National Dog Day: “A Famous Dog”

In honor of National Dog day which took place on August 26, I thought I'd post about Thomas Hardy's dog, Wessex. Wessex was a very spoiled but much- loved fox terrier who kept Hardy company in his old age.

Wessex was notorious for his bad behavior towards visitors to the Hardy home, as one dinner guest recorded in a letter:

Wessex was especially uninhibited at dinner time, most of which he spent not under, but on, the table, walking about unchecked, and contesting every single forkful of food on its way from my plate to my mouth.

Thomas Hardy's notebook recorded the dog's passing in 1926 thusly:

"Wx buried" and "Wx sleeps outside the house for the first time for 13 years".

Wessex's Headstone reads:

THE
FAMOUS DOG
WESSEX
August 1913 – 27 Dec 1926

Faithful. Unflinching

Hardy's wife Florence also recorded her affection for Wessex in a letter to a friend:

Of course he was merely a dog, and not a good dog always, but thousands (actually thousands) of afternoons and evenings I would have been alone but for him, and had always him to speak to. But I mustn't write about him and I hope no one will ask me about him or mention his name.

Hardy wrote this poem about Wessex in 1924:

A Popular Personage at Home

"I LIVE here : 'Wessex' is my name:

I am a dog known rather well:

I guard the house but how that came

To be my whim I cannot tell.

"With a leap and a heart elate I go

At the end of an hour's expectancy

To take a walk of a mile or so

With the folk I let live here with me.

" Along the path, amid the grass

I sniff, and find out rarest smells

For rolling over as I pass

The open fields toward the dells.

" No doubt I shall always cross this sill,

And turn the corner, and stand steady,

Gazing back for my Mistress till

She reaches where I have run already,

" And that this meadow with its brook,

And bulrush, even as it appears

As I plunge by with hasty look,

Will stay the same a thousand years."

Thus "Wessex." But a dubious ray

At times informs his steadfast eye,

Just for a trice, as though to say,

" Yet, will this pass, and pass shall I?"

You can read more about Thomas Hardy and his famous dog Wessex at:

Forever Foxed
and
The London Dog Forum