from the Hague, from Holland.

"I've never read a book in which I felt something of myself as in yours.

My goodness, I think Tess's character is so beautiful to understand the weakness and the pain."

Must have been wonderful for readers to find that their experience wasn't unique and that somebody like Hardy was ready to give them a voice, because of course, he was now a major literary figure.

When he spoke, people listened, and when he published a new book, it sold by the sack load.

(vibrant music) By giving such women a voice, Hardy's success grew.

Soon, he was among the highest earning authors of his era.

How easily people can rise and fall through the class system would be the theme for another of Hardy's major Wessex novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge.

You won't find Casterbridge on any West Country map, but when writing about it, he had one place firmly in mind: his own hometown.

(bell ringer) Dorchester!

An ancient place.

A county town in Wessex.

Stands beside the River Frome.

A lure for boats poetic.

♪ (Gyles) Today, this is a bank, but in the novel, this was the home of Michael Henchard, the mayor of Casterbridge.

♪ In fact, it's amazing how much of this place is the same as it was in Hardy's day.

What a lovely town!

Handsome houses, stylish streets.

You can hardly think of anywhere more agreeable, but that's Dorchester.

Casterbridge, that's something else.

(solemn music) Tough and bleak, with people dependent upon the soil and whose fortunes rise and fall with the weather.

That's the place Hardy had in mind.

It's also where he located one of his darkest characters, a man guilty of another hidden Victorian crime and who cannot escape from his past.

(Angelique) The Mayor of Casterbridge is a novel about an unemployed farm worker and his rise and fall.

He becomes the mayor of a county town.

The opening scenes of the Mayor of Casterbridge involve Michael Henchard, his wife, and their daughter walking towards a fair, and they're cross because they haven't got any work and they're poor, and he gets drunk and he auctions his wife.

(Gyles) A man exchanging his wife for cash?

The idea was as shocking to the Victorian middle classes as it is to us today.

But incredibly, it happened.

Next, I track down the shockingly true event on which Hardy based this story.

(Harriet) You've got the case written down from the Dorset County Chronicle saying, "Sale of a wife, at Stamford."

(Gyles) Oh, this is...

This is literally detective work.

I mean, this is so exciting!

And as his own closest personal relationship falls apart, how Hardy let his frustrations out on the page.

(Mark) Jude the Obscure shocked and scandalized society because it presents marriage as an appalling imprisonment.

(dramatic music) (Gyles) Dorchester, the setting for Thomas Hardy's 1886 masterpiece, The Mayor of Casterbridge.

At the start, he wanted to write a story about a man's rise and fall.

By the end, he confessed, it was the only one of his novels that made him weep.

(John) I think that you feel, as you read the Mayor of Casterbridge, huge sympathy for Henchard, and that's why it's so painful, so brilliantly painful, as you see him constructing his own downfall.

(Gyles) In the book, Michael Henchard rises from nothing to become Mayor of Casterbridge.

But he can never escape the consequences of his terrible actions: selling his wife at auction.

But where did Hardy get such an idea?

The answer may lie among his personal archives, some of which are still held in Dorchester.

(clock chimes) Did he leave a lot of papers?

(Harriet) There were a lot of papers, but the notebooks actually, a lot of them, he made instructions to have them burnt.

And so, they went up on bonfires in the garden.

So, did he not want us to see this, in fact?

(Harriet) No, we shouldn't-- we shouldn't be seeing this if we go by Thomas Hardy's wishes, but... (Gyles) But, he's a great man, and we are riding above that, I hope he forgives us.

-Absolutely.

-So, what were these notebooks?

(Harriet) So, these were notebooks that he felt that stories were most, I suppose, most powerful when they had that kernel of truth in them.

So, these are-- this not a diary, this is him recording stories that he has read in the newspaper or that people have told him.

Local stories.

Yeah, that whole "fact is stranger than fiction" thing, um, so that's what he's really playing on here.

(Gyles) How wonderful!

Can I--can I see inside?

-Do you want to see some?

-This is his own handwriting?

There!

So, you've got his handwriting there.

(Gyles) Oh, what beautiful handwriting!

Here is a very controlled and organized person.

(Harriet) This one, in particular, is quite important because The Mayor of Casterbridge has this case of a wife sale, and this one is particularly interesting because you've got the case written down from the Dorset County Chronicle saying, "Sale of a wife, at Stamford, fellow sold her for two shillings wet and two shillings dry..." -What does that mean?

-Um, that means two shillings of booze and two shillings of money, and it seems like it was quite common to sell your wife for beer as part payment.

"...After which the trio retired to a public house to quaff the heavy wet," so afterwards, they all go to the pub together and have a drink.

-My.

-And can you make out this little tiny bit?

-I certainly can.

-In pencil there.

In pencil, it's his handwriting again: "Need in The Mayor of Casterbridge."

So, he uses this actual story, which happened in October 1829, when he writes the Mayor of Casterbridge.

(Harriet) Absolutely, so, this is the inspiration for The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Oh...this, this is, this is literally detective work.

