What do Thomas Hardys short stories reveal about his society? :: English Literature

What do Thomas Hardy's short stories reveal about his society? Thomas Hardy was born 1840 and died 1924. He composed most of his writings between 1871 and 1912. From 1912 till death he wrote poetry. Hardy enjoyed writing short stories because he had realised that with the pressures and busy lifestyles of modern day life there was little time to sit down and read a novel. One difficulty of a short story is that it can't give in depth character analyses but they can gradually allow someone to make their own analyses judging by Hardy's content in his stories. They are succinct which made them successful. What is a short story? For Hardy a short story wasn't a tale that explained the details in two sentences and left the reader blank looking for clues as to where the story was going, the background of the story and who everyone was. Hardy's short stories gave as much detail as possible and if something was missing, it appeared later on, he consistently made sure the reader would keep up with the story and never rushed his stories, making sure the reader got the full jist of the story. A very simple example of this is in "The Superstitious Mans Story" where during the story Hardy includes a short paragraph which is told by the narrator of the story, it provides both the listener in and out of the story with a piece of missing information which we need to understand it fully, because in "The Superstitious Mans Story" there are two listeners, ourselves and Hardy's metaphorical Alias Mr. Lackland. Hardy's stories have a personal feel to them, when you read them he is talking to you, explaining and saying everything to you. For example "The Superstitious Mans Story" and "Old Andrey's Experience as a Musician" Hardy uses a conversational tone, he writes his stories in the way they would be told person-to-person, face-to-face as maybe travellers stories. Society has changed greatly since the time of Thomas Hardy, we no longer have the closeness and reliability that everyone had then. Hardy lived in a community and describes a community in his short stories where every member of the community knows everyone else, knows past and present members and they are able to tell stories about each of them. In this community everyone can rely on someone else, be it a friend or neighbour. A community like this is not found in cities as Hardy discovers when he moves to London in his early years, London was one of the first megalopolises. He was introduced to the city which he seen as a