1. Elaine Showalter’s fine essay ‘The Unmanning of the Mayor of Casterbridge’ reaches a similar conclusion by a different route. The essay is in Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978) pp. 99–115.
2. See, for instance, the first chapter of David Enstice’s Thomas Hardy: Landscapes of the Mind (London and Basingstoke, 1979)
3. See, for instance, the first chapter of David Enstice’s Thomas Hardy: Landscapes of the Mind (London and Basingstoke, 1979) with its reliance on A. Lindsay Clegg’s A History of Dorchester, Dorset (London, 1972), and almost every substantial commentator on the novel.