Thomas Hardy Trivia
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50 free Thomas Hardy trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Thomas Hardy trivia covers a stonemason's son from a Dorset hamlet who trained as an architect, dug up a graveyard for the railway at St Pancras, invented a fictional county called Wessex, scandalised Victorian England twice, gave up novels at the height of his fame, and then spent thirty years becoming one of the great English poets. When he died in 1928, his heart went into his first wife's grave and his ashes into Westminster Abbey. This quiz runs from Higher Bockhampton and Mr Last's Academy through the London years and the meeting with Emma Gifford at St Juliot, the anonymous early novels and the origin of the word 'cliffhanger', Far from the Madding Crowd, Max Gate and the bad-tempered dog Wessex, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and the bishop who burnt Jude the Obscure, the Wessex Poems, The Dynasts, the elegies of 1912–13, the 25 Nobel nominations, and the tug-of-war over his funeral. It also dips into the plots: Bathsheba's valentine, Henchard's wife sale, Tess at Stonehenge, Little Father Time and the reddleman Diggory Venn. Easy questions suit anyone who has read one Hardy novel; the expert tier assumes you know which church tower collapsed while he was working for Blomfield. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Hardy and his novels, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which English county was Thomas Hardy born and did he set most of his fiction?
Dorset
Dorset pulled him back: born in a thatched cottage at Higher Bockhampton, he spent five years working in London before ill health sent him home in 1867.
Q 02What was the trade of Hardy's father?
Stonemason and builder
Stonemason and builder Thomas Hardy senior was also a keen musician in the Stinsford church band, a family tradition his son turned into the novel Under the Greenwood Tree.
Q 03What is the name of the semi-fictional region in which Hardy set his novels?
Wessex
Wessex was an extinct Anglo-Saxon kingdom whose name Hardy 'disinterred' because a single county was too small a canvas; the label caught on, and real organisations across the region now use it.
Q 04To which profession was the 16-year-old Hardy apprenticed, since his family could not afford university?
Architecture
Architecture gave him a living and, by chance, a wife: he trained under the local architect John Hicks, and a church survey in Cornwall in 1870 introduced him to his future bride.
Q 05In the mid-1860s Hardy supervised excavation of part of which London graveyard to make way for a railway?
St Pancras Old Church
St Pancras Old Church lost part of its burial ground to the Midland Railway; an ash tree ringed with displaced gravestones there was known as the Hardy Tree until it fell in December 2022.
Q 06Whom did Hardy meet at St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 and marry in 1874?
Emma Gifford
Emma Gifford, the rector's sister-in-law, urged him on as a writer, and the pair married against the wishes of both their families.
Q 07Which house near his birthplace was Hardy's home from 1885 until his death in 1928?
Max Gate
Max Gate stood on an isolated plot, yet Hardy still ringed it with pines for privacy; they grew so thickly that the house ended up dark and gloomy.
Q 08Hardy's second wife, Florence Dugdale, whom he married in 1914, had been his what?
Secretary
Secretary and typist to Hardy before their marriage, Florence later put her name to a two-volume Life of him that he had largely written himself.
Q 09Hardy's notoriously ill-tempered dog, named after his fictional region, was what breed?
Wire fox terrier
The wire fox terrier lived with the Hardys for thirteen years; when he died in 1926, Hardy drew up the inscription and the design for the headstone that still marks his grave in the garden.
Q 10Which Irish writer beat Hardy to the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature?
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats won even though two members of the Nobel committee argued that the older Hardy should come first; Hardy was nominated 25 times in all and never won.
Q 11Having turned down a knighthood, Hardy accepted which honour in 1910?
The Order of Merit
The Order of Merit came in the Birthday Honours just after he turned 70, yet by his own account the freedom of his home town that November appealed to his sentiment perhaps more than many earlier tributes from far away.
Q 12Hardy's ashes lie in Poets' Corner, but what was buried separately in the churchyard at Stinsford?
His heart
His heart was buried at Stinsford, where he had wanted to lie whole among his family's graves; the rest of him was cremated so that the nation could have its Abbey funeral.
Q 13On the last evening of his life, Hardy asked his wife to read him a verse from which Persian poem?
The Rubaiyat
Q 21In The Mayor of Casterbridge, for how much does the drunken Michael Henchard sell his wife and daughter?
Five guineas
Five guineas was the bid of a passing sailor, Newson; sober the next morning, Henchard swore off strong drink for twenty-one years, one for each year he had lived.
