How The Shire appears during and after the 'Scouring', is in effect reality. Before this, it was an idyllic place, that village which we all yearn for, which we all 'remember', and afterwards, the Hobbits try to return to that state of grace. But during the absence of the four Hobbits, the Shire is like the real world. Farm labourers toil to produce food which is shipped off somewhere else (to the towns in real life), tenants can be evicted from their homes if the landlord wants the land (as in what happened to the Gaffer), the mill fouls the local water supply. This is, and was, the reality of the countryside. Farmer Cotton takes steps to see that the Gaffer is well fed, which is forbidden, like a labourer supplementing his family's diet by poaching.
Yes, there are many parallels with oppressive regimes and how they have run their respective countries, but what happens to The Shire is in contrast
not all that bad! Now I'm waiting for the rotten fruit to come flying, but compare what has happened to The Shire and to the Hobbits with what happened to the farms which had been on the Pelennor Fields, the destruction of the trees around Fangorn, the slavery Sauron subjected his people to, the violence of the Orcs. The Shire got off lightly in comparison; it was never reduced to the state of Mordor, it was only reduced to
reality. The changes to the Shire only seem quite so horrific as we have been, like the four Hobbits, away from it for so long. We have been through their torments and like them cherished a dream of The Shire, a hope that we could return there. Tolkien cleverly pulls off this ending which is not happy and not what we expected; he takes us right out of our comfort zone.
This makes me wonder just how true the picture painted of the Shire in the first few chapters really is. It is from the point of view of Hobbits who have been through hell, and one of the things which kept them going through that hell was the vision of a perfect homeland to return to. Any of us who moved from home at an early age and now feel great nostalgia about our original town/village might experience the same if we too returned to our own 'Shire'.
How perfect was The Shire
really? We already know that some Hobbits could not read, and Bag End was atypical of average Hobbit Holes (the Chatsworth House of the Shire while the poorer Hobbits lived in places like
Park Hill). From Ted Sandyman's snide comments to Sam about him 'prattling' about his dreams for the future, we can also guess that The Shire had its fair share of reactionary Daily Mail types.
Considering the point of view of who wrote the texts, Bilbo (traditional middle England male), Frodo, Sam (working class boy made good), then it might not be that we were seeing The Shire in its true light in the first place
anyway. But then we had to see it like that, or we too would not have yearned along with Frodo and Sam.