ABSTRACT
When Hardy began work on The Poor Man and the Lady, at the age of twenty-seven, he tells us that:
He considered that he knew fairly well both West-country life in its less explored recesses and the life of an isolated student cast upon the billows of London with no protection but his brains – the young man of whom it may be said more truly than perhaps of any, that ‘save his own soul he hath no star’. The two contrasting experiences seemed to afford him abundant materials out of which to evolve a striking socialistic novel – not that he mentally defined it as such, for the word had probably never, or scarcely ever, been heard of at that date.
(Life, p. 56)