Two on a Tower have done...while other eminent critics (I wonder if they are the same) print the most cutting rebukes you can conceive—show me (to my amazement) that I am quite an immoral person...” Two on a Tower Two on a Tower (1882) is a novel by English author Thomas Hardy, classified by him as a romance and fantasy and now regarded as one of his minor works. The book is one of Hardy's Wessex novels, set in a parallel version of late Victorian Dorset. Hardy placed an epigraph at the beginning of this book. The epigraph is from a Richard Crashaw poem,
Wessex overwhelmed the Danes of Mercia and East Anglia, bringing all of England south of the Humber under Edward's power. In 918 Æthelflæd died and Edward took over direct control of Mercia, extinguishing what remained of its independence and ensuring that henceforth there would be only one Kingdom of the English. In 927 Edward's successor Athelstan conquered Northumbria, bringing the whole of England under one ruler for the first time. The Kingdom of Wessex had thus been transformed into the Kingdom of England. Although Wessex had now effectively been subsumed into the larger kingdom which its expansion had created, like the