again urges her to be honest with Dick about the episode. The final chapter is a joyful and humorous portrait of Reuben, William, and the rest of the Mellstock rustics as they celebrate Dick and Fancy's wedding day. The novel concludes after the ceremony with Dick telling Fancy that their happiness must be due to there being such full confidence between them. He says that they will have no secrets from each other, "no secrets at all". Fancy replies “None from to-day” and, changing the subject, thinks "of a secret she would never tell". Principal characters Dick Dewy: a young member of the Mellstock Choir, in love with Fancy Day Fancy Day: the new teacher at the village school Mr Maybold: the new vicar of Mellstock Robert Penny: one of the choir, a boot and shoe-maker by profession Reuben Dewy: Dick's father, a tranter (carrier), the de facto leader of, and spokesman for, the Mellstock Choir William Dewy: Dick's grandfather Geoffrey Day: Fancy's father, gamekeeper and steward at one of the Earl of Wessex's outlying estates Frederic Shiner: a rich farmer in Mellstock, and Dick's rival in the courtship of Fancy. Background Hardy began work on what would become the first of his Wessex novels, Under the Greenwood Tree in 1871, the genesis of the novel being a conflict between his grandfather’s ‘string choir’ of viols and voices in Stinsford church, and a new vicar who was determined to replace the choir with an up-to-date organ. He modelled Mellstock on Stinsford, and the Dewys' house on his own family home in the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton (now Higher Bockhampton). Although the characters were not directly modelled on members of his family, he did make use of the fact that his sister Mary had trained as a schoolteacher. Writing forty years later, Hardy recalled "This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-gallery musicians ... is intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of fifty or sixty years ago." The book was originally to be called The Mellstock Quire, but during the summer of 1871 Hardy added significant additional material, de-emphasising the tribulations of the choir and focusing the plot on the love story between Dick and Fancy. With the new structure came a new title, Under the Greenwood Tree,