ABSTRACT
If Far from the Madding Crowd struck contemporary reviewers as evoking ‘an idyl or a pastoral poem’1 pleasantly remote from the harsher realities of life, and if recent criticism finds Hardy, at this early stage of his career, less the social critic than the romancer set at a distanced perspective from the culture he describes,2 this may be justified on several textual and extratextual counts. But it is less easily justified by Hardy’s manuscript account and a close study of his epistemology.
