Yet, at the same time, Hardy also distanced himself from other provincial novelists by overtly claiming that concentrating on Wessex – that tiny corner of England – did not actually involve missing universal truths. Indeed Hardy's Wessex proves to be made up of microcosms, each asserting its own peculiarities. This seeming paradox is all the more striking if we consider that one of the most outstanding authors of Victorian provincial literature was Thomas Hardy, one who carried this concentration on localities to extremes.
Just when faster means of transport were making it possible to reach even the remotest places in Britain, and the industrial revolution was making of the modern towns the very centre of human life, many novelists established themselves on the literary scene by focusing on peripheral, remote and often backward provincial regions. If there is a literary genre which can stand as a symbol for the Victorian Age, this is the provincial novel. If organisms easily die, as Hardy points out, culture needs ethically to interpose as a mechanism to prevent, from a Darwinian point of view, the extinction of values of these threatened minority cultures. Thomas Hardy's "The Woodlanders" points thus to the necessity of an adaptation process and to cultural memory and the adoption of a 'critical regionalism' - the constant openness to the new' mitigated by a conscious strategic essentialism' as a possible protection of the old but positive values of marginal, minority-culture environments. This is portrayed metaphorically in Giles's death. Communities are thus seen and studied by Hardy as complex Darwinian organisms that are both attracted to the new but that also fear losing what they see as their specific cultural heritage and identity.
Often, the new ideas represent a challenge to the regional 'traditional' culture. The essay examines how regional communities react when confronted with new ideas, brought in by the arrival of people that immigrate from different environments. This article has been quoted in Rosemarie Morgan's, President of the Thomas Hardy Society, in 'The Ashgate Companion to Thomas Hardy', Ashgate, 2010.
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