The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Original en 115143 words First published 1886 United Kingdom Tales Reborn

At a country fair in Wessex, a drunken hay-trusser named Michael Henchard sells his wife Susan and their baby daughter to a sailor for five guineas. When he sobers up and realizes what he has done, he is too proud to chase after them. Instead he swears an oath before God: for the next twenty-one years he will not touch a drop of liquor. The oath is the first of many grand gestures by which Henchard tries to bargain with fate, and the novel follows him for the whole span of that vow. Henchard rises. Through tireless work and an unforgiving temper he becomes the richest grain merchant and the mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy's imagined market town built on the wool trade and old customs. But his character is his own worst enemy: headlong, jealous, quick to take offense and slow to forgive. Susan returns years later with a grown daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, believing herself a widow, and Henchard remarries her, only for new and old secrets to begin unraveling his position. Into the town comes Donald Farfrae, a young Scotsman with modern methods and an easy charm. Henchard hires him, then quarrels with him, then spends his remaining years competing with the man who out-sells him in grain, out-manages him as mayor, and, without ever meaning to, wins the love of nearly everyone Henchard cares about. As his fortunes turn, Henchard pays in kind for every rash act, and Hardy lets the bill come due with almost biblical patience. First published in 1886, The Mayor of Casterbridge carries the subtitle The Life and Death of a Man of Character, and it is one of the great tragic novels of English literature: a study of a self-made man undone by the very qualities that made him.

Public domain in the United States; text sourced from Project Gutenberg.

The Mayor of Casterbridge

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