Historical context
The end of the 19th century in the UK continued the painful social changes involved in the gradual transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. Victorian society was organised around gender and class.
The rising middle class in the form of bankers, businessmen and entrepreneurs brought new money to power the factories. They increasing displaced the old land aristocracies to become the social elite: the D'Urbervilles became the Durbeyfields. Tess's family's fantasy of aristocratic lineage was that, an illusion. This idea was not well received by Hardy's conservative Victorian society.
Gender was based on biology. Its ideology was founded on the premise of separate spheres which divided men and women into dual entities and the more negative attributes are feminine: weak/strong, sex/reproduction, independent/dependent, public/private.
Literary context
Novels in the Victorian age tended towards a realistic depiction of contemporary social life. Thackeray described the upper-class through Becky Sharp, the social climber. Dickens focused on the under class and their exploitation. Eliot centred attention on the rising middle class. Hardy's fictional niche was the rural class. Each writer reflected on the practical problems of their chosen social environment and also offered criticism of its organisation.
Morality was another common theme in Victorian literature. It shone a light on the double standards of the day where ethical behaviour was coded, but the higher the class the more skeptically it was adhered to. The banker in Middlemarch, the mill owner in Hard Times, Ms. Sharp in Vanity Fair and the false D'Urberville in Hardy's novel were all disdainful of the accepted moral code.
