Q 01/05

In which English county was Thomas Hardy born and did he set most of his fiction?

A) Dorset

B) Somerset

C) Wiltshire

D) Devon

Answer · why

A) 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 186...

Q 02/05

What was the trade of Hardy's father?

A) Stonemason and builder

B) Village schoolmaster

C) Parish clerk

D) Farm labourer

Answer · why

A) 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 Und...

Q 03/05

What is the name of the semi-fictional region in which Hardy set his novels?

A) Mercia

B) Barsetshire

C) Loamshire

D) Wessex

Answer · why

D) 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...

Q 04/05

To which profession was the 16-year-old Hardy apprenticed, since his family could not afford university?

A) Printing

B) Medicine

C) Solicitor's law

D) Architecture

Answer · why

D) 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 introd...

Q 05/05

In the mid-1860s Hardy supervised excavation of part of which London graveyard to make way for a railway?

A) St Marylebone churchyard

B) Highgate Cemetery

C) St Pancras Old Church

D) Paddington Old Cemetery

Answer · why

C) 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 Hard...