On the Western Circuit

In Thomas Hardy's "On the Western Circuit," he states, "She did not know that before his eyes he beheld as it were a galley, in which he, the fastidious urban, was chained to work for the remainder of his life, with her, the unlettered peasant, chained to his side" (9). In this writing, Raye is finding out that the person, Anna, whom he has just married, is not the person who he has communicated with over the last several months. It turned out that this was not the case. The quote that struck me as kind of interesting was the one that describes how he felt when he realized that the women he was with was not educated like he thought. This is quite different from the way that Sarah Stickney Ellis described the duties of women in her writing "The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits." She states, "There is but a very small proportion of the daughters of farmers, manufacturers, and tradespeople, in England, who are ever called upon for their Latin, their Italian, or even for their French; but all women in this sphere of life are liable to be called upon to visit and care for the sick;" (559). It seems that maybe the view toward the education of women had changed in society from the Victorian to the Modern period. A Victorian man would probably not have been upset if his wife could not write intelligently, but was more concerned with someone who is like a maid. This seems to show the slow change in societies view of women.