Inbred yokels in literature

Top of my head, To Kill a Mockingbird, Silas Marner, there must be millions more?

Conan Doyle through Holmes summed it up perfectly -

“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“You horrify me!”

“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”

https://victorianweb.org/authors/doyle/rural.html

The NRCN (National Rural Crime Network) concluded -

‘Studies have very clearly shown that in small communities abusers recruit the entire community into the abuse, so when police knock on doors they are on the side of the abusers and not the abused’.

It may surprise people to hear that ‘entire community’ can sometimes mean public organisations and so called professionals, such as police, doctors, councillors, social workers, lawyers, and so on.

Atticus Finch had to protect innocent people from an entire community, but people like him are extremely rare. The received wisdom is that most people are good, but alas I suspect there is a bit of yokel lurking in too many humans. The brutal primitive yokel gives us a glimpse of the inner monkey within the human.