I mean, this is so exciting!

The first documented case of wife selling in Britain came in the 1690s, but it hit its height in the 19th century.

(Harriet) It seems that it was not uncommon.

It was a way of people legitimately separating because at that point, getting a divorce where you could legally remarry someone, you needed an Act at Parliament, so it was really hard.

There are only about 300 cases between 1700 and this date.

Um, and it was really, really, really expensive.

Poor people would never have been able to do it.

Never, and so this was a way of getting out of an unhappy marriage, really, and having public acknowledgment of that.

(Gyles) It's fascinating because these notebooks clearly inform all his writing.

It's completely gripping.

(gentle piano music) With all those tragic plot twists, you have to ask what was going on in Hardy's own life.

By now, he and Emma were middle-aged and childless.

Were his own marital frustrations emerging in his work?

(John) Emma was in the position that women had been in before, of being the sort of the consort of the celebrity man, and that's not an easy position, and I think she couldn't really cope with it very well and didn't have, uh, the sort of magnetism that he had, and became a slightly embarrassing companion, and retreated from and came, I think, to dread this sort of society round that he loved more and more.

My read on Emma Hardy is that she was just boring.

(Gyles) Marital dissatisfaction was a theme of Hardy's last major novel, Jude the Obscure.

In the 1996 movie adaptation, Christopher Eccleston authentically recreates the tortured lead character.

He has an extramarital affair with Sue, played with brooding intensity by Kate Winslet.

They have two children, to the disgust of the locals.

It was a direct attack on Victorian values.

Hardy doesn't exactly come across as the biggest fan of marriage.

He describes how Jude feels trapped in a legal arrangement with his wife, and bemoans "the fundamental error of their matrimonial union, that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable."

Which must have been a tough passage for Hardy's own wife to read.

Not surprising that he didn't let her see it until after it was published.

I don't see how Emma, when eventually she read it, could have failed to see this attack on marriage as a criticism of her.

Hardy may not have felt as trapped as Jude, but his feelings towards his wife had certainly changed.

This was no longer the happy, carefree, giddy relationship that had led him to write A Pair of Blue Eyes.

In fact, they were increasingly leading separate lives, and if she was unhappy with her husband's latest story, she wasn't alone.

Some critics referred to it as Jude the Obscene.

Others even threatened to burn it.

Ouch.

The one consolation for Hardy: The public paid little attention to the reviewers and went on to make Jude the Obscure one of his most successful books.

Next, how a new friendship tore Hardy's home life apart.

She was 26, forty years his junior.

Wessex, the imaginary region in which Thomas Hardy set his blockbusting novels, including Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, and The Mayor of Casterbridge.

He'd introduced millions of people to this corner of England, writing from his Dorset home, Max Gate.

He was rich and famous, but his life had grown emotionally complicated, particularly when he became friends with Florence Dugdale.

She was an admirer who pretty much sought Hardy out in 1905.

She went on to become his assistant.

She was 26, forty years his junior.

(mellow music) And so began a bizarre living arrangement.

Emma spent most of the time in her own room, up in the attic, while Florence inhabited the downstairs, working as Hardy's secretary.

♪ In 1912, in this room, alone, Emma died, and Hardy went into deep mourning.

Although he went on to marry Florence, the loss of his first wife, to whom he'd been married for 38 years, was traumatic and had a lasting effect on him.

In fact, his early love for Emma suddenly came flooding back, and he spent the rest of his life writing intensely moving love poetry all about her.

♪ These went on to form some of Hardy's best selling collections.

♪ This is one of my favorites, The Voice.

"Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, saying that now you are not as you were when you had changed from the one who was all to me, but as at first, when our day was fair."

You can almost hear Hardy's guilt at the way he treated Emma towards the end.

Despite being surrounded by memories of Emma, Hardy continued to live at Max Gate along with Florence and their dog, a terrier who terrorized guests and the postman, and who was called, well, what else?

Wessex.

Hardy lived here till his death in 1928 at the age of 87.

A sickly child of humble origins had confounded the Victorian class system by becoming one of the most successful and celebrated poets and authors of his day.

He was honored by the establishment when he died with a funeral at Westminster Abbey.

(vibrant music) Which was very nice of them, but not what Hardy wanted for himself.

Ever loyal to his roots, his wish was to be buried at Stinsford, his childhood church.

(birds chirping) ♪ The vicar suggested a compromise.

Hardy's ashes would be buried at Westminster Abbey in Poets' Corner, but his heart would be removed and buried here.

Of course it was.

Hardy's heart always belonged to Wessex.

♪ Hundreds attended his London funeral.

His pallbearers included the Prime Minister and Rudyard Kipling and J. M. Barrie.

Hardy had been immortalized among the greats.

For me, Hardy's work remains readable so long after his death for one simple reason.

Yes, his novels are set in a specific place, at a particular time, but his stories and his characters are universal, and so many of the tough subjects he touches on are profoundly relevant today.

Thomas Hardy was a man ahead of his time.

And his Wessex hasn't vanished.

It's all around us still.

♪ (bright music)