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Social Hierarchy In Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd

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Social hierarchy is the arrangement of different groups of people in a particular order. This order can be based upon different social features such as caste, creed, religion or class. The class of a can be directly or indirectly related to the economic status of a person. This kind of hierarchy is seen almost everywhere around us till today. The Victorian age was the time when great changes were taking place. In England, particularly there was a division of people according to various classes and occupations. Thomas Hardy, a Victorian realist, witnessed almost all of the developments that took place during this period and these greatly influenced his works. Thomas Hardy, born in Dorset, England in 1840, both a poet and a novelist, is best …show more content…

He is considered to be a Victorian realist and he very keenly examined and observed this hierarchy and its effects on the lives of the people in Victorian England. In his poems as well as novels, he talks about the realistic aspects of the lives of such people. Their miseries, pain, sufferings and unhappiness were some of the themes of Hardy’s works. He also, in his works, criticises the beliefs related to marriage, education and religion which was in one way or another linked with this social hierarchy which limited the lives of the people and caused …show more content…

The novel portrays the themes of love, betrayal and most importantly the realities of the Victorian England. Thomas Hardy took the title Far from the Madding Crowd from Thomas Gray’s poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. “Madding” here means “frenzied”. The title of the novel is quite ironic in itself. Thomas Gray in this line of his poem is talking about the noiselessness of the atmosphere around the churchyard in the countryside. The novel is also set in the rural countryside far from the noises of the town life but this does not mean that characters and the atmosphere is actually tranquil. Instead, the disturbances in the lives of the characters and the themes of troubled emotions and requited love in the novel demonstrates the complexity of the plot which makes the title completely

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