ABSTRACT
Thomas Hardy's complaints in "Candour in English Fiction" about the stultifying effects of the moral code as applied to English fiction via the lending libraries and magazines were a reaction to the problems he had experienced with publishing Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In his poem "The Ruined Maid," Hardy brings together these three strands: gender, class and morality. Sir George Clausen's painting Winter Work, completed a few years before Hardy started work on Tess, depicts the poor conditions Hardy implies the girls in his poem have suffered. Hardy himself had suffered from class prejudice. He examines the question of what constitutes social superiority and the possibility of transition from one social class to another in several of his novels. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, his irony is directed at the triviality of what constitutes class difference.
