The Return of the Native (1878), Hardy’s sixth novel, is set in the 'south-western quarter' of Wessex. It was one of the texts Hardy categorised as a 'Wessex Novel' in the revised editions of 1912. Wessex, according to Hardy, is a 'partly real, partly dream' country ('Preface', Far From the Madding Crowd, London: Macmillan, 1912, p. viii), and it is because of this amalgamation of imagined and the real-world geographies that it has been chosen as the focus for spatial type 3. Wessex represents, then, a fictional region nested in an ostensibly more real territory corresponding to actual place-names in the South West of England. In the novel, the clash between the old and modernity, between tradition and fashion, is played out in this tension between reverie and reality, and figured spatially through that age-old dichotomy between the country (Egdon Heath) and the city (Paris or Budmouth). Return of the Native is also a 'Novel of Character and Environment' with a highly condensed time and space. As the topoi map demonstrates, all the action is confined to Egdon, and we must look to the complete map to gain a sense of Egdon’s place within the wider world. What’s true of space is also true of time. Though the novel’s plot covers a year and a day, the prehistoric depth of the Heath gives a sense of an imagined moment in the vastness of real, geological time.