“Thomas Hardy wrote about traditional rural communities of England.” Discuss.
In the nineteenth century England, the vast majority of readers of the novel lived in the city. However, the novel created in them a feeling of connection with the fate of rural communities. It was under these conditions that Thomas Hardy, the nineteenth century British novelist wrote about traditional rural communities of England. These were vanishing due to the reasons as mentioned below : This was the time when large farmers fenced off land. Big farmers/landlords were enclosing a number of small landholdings to create one larger farm. Once enclosed, use of the land became restricted to the owner and it ceased to be common land for communal use. The wealthy farmers bought machines and employed labourers to produce for the market. The old rural culture was coming to an end. Thomas Hardy wrote about the above changes in his novel Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). In it Hardy mourns the loss of the more personalised world, that is disappearing, even as he is aware of its problems and advantages of the new order.
