ABSTRACT
Darwin had a profound influence on many writers, but none more than Thomas Hardy, and in the extensive literature on Hardy’s connection with Nature there are numerous approaches to the influence of Darwinian theory on his writing.1 This literature has mainly concentrated on the evolutionary processes of adaptation, natural selection, chance and preservation as explored in the writings of Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, Spencer and other prominent Victorians. H. C. Webster explains biographically the influence on Hardy, especially during the period 1860-65, of reading such works as the Origin of Species2(1859) and the collection of viewpoints by liberal theologians entitled Essays and Reviews (1860), concentrating on the indifferent carnage of ‘natural selection and the bearing it might have had on Hardy’s philosophy’.3
