Cheese-wring

In Chapter 50 of Far From The Madding Crowd, when Jan Coggan says:  ".... if only I could get out of this cheese-wring ....", he is using a dialect for an extremely tight squeeze or a crush of people. 
A cheese-wring (more commonly spelled cheesewring or cheesering) originally meant a device used in cheese making.  After curds were placed in a mould, a press squeezed them to force out the whey and compact the cheese.  By extension the word came to mean any situation in which a person is compressed from all sides. 

In Chapter 50 Jan Coggan and Joseph Poorgrass are being pushed forward by the crowd trying to enter the circus tent at Greenhill Fair.  Hardy describes Coggan as being "Jammed as in a vice."  Surrounded by people and unable to move, Coggan humurously compares the crowd to a cheese press. 
The image is particularly impressive.
Hardy often gives rustic characters vivid farming and dairy-farming metaphors drawn from village life.  The phrase also adds comic texture to a tense situation. 
Jan Coggan does not stop here, he continues 
"d----- women might eat the show for me." 
Here d is "dammed," a word the  Victorian publishers often preferred not to publish.  "Women might eat the show for me"  means:
Women will consume all my chance of seeing the show. 

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