Thomas Hardy stirred up Victorian readers

It is the birthday of English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840), whose most well known books, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), examined the decline of rural Victorian English society. Hardy was heavily influenced by the work of Charles Dickens and his criticism English urban life. Tess and Jude received a lot of criticism, Tess for its apparent sympathetic portrait of a woman of ill repute, and Jude for its criticism of marriage and its open discussion of sexual themes. He wrote no more novels after that.