‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ is an 1886 novel by the legendary English writer Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy’s ‘Wessex’ novel (a fictional region of Britain that Hardy invented), the book is generally acknowledged as one of the author’s masterpieces.
The story, set in the town of Casterbridge, concerns a married young farmer named Michael Henchard who, one drunken night, auctions off his wife Susan and baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a passing sailor, Richard Newson for five pounds. Waking up the next morning and unable to locate his family, Henchard is mortified and vows never to drink again. Years later, with Newson apparently lost at sea, Susan returns to Wessex with a grown-up Elizabeth-Jane in tow and rekindles her romance with Henchard, who has now grown to be a wealthy farmer and, as it turns out, the Mayor of Casterbridge.
What follows is a wild and adventurous tale of love, marriage, betrayal and hidden secrets in a book that has long been hailed as one of the most consequential and entertaining books in English literary history. Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ is presented here in its original and unabridged format.
About the author
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet best known for his dramatic novels set in the west of England in a fictionalized area known as Wessex.Hardy came from humble origins (his father was a stonemason) but he received encouragement in his education from his mother and attended school in Dorchester until he began an apprenticeship at 16, studying to become an architect. Eventually, he would move to London and continue his education at King’s College London and worked on various architectural projects through the 1860’s.But young Hardy had a love of literature and attempted to get an early novel published in as early as 1867. He could not find a publisher and abandoned the book, finally publishing his first two novels anonymously in the early 1870’s.His publications of Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874 finally brought Hardy the success and literary renown he craved and his subsequent books, The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and especially Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1891) proved to be enormously successful, if controversial because of their themes of class division, sex, religion and marriage. This would come to a head with his publication of Jude the Obscure in 1895, which brought strong condemnation from the conservative Victorian public as well as church officials. The notoriety and negative press surrounding the publication naturally only caused the book to become even more popular.By the 1900’s, Hardy’s financial and literary legacy was secure and he spent the rest of his life devoted almost entirely to writing poetry, including a number of significant war poems inspired by the Boer Wars and World War I. In December of 1927, he became ill with pleurisy and died on January 11, 1928 at his home in Dorchester at the age of 87.
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