The body of Victorian literature is tremendous and would be difficult to categorize with only a few authors. Hardy's contemporaries included the likes of Charles Dickens, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, E.M. Forester, and Joseph Conrad. Each contributed his or her work to the body of general human knowledge and, to one degree or another, considered the issues that had become a part of the English "discussion."
Dickens criticized the treatment of the poor and children, the courts, and the clergy in Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Bleak House. William Thackeray challenged Victorian society at all levels in Vanity Fair. The Brontë sisters — Emily, Charlotte, and Anne — wove romantic elements with tragic heroines and heroes in Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Agnes Grey. Matthew Arnold took the discussion of worldly happiness versus religious faith in his poems "The Scholar Gypsy" and "Dover Beach." Tennyson's In Memoriam, an epic poem on the loss of dear friends, discusses intellectual and religious issues of the day. Conrad wrote on the psychology of guilt, heroism, and honor in his novels Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles is one of Hardy's Wessex novels, so called because the action in each story takes place in the Wessex region. Other of the Wessex novels include The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Jude the Obscure (1895). In each, the main characters are dealt a cruel fate that they must overcome or be crushed by. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard, a respected man, faces a spiritual and physical deterioration that, in the end, destroys him. The main character in Jude, Jude Fawley, suffers from a desperate misery of body and mind and dies, like Tess in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, a victim of fate.
