Most if not all of Thomas Hardy's novels are set in the fictional(ish) English region of Wessex. He uses many real towns and locations as settings, but gives them fictional names: for instance, Oxford becomes "Christminster" and Dorchester becomes "Casterbridge". (Both of these towns are in Wessex, which shows how massive that region must be.)
My edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles includes a lengthy table mapping real locations to the fictional names they're given in the books. Presumably most of these correspondences can be deduced directly from the text of the novel, by looking closely at the spatial relationships between different locations therein. Some of them also include wordplay which makes the connection obvious.
More interestingly, another of my Hardy books (possibly The Mayor of Casterbridge) includes a map of the region of Wessex, divided into subdomains with names such as Near Wessex, Outer Wessex, and East Wessex. (I'm guessing here, since I can't remember the exact phrases, but most of them were in the form "something Wessex".)
My question is: how canonical is this map? Or more generally, what canon information is available on the exact boundaries of Wessex within the real England?
Did Hardy himself ever draw a map of his Wessex, or write out a table of correspondences between real places and the names he used for them in his books?
