To Kill a Mockingbird is set in Maycomb County, an fictional town in southern Alabama in the early 1930s. These were the years of the Great Depression, when the United States suffered greatly from poverty and unemployment. In deep Southern areas like Maycomb County, which were already suffering for decades earlier, the Depression meant things would get a little worse.
The undeveloped and poor rural areas were where black people worked for low wages in the fields; and where white people were likely to own land but were still cash poor.
The Finches belong to a higher level in the local community. Being an educated man who goes to work in a clean shirt, Atticus Finch owns a nice house and can afford to hire the black housekeeper, Calpurnia. But even then, the Finch family are only well-off in comparison with the other families who live in the same county, Maycomb.
The undeveloped and poor rural areas were where black people worked for low wages in the fields; and where white people were likely to own land but were still cash poor.
The Finches belong to a higher level in the local community. Being an educated man who goes to work in a clean shirt, Atticus Finch owns a nice house and can afford to hire the black housekeeper, Calpurnia. But even then, the Finch family are only well-off in comparison with the other families who live in the same county, Maycomb.
"A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County."
In a way, Maycomb is its own little world that doesn’t know what’s happening elsewhere and doesn’t seem to really care. Few people move there because there is not much reason to, just as few people leave - because again, why bother? All this means that the same families have been around for generations. With that comes family "traditions" where each family has their own values. For example, the Cunningham's not taking what they can't repay.
"Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's nothing unusual – her mother did the same."