SOURCE: Williams, Merryn. “Far from the Madding Crowd.” In Thomas Hardy and Rural England, pp. 130-35. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.

In the following essay, Williams states that the worth of characters in Far from the Madding Crowd is measured by their level of concern for their farm livelihood and the members of their community.

Far from the Madding Crowd is a much more substantial novel than its predecessors, and several themes which were only glanced at in Under the Greenwood Tree are now fully sustained. There is still a good deal of indifferent writing, and a tendency towards shallow philosophising, yet this is definitely the first of Hardy's major works.

Of all his novels, it is the most optimistic and positive. The tensions, far greater than those in Under the Greenwood Tree, are still contained and harmoniously resolved in the end. It was the novel which the...