Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton in Dorset, a rural region of southwestern England that was to become the focus of his fiction. The child of a builder, Hardy was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to John Hicks, an architect who lived in the city of Dorchester. The location would later serve as the model for Hardy’s fictional Casterbridge. Although Hardy gave serious thought to attending university and entering the church, a struggle he would dramatize in his 1895 novel Jude the Obscure, his declining religious faith and lack of money encouraged him to pursue a career in writing instead. Hardy spent nearly a dozen years toiling in obscurity and producing unsuccessful novels and poetry. Far from the Madding Crowd, published in 1874, was his first critical and financial success. Finally able to support himself as a writer, Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford later that year.
Although he built a reputation as a successful novelist, Hardy considered himself—first and foremost—a poet. To him, novels were primarily a means of earning a living. Like many novelists of his day, he wrote according to the conventions of serialization (the process of publishing a work in periodic installments). To insure that readers would buy a serialized novel, writers often left pressing questions unanswered at the end of each installment. This practice explains the convoluted, often incredible plots of many nineteenth-century Victorian novels. But Hardy cannot be labeled solely a Victorian novelist. Nor can he be categorized as purely a modernist, in the tradition of writers like Virginia Woolf or D. H. Lawrence who were determined to explode the conventions of nineteenth-century literature and build a new kind of novel in its place. In many respects, Hardy was trapped between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between Victorian and modern sensibilities, and between tradition and innovation.
The Mayor of Casterbridge reveals Hardy’s peculiar location in this shifting world, possessing elements of both the Victorian and modernist forms. It charts the course of one man’s character, but it also chronicles the dramatic change of an isolated, rural agricultural community into a modern city. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, as well as in his most popular fictions, such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Hardy explores the effects of cultural and economic development: the decline of Christianity as well as folk traditions, the rise of industrialization and urbanization, and the unraveling of universally held moral codes.
Hardy himself abandoned Christianity. He read the writings of Charles Darwin, accepted the theory of evolution, and studied the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s notion of the “Immanent Will” describes a blind force that drives the universe irrespective of human lives or desires. Though his novels often end in crushing tragedies that reflect Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Hardy described himself as a meliorist, one who believes that the world tends to become better and that people aid in this betterment. Humans can live with some happiness, he claimed, so long as they understand their place in the universe and accept it. Hardy died in 1928 at his estate in Dorchester. True to the rather dramatically romantic fantasies of his fiction, Hardy had his heart buried in his wife’s tomb.
Michael Henchard is traveling with his wife, Susan, looking for employment as a hay-trusser. When they stop to eat, Henchard gets drunk, and in an auction that begins as a joke but turns serious, he sells his wife and their baby daughter, -Elizabeth-Jane, to Newson, a sailor, for five guineas. In the morning, Henchard regrets what he has done and searches the town for his wife and daughter. Unable to find them, he goes into a church and swears an oath that he will not drink alcohol for twenty-one years, the same number of years he has been alive.
After the sailor’s death, eighteen years later, Susan and Elizabeth-Jane seek Henchard; Elizabeth-Jane believes he is merely a long-lost relative. They arrive in Casterbridge and learn that Henchard is the mayor. The parents meet and decide that in order to prevent -Elizabeth-Jane from learning of their disgrace, Henchard will court and remarry Susan as though they had met only recently.
Meanwhile, Henchard has hired Donald Farfrae, a young Scotchman, as the new manager of his corn business. Elizabeth-Jane is intrigued by Farfrae, and the two begin to spend time together. Henchard becomes alienated from Farfrae, however, as the younger man consistently outdoes Henchard in every respect. He asks Farfrae to leave his business and to stop courting Elizabeth-Jane.
Susan falls ill and dies soon after her remarriage to Henchard. After discovering that Elizabeth-Jane is not his own daughter, but Newson’s, Henchard becomes increasingly cold toward her. -Elizabeth-Jane then decides to leave Henchard’s house and live with a lady who has just arrived in town. This lady turns out to be Lucetta Templeman, a woman with whom Henchard was involved during Susan’s absence; having learned of Susan’s death, Lucetta has come to Casterbridge to marry Henchard.
While Lucetta is waiting for Henchard to call on her, she meets Farfrae, who has come to call on Elizabeth-Jane. The two hit it off and are eventually married. Lucetta asks Henchard to return to her all the letters she has sent him. On his way to deliver the letters, the messenger, Jopp, stops at an inn. The peasants there convince him to open and read the letters aloud. Discovering that Lucetta and Henchard have been romantically involved, the peasants decide to hold a “skimmity-ride,” a humiliating parade portraying Lucetta and Henchard together. The event takes place one afternoon when Farfrae is away. Lucetta faints upon seeing the spectacle and becomes very ill. Shortly afterward, she dies.
While Henchard has grown to hate Farfrae, he has grown closer to Elizabeth-Jane. The morning after Lucetta’s death, Newson, who is actually still alive, arrives at Henchard’s door and asks for -Elizabeth-Jane. Henchard tells him that she is dead, and Newson leaves in sorrow. Elizabeth-Jane stays with Henchard and also begins to spend more time with Farfrae. One day, Henchard learns that Newson has returned to town, and he decides to leave rather than risk another confrontation. Elizabeth-Jane is reunited with Newson and learns of Henchard’s deceit; Newson and Farfrae start planning the wedding between Elizabeth-Jane and the Scotchman.
Henchard comes back to Casterbridge on the night of the wedding to see Elizabeth-Jane, but she snubs him. He leaves again, telling. . .
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