The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Mayor of Casterbridge is a tragic novel by Thomas Hardy, first serialized and published in book form in 1886. Subtitled “The Life and Death of a Man of Character,” it is a study of Michael Henchard.

As an impoverished young laborer, Henchard gets drunk at a country fair and sells his wife Susan and their child to a sailor. Horrified when he sobers, he swears off alcohol for twenty-one years, but a buried act of violence remains beneath his later respectability.

Years later, Susan and her daughter Elizabeth-Jane find Henchard established as a prosperous corn merchant and mayor of Casterbridge. His attempt to repair the past becomes entangled with the capable young Scotsman Donald Farfrae and with Lucetta Templeman, until friendship turns into rivalry.

Hardy's fictional Casterbridge gives public weight to private choices: business, courtship, weather, gossip, and coincidence all expose Henchard's pride and need for affection. The novel traces success undone by character without reducing its flawed central figure to a simple warning.

"One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot."