Another who never actually rejected a knighthood outright but who said he wouldn't be uninterested when sounded out for one was novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. Famed for novels including Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure, as well as his Wessex Poems, Dorset-born Hardy declined a knighthood during the 1910s. He latterly accepted the an Appointment of the Order of Merit because it was an honour without a title, but Hardy was wholly against the whole honours system.