As a boy Thomas Hardy had been no stranger to poverty; and he unfolds his story of Tess, struggling to overcome the pitfalls that poverty and ignorance strew in her way, with peculiar intensity. In doing so, he mounts an assault on conventional victorian society's pharisaic morality, its unforgiving religion and rigid class system, and mourns the desecration by the machine of traditional agricultural life. Of all Hardy's novels TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES provides a particularly interesting example of the extent to which Hardy was obliged to bow to the dictates of late victorian morality.