ABSTRACT
Politically, Hardy was liberal and influenced by John Stuart Mill, and it was the plight of the rural worker – the ‘Hodge’ – in the face of industrialization that troubled him more than the aesthetics of a changing countryside. Nationalities, the aristocracy, the plutocracy, the citizen class, and many others, have their allegorical representatives, which are received with due allowance for flights of imagination in the direction of burlesque. Thus, while their pecuniary condition in the prime of life is bettered, and their freedom enlarged, they have lost touch with their environment, and that sense of long local participancy which is one of the pleasures of age. That the labourers of the country are more independent since their awakening to the sense of an outer world cannot be disputed. But a natural tendency to evil, which develops to unlawful action when’ excited by contact with others like-minded, would often have remained latent amid the simple isolated experiences of village life.
