Under the powerful influence of rum furmity,Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser by trade, sells his wife Susan and their child Elizabeth-Jane to Newson, a sailor, for five guineas.
Years later, Susan, now a widow, arrives in Casterbridge with Elizabeth-Jane, to seek her legal husband. To their surprise,Henchard is now the Mayor of Casterbridge and, following the sale of his wife, took a twenty-one-year vow not to drink, out of shame. Henchard remarries Susan and, as Elizabeth-Jane believes herself to be Newson’s daughter, he adopts her as his own. But he cannot evade his destiny by such measures, for his past refuses to be buried. Fate contrives for him to be punished for the recklessness of his younger days.
In this powerful depiction of a man who overreaches himself,Hardy once again shows his acute psychological grasp and his deep-seated knowledge of mid-nineteenth-century Dorset.
THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928). One of the few writers to succeed as both major novelist and poet, Hardy is best known for his beautiful but often harsh portrayal of rural England set in and around his beloved Wessex.
The son of a master stonemason, Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, in June 184o. He was educated first at the village school and then in Dorchester. His mother harboured intellectual ambitions for him and encouraged him to read widely; at the age of sixteen, however, he was apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect, where he trained in the architecture of Gothic revival, an interest that stayed with Hardy for the rest of his life. In I862 Hardy moved to London to follow his profession, working for the architect Arthur Blom field. It was during his busy years in London that Hardy started to write, greatly encouraged by his close friend Horace Moule.
Returning to Dorset in 1867 Hardy began his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, but it was rejected for publication. While living in Dorset, Hardy became very attached to his cousin Tryphena Sparks; their relationship and hers with Horace Moule has been the subject of much speculation ever since. It was on an architectural mission to St Juliot in Cornwall in 1868 that Hardy met Emma Gifford, whom he was later to marry. Although their marriage was often strained, it was Emma who encouraged Hardy to renounce architecture in favour of writing fulltime. Hardy wrote eleven novels between his first success with Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874 and the public ation of Jude the Obscure in 1896. Among his most wellknown novels are The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the D’Urbevilles (1891). Increasingly harsh attacks by critics on his ’pessimism’ and ’immorality’ in the later novels led Hardy to abandon the novel form for ever. For the remainder of his life he devoted himself to poetry, publishing his first collection of verse, Wessex Poems, in 1898. Emma died in 1912, which affected Hardy greatly, leading to some of his most deeply felt poems. Marrying his secretary and close companion Florence Dugdale in 1914, Hardy remained for most of his time at his house in Dorchester. An intensely private person, he set about writing his autobiography during the last years of his life, to prevent others from prying after his death. Published posthumously in 1928, it was passed off as the work of Florence Dugdale,as Hardy had intended it should be. Thomas Hardy is buried in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.
The Mayor of Casterbridge, which first appeared in 1886, was Hardy’s tenth published novel and, some say,first masterpiece. Set around Casterbridge, Hardy’s name for Dorchester, the story of Michael Henchard remains among the most tragic of all Hardy’s novels.Readers may also find the following books of interest:John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy (1978); Simon Gatrell,Hardy the Creator (1988); Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy (1975) and The Older Hardy (1978); J. Goode,Hardy: The Offensive Truth (1988); Patricia Ingham, A Feminist Reading of Hardy (1989); and Michael Millgate (ed.), The Life and Works of Thomas Hardy (1985) and Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982).
THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE BY THOMAS HARDY
PREFACE
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Chapter XLIV
Chapter XLV
