The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character is an 1886 novel by the English author Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy’s Wessex novels, it is set in a fictional rural England with Casterbridge standing in for Dorchester in Dorset where the author spent his youth. It was first published as a weekly serialisation from January 1886.
The novel is considered to be one of the Hardy’s masterpieces, although it has been criticised for incorporating too many incidents: a consequence of the author trying to include something in every weekly published instalment.
At a country fair near Casterbridge in Wessex Michael Henchard, a 21-year-old hay-trusser, argues with his wife Susan. Drunk on rum-laced furmity he auctions her off, along with their baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane, to Richard Newson, a passing sailor, for five guineas. Sober the next day, he is too late to recover his family. He vows never to touch liquor again for 21 years.
Believing the auction to be legally binding, Susan lives as Newson’s wife for 18 years until he is one day lost at sea. Lacking any means of support, Susan decides to seek out Henchard again, taking her daughter Elizabeth-Jane with her. Elizabeth-Jane believes Henchard to be a distant relative of her mother. Susan discovers that Henchard has become a successful grain merchant and Mayor of Casterbridge, known for his staunch sobriety. He has avoided explaining the loss of his wife many years earlier, allowing people to assume he is a widower.
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