Among modern studies of Thomas Hardy, Nie Zhenzhao and Zhu Haiqing gain notable achievements. Nie writes an article named Darwinism and Thomas Hardy’s Fiction. In this article he mainly discusses Darwinism and its influence on Hardy’s several fictions including the Mayor of the Casterbridge, Under the Greenwood, Tess, Far from the Madding Crowd and so on. In his work, Nie explores how Darwinism has had an influence on Hardy and his all works. In addition, he also makes a detailed analysis of embodiment of Utilitarianism in Tess. But he doesn’t study further on the impact of Darwin thought on Far From the Madding Crowd. And Zhu Haiqing publishes one paper entitled Influence of Darwinism on Hardy’s Novels .Zhu proposes that Hardy depicts the pictures of “the fittest survives” in his novels. He thinks that Thomas Hardy’s reading of evolution gave no hope of man’s being able to control his destiny. At the same time, he realizes a fact-that the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal in such an environment and this planet does not supply the materials for happiness to higher existences. To be specific, either of them does research on Far from the Madding Crowd. This paper will make up for this limitation and aims to examine the influence of Darwinian thought on this novel.

This paper contains three parts: humankind’s brutal competition for survival and its effect on personal fate; the dramatic destiny the peasant class encountered during the drastic change occurred at that certain period in the fiction; reasons for the demise of rural area in southern England.