Where It All Goes Down
Wessex, England
Far from the Madding Crowd is the first novel that Thomas Hardy set in the fictional area of Wessex, England, but it isn't the last. For the rest of his career, Hardy would build an entire mythology around this fictional part of England, even creating maps of the area to help readers get acquainted.
The main thing you need to know about Wessex and the equally fictitious town of Weatherbury is that Hardy designed these places as a sort of idyllic, rural England that was slowly going extinct with the rise of modern technology and industry. Hardy makes this idealism fairly clear in the ways he describes the setting, like when he writes, "The thin grasses, more or less coating the hill, were touched by the wind in breezes of differing powers, and almost of differing natures—one rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another brushing them like a soft broom" (2.4).
As you can tell, Hardy is a big fan of nature. But he's also quick to point out that living in the countryside doesn't solve all of people's problems. At the end of the day, bad things can happen to you no matter where you live. But Hardy still has a real soft spot for the English countryside. It's not the countryside, after all, that makes these people act so crazy. The countryside is there to highlight how insane-o the characters are, by being beautiful and relatively sane in comparison.