Actually, I do rather like Hardy, it's just so many of those others: Dickens, Elliot, Trollope, Austin and teh Bronte's: for me they're the 19th century equivalent of "chick flicks".
I have enjoyed some Wilkie Collins, and Thackery is not bad. But, give me the vigor of American or German novels of that period almost any time! While adequate in translation, novelists like Fontane, Kleist, Goethe and Mann are all far better in the original German. (tho' I confess to having had a hard time with the plattdeutsch dialect in Effi Briest -- gives me a new appreciation of the difficulties non-native speakers of English must have with the dialect in Twain)