"Reading Thomas Hardy's 'The Withered Arm' transports you back to England at the turn of the 20th century" How far do you agree with this statement?

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“Reading Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Withered Arm’ transports you back

to England at the turn of the 20th century.”  How far do you agree with this statement?

    Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in a village known as Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester, which is in the county town of Dorset.  This village was extremely small and consisted of about eight workers cottages and had a total population of about 50 people.  Hardy lived with his two sisters, his brother, his mother and his father and grew up on the edge of a wild stretch of heath.  

    Hardy’s mother who could read but could not write had sent him to a church funded school in Dorchester at the age of nine as she was determined that he would get a better education than she had got.  His education continued at home where his ambitious mother insisted that he read a wide range of ‘good’ books   He left school at sixteen and then moved to London in 1862 where a go-ahead architect known as Arthur Blomfield employed him.  While in London Hardy also studied painting and taught himself Greek and Latin every morning before he went to work.  

    Before Hardy returned to Dorchester in 1867, he had also begun writing novels.  His first “Desperate Remedies”, was published in 1871.  He became famous for the serialised story, “Far From the Madding Crowd”, which was printed first in a London magazine and then as a novel.  From 1887 onwards, Hardy turned more to writing short stories based on his knowledge of Dorset life.  Hardy’s name became well known and his stories were collected and published in three volumes: “Wessex Tales” (1888), “A Group of Noble Dams” (1891), and “Life’s Little Ironies” (1894).  A fourth and final volume of short stories, “A Changed Man” was published in 1913.  Hardy died in 1928 at the age of 88.  His body was buried at Westminster Abbey however Hardy had always remained very close to his ‘roots’ in Dorset.  

    I agree with the statement that reading “The Withered Arm” transports you back to rural England at the turn of the 20th Century. When Hardy was born in 1840, Wessex was very deep country and was cut off from almost all other parts of England.  There were cart tracks rather than roads and almost everyone travelled on foot.  Many people lived in their village their whole lives without going further than the nearest market. Almost everyone belonged to the ‘Labouring Class’ and worked on the land.  Sheep and dairy farming was wide spread with the farms being owned by the middle class farmers who then employed the local people to work on their land.  The following passage illustrates this.

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“I shall have to pay him nine pound a year for every one of these milchers, whatever his age or her.  Get on with your work, or ‘twill be dark afore we have done.  The evening is pinking in a’ready.”  This speaker was the dairyman himself, by whom the milkmaids and men were employed.”

(Page 30)

These lines show that the dairyman pays Farmer Lodge for the rent of his cows.  The dairyman then hires the local milkmaids to milk the cows by hand.  In Hardy’s time cows would be milked by hand into a bucket or pail, whereas ...

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