Thomas Hardy's Wessex as an artistic conceit, and has spawned a lucrative tourist trade, and even a devolutionist Wessex Regionalist Party. Outer Wessex is sometimes referred to as Nether Wessex. The abbreviations for Thomas Hardy's novels that are used in the table are as follows: Artists such as Walter Tyndale, Edmund Hort New, Charles George Harper and others, have painted or drawn the landscapes, places and buildings described in Hardy's novels. Their work was used to illustrate books exploring the real-life countryside on which the fictional county of Wessex was based: Thomas Hardy's Wessex The English author Thomas Hardy set all of his
William Gilbert (author) William Gilbert (author) William Gilbert (20 May 1804 – 3 January 1890) was an English writer and Royal Navy surgeon. He wrote a considerable number of novels, biographies, histories, essays (especially about the dangers of alcohol and the plight of the poor) and popular fantasy stories, mostly in the 1860s and 1870s. Some of these have been reprinted in recent decades and are still available today. He is best remembered, however, as the father of dramatist W. S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert was born at Bishopstoke, Hampshire, the eldest son of William (1780–1812), a grocer in Commercial Row,