I have said already that Hardy is pre-eminently a writer, and this perhaps needs further elucidation. It is not just a matter of his having written so much over such a long period – although that is indeed an index of his professionalism; it is also a way of placing him socially, of remarking the impact of that positioning on his writing, and then of defining the kind of writer he is: what it is that constitutes his very writerliness. Let us consider these two linked points further.

Hardy may have belonged originally to that ‘intermediate’ class in the rural economy of which he writes so sympathetically in his essay ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ (1883) and in Tess of the d'Urbervilles:

But it would be quite wrong to see him as remaining in that class, or to see him, from the 1870s on, as basically still a countryman. Despite building a house, Max Gate, outside Dorchester in the early 1880s, and living there for the rest of his days, Hardy had spent formative periods in London in the 1860s and 1870s (as well as visiting it for several months of each spring and summer from Max Gate). His career, at least as a novelist, was made and shaped in the tough domain of the late- Victorian London literary market place, and he is better seen, in social terms, as a metropolitan man of letters than as a rural yeoman. Nevertheless, when literary success and financial reward allowed, he did build a house in Dorset and live there much of the time.