Q 22What nationality is Donald Farfrae, the energetic young man Henchard hires as his manager?
Scottish
Scottish and bound for America, Farfrae charms a Casterbridge inn with homesick songs of his 'ain countree', then stays when Henchard begs him to become his manager.
Q 23What subtitle did Hardy give Tess of the d'Urbervilles?
A Pure Woman
A Pure Woman was added at the last moment as a verdict Hardy thought nobody would dispute; as he later admitted, it was disputed more than anything else in the book.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam supplied the verse, which asks the Creator to take man's forgiveness as well as give it; after those four lines Hardy signalled that he wanted no more read.
Q 14What was the title of Hardy's first novel, never published and later destroyed?
The Poor Man and the Lady
The Poor Man and the Lady struck a publisher's reader as too politically risky for a beginner, so Hardy shelved it and recycled parts, one resurfacing in 1878 as An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress.
Q 15Which Hardy serial left Henry Knight literally hanging off a cliff, a scene often called the first cliffhanger?
A Pair of Blue Eyes
A Pair of Blue Eyes leaves Knight clinging to the rock, eye to eye with a fossil trilobite, until Elfride hauls him up on a rope she makes by tearing her own linen into strips.
Q 16Which 1874 novel, serialised in the Cornhill Magazine, made Hardy famous?
Far from the Madding Crowd
Far from the Madding Crowd ran anonymously at first, and the Spectator's reviewer guessed that it must be the work of George Eliot.
Q 17In Hardy's 1874 novel, what does Bathsheba Everdene playfully send to the farmer William Boldwood?
A valentine reading 'Marry me'
A valentine reading 'Marry me' went to Boldwood only because a tossed hymn book landed shut; the reserved farmer took the joke in earnest and became obsessed with her.
Q 18Shepherd Gabriel Oak is ruined early in his story when what drives his flock over the edge of a chalk pit?
His young sheepdog
His young sheepdog, too keen at its work, chased the ewes over the edge; the flock was not insured, so Oak sold everything to pay his debts, and the dog was shot the same day.
Q 19Which of Bathsheba Everdene's suitors wins her with a private display of swordsmanship?
Frank Troy
Frank Troy, a sergeant of dragoons, dazzles her in a ferny hollow, shearing off a lock of her hair and then spitting a caterpillar on her bodice with the point of his sword.
Q 20Which real town in Hardy's home county does Casterbridge represent in The Mayor of Casterbridge?
Dorchester
Dorchester's Roman amphitheatre, Maumbury Rings, appears in the novel as 'the Ring', the lonely spot where Henchard arranges to meet the wife he wronged years before.
Q 24Where do Tess and Angel Clare fall in love while working side by side?
Talbothays Dairy
Talbothays Dairy gives Tess a fresh start among people who know nothing of her past; when she tells Angel the truth on their wedding night, he leaves her.
Q 25How does the landlady discover that Tess has killed Alec d'Urberville?
A bloodstain spreading on the ceiling
A bloodstain spreading on the ceiling, in the shape of a gigantic ace of hearts, sends Mrs Brooks for help; Tess has stabbed Alec, who had told her that Angel would never come back.
Q 26At which ancient monument does Tess spend her last night of freedom with Angel?
Stonehenge
Stonehenge is where Tess falls asleep on a slab that Angel takes for an altar; the men who surround them at dawn let her finish her sleep, and she wakes to say, 'I am ready.'
Q 27What signals Tess's execution at the end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles?
A black flag raised over the prison
A black flag raised over the prison is all the reader sees: Hardy keeps the hanging offstage and adds that the 'President of the Immortals' had ended his sport with Tess.
Q 28Which real city is 'Christminster', the university town Jude Fawley longs to study in?
Oxford
Oxford in thin disguise shuts Jude out: a college master advises the working man to stick to his trade, and Jude chalks a defiant verse from Job on the college wall.
Q 29What relation is Sue Bridehead to Jude Fawley?
His cousin
His cousin Sue shares the family failing: Jude's great-aunt warns that 'the Fawleys were not made for wedlock', and when the pair live together unmarried they are shunned for it.
Q 30The bishop of which diocese is said to have burnt his copy of Jude the Obscure?
Wakefield
Wakefield's bishop, Walsham How, told the newspapers he had thrown the novel on the fire; Hardy doubted it, remarking how hard a thick book is to burn, least of all in summer.