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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
He was born in the hamlet of Higher Bockhampton, just east of the county town, in 1840.
Q 02What was the trade of Hardy's father?
Stonemason and builder
His mother Jemima was well read and taught him at home until he was eight.
Q 03What is the name of the semi-fictional region in which Hardy set his novels?
Wessex
He first used the name in his fourth novel, borrowing it from the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom.
Q 04To which profession was the 16-year-old Hardy apprenticed, since his family could not afford university?
Architecture
He worked for the local architect James Hicks and later designed his own house.
Q 05In the mid-1860s Hardy supervised excavation of part of which London graveyard to make way for a railway?
St Pancras Old Church
The Midland Railway was being extended to its new terminus at St Pancras.
Q 06Whom did Hardy meet in 1870 while restoring a church at St Juliot in Cornwall, and marry in 1874?
Emma Gifford
Her death in 1912 produced his greatest poems.
Q 07Which house on the edge of Dorchester did Hardy design and move into in 1885?
Max Gate
His brother built it; it passed to the National Trust in 1940, and Hardy's birthplace followed in 1948.
Q 08Hardy's second wife, Florence Dugdale, whom he married in 1914, had been his what?
Secretary
She was 39 years his junior and later published his ghost-written biography as her own work.
Q 09Hardy's notoriously ill-tempered dog, named after his fictional region, was what breed?
Wire fox terrier
The dog's gravestone can still be found in the grounds of his house.
Q 10How many times in total had Hardy been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by 1927?
25
He was a final candidate in 1923 but never won.
Q 11Which honour was Hardy appointed to in 1910?
The Order of Merit
The same year brought his first Nobel nomination.
Q 12What compromise was reached over Hardy's burial in 1928?
His heart went to Stinsford, his ashes to Poets' Corner
He had wanted to lie with Emma at Stinsford; his executor Sydney Cockerell insisted on Westminster Abbey.
Q 13What did Hardy do on his deathbed on 11 January 1928?
Dictated his final poem to his wife
Q 21In The Mayor of Casterbridge, for how much does the drunken Michael Henchard sell his wife and daughter?
Five guineas
He was drunk on rum-laced furmity; the buyer was a sailor named Newson.
Q 22What nationality is Donald Farfrae, the energetic young man Henchard hires as his corn factor?
Scottish
He shows Henchard how to salvage substandard grain and later becomes his rival in business and love.
Q 23What is the subtitle of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, intended to raise Victorian eyebrows?
A Pure Woman
The book was initially refused publication for its sympathetic treatment of a 'fallen woman'.
The death certificate gave 'cardiac syncope', with old age as a contributory factor.
Q 14What was the title of Hardy's first novel, never published and later destroyed?
The Poor Man and the Lady
George Meredith warned him it was too politically controversial; Hardy called it 'socialistic, not to say revolutionary'.
Q 15The word 'cliffhanger' is thought to derive from the serialisation of which Hardy novel?
A Pair of Blue Eyes
The character Henry Knight is left literally hanging off a cliff at the end of an instalment.
Q 16Which 1874 novel was successful enough for Hardy to give up his day job for writing?
Far from the Madding Crowd
It appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in the Cornhill Magazine.
Q 17In Hardy's 1874 novel, what does Bathsheba Everdene playfully send to the farmer William Boldwood?
A valentine reading 'Marry me'
He takes the joke seriously with tragic consequences; Hardy cited it as an example of chance driving the plot.
Q 18How is the shepherd Gabriel Oak ruined early in his story?
A young sheepdog drives his flock over a cliff
He sells everything to pay his debts and ends up seeking work at a hiring fair.
Q 19Which soldier wins Bathsheba's heart with a private display of swordsmanship?
Sergeant Frank Troy
Gabriel Oak sees the danger and tries to warn her.
Q 20Which real town in Hardy's home county does Casterbridge represent in The Mayor of Casterbridge?
Dorchester
The novel's opening, in which Henchard auctions his wife, was based on real press reports of wife-selling.
Q 24Where does Tess work as a milkmaid when she meets Angel Clare?
Talbothays Dairy
Her past is unknown there, until she confesses it on their wedding night.
Q 25How does the landlady discover that Tess has killed Alec d'Urberville?
A bloodstain spreading on the ceiling
Tess has stabbed him in his bed and run after Angel.
Q 26At which ancient monument are Tess and Angel found on the night before her arrest?
Stonehenge
She asks Angel to marry her younger sister 'Liza-Lu once she is gone.
Q 27What signals Tess's execution at the end of the novel?
A black flag raised over the prison
Angel and 'Liza-Lu watch from a hill above Wintoncester at 8 a.m., then walk on hand in hand.
Q 28Which real city is 'Christminster', the university town Jude Fawley longs to study in?
Oxford
Jude teaches himself Greek and Latin while working as a stonemason but is never admitted.
Q 29What relation is Sue Bridehead to Jude Fawley?
His cousin
She dislikes both sex and marriage, and the couple's unmarried life leads to social ostracism.
Q 30The bishop of which diocese is said to have burnt his copy of Jude the Obscure?
Wakefield
Hardy joked that Walsham How burnt it 'probably in his despair at not being able to burn me'.