The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Thomas Hardy (Author), Keith Wilson (Editor, Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1998 | Series: Penguin Classics

Thomas Hardy's fascination with the dualities inherent in human nature is at the root of The Mayor of Casterbridge, now in a brand-new edition. In a drunken fit Michael Henchard sells his wife and infant daughter to a sailor at a country fair; when sobriety returns the following day, he is unable to find and reclaim his family. Vowing to transform his life, he settles in the town of Casterbridge, where he eventually rises to the position of mayor. Henchard is a man whose impulses are at war with one another, and when his wife and daughter, now a young woman, appear in Casterbridge, these internal contradictions drive him to commit acts that spell his final destruction. Employing the elements of classic tragedy Hardy took the English novel in a new direction, emerging as both the last Victorian novelist and the first modern one, and defines themes that would occupy such twentieth-century writers as Conrad and Lawrence.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840. In his writing, he immortalized the site of his birth—Egdon Heath, in Dorset, near Dorchester. Delicate as a child, he was taught at home by his mother before he attended grammar school. At sixteen, Hardy was apprenticed to an architect, and for many years, architecture was his profession; in his spare time, he pursued his first and last literary love, poetry. Finally convinced that he could earn his living as an author, he retired from architecture, married, and devoted himself to writing. An extremely productive novelist, Hardy published an important book every year or two. In 1896, disturbed by the public outcry over the unconventional subjects of his two greatest novels—Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure—he announced that he was giving up fiction and afterward produced only poetry. In later years, he received many honors. He died on January 11, 1928, and was buried in Poet’s Corner, in Westminster Abbey. It was as a poet that he wished to be remembered, but today critics regard his novels as his most memorable contribution to English literature for their psychological insight, decisive delineation of character, and profound presentation of tragedy.

Keith Wilson is professor and former chair of English at the University of Ottawa and Honorary Vice President of the Thomas Hardy Association.

Keith Wilson is professor and former chair of English at the University of Ottawa and Honorary Vice President of the Thomas Hardy Association.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140435131
• ISBN-13: 978-0140435139
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,087,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Mayor of Casterbridge, May 30, 2002

By 

jenny (Okemos) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge" es a truly remarkable novel. Interesting throughout, it is the story of the rise and fall of a man named Mechael Henchard. Ay the beginning of the novel, Henchard is a volatile, twenty-one-year-old hay-trusser. He becomes drunk at a fair and sells his wife and daughter to a sailor in an auction, which originally began as a joke, turns serious.Upon realizing that he has sold his family, Henchard searches for them to no avail, and takes an oath to give up alcohol for twenty-one years. After the supposed death of the sailor, Michael's wife, Susan Henchard, and her daughter began a search for Michael Henchard, who has become the mayor of Casterbridge.
The novel proceeds as many soap-opera-like events unfold. The unique plot-twists made reading the novel a very entertaining experience. An unfavorable trait Henchard possesses is not letting go of past mistakes. Although he tries to atone for the past indiscretions, fate always seems to catch up to him. These factors and others contribute to the downfall of Michael Henchard.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark, depressing, and fascinating, October 6, 2004

By 

Maria (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Read this novel after Far From The Madding Crowd and Return of the Native. It's a very bleak and depressing novel - without the comic flourishes and moments of his earlier work.

The story follows Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser, who sells his wife and child for five guineas in an 'auction' during a fit of inebriety. He spends the next 21 years regretting his action, but during that time he does well for himself, becoming mayor of Casterbridge, a rural town. Years later, his wife and daughter reappear. This starts a chain of events that leads to Henchard's fall. He eventually ends up losing everything because of his pride, passion and stubborness. The main character isn't very likeable, but there is something of the tragic about him that commands your attention.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "He sold his wife and baby daughter for 5 guineas.", August 10, 2004

By 

Matthew M. Yau "Voracious reader" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

The Mayor of Casterbridge, focused and simple the premise has been in itself, affords a quite convoluted plot that packs with events as the memorably niched characters play out their lives and unravels the novel. The book is riddled with a well-faceted theme of conscience: the purging of conscience and its reconciliation through an allusion to deceit and characters' shameless past that ceaselessly haunt them and render them despondent and guilty. The tragic actions revolve around one man who manages to establish prestige, wealth, and authority over Casterbridge and ironically the very elite status leads to the fall of the deeply flawed man.

In a fit of drunken anger and delirium, young Michael Henchard sells his wife Susan and baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a sailor for 5 guineas at a county fair. Over the course of the years, though he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the town from literally nothing, Henchard still affords a ray of hope in reuniting with his family, until he meets Lucetta Templeman who nurses him in America. Such black spot of his youth as wife-sale caused by his fits of spleen not only renders him ashamed of himself but also wears an aspect of recent crime: something that will shame him until his dying day. Behind his success is always lurking such shameful secret of his troubled past shielded from the public and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper.

Contributing to the suspenseful nature of the novel is the return of the mayor's wife and daughter some 18 years later whom Michael Henchard believed to have perished at the sea. The sentimental reunion, which marks Henchard respectable 20-year abstinence from alcohol, brings about a heartrending revelation and an ironical sequence of events that irritate Henchard. The very truth cruelly leaves in him an emotional void that he unconsciously craves to fill. At the same time, the regard he has acquired for Elizabeth-Jane has eclipsed by this revelation. The new-sprung hope of his loneliness (or "friendless solitude" in Hardy's own words) that she will be to him a daughter of whom he can feel as proud as of the actual daughter she believes herself to be, has been stimulated by the (yet another) unexpected arrival of the sailor to a greedy exclusiveness in relation to her.

All these ineluctable consequences of his past shameful transaction at the fair take a stupendous toll on Henchard and his conscience. He is also uneasy at the thought of Elizabeth-Jane's passion for Donald Farfrae, whose rising prestige and success in his independent business provoke in Henchard enmity and envy. Henchard quails at the thought that Farfrae shall utterly usurp her mild filial sympathy with him, that she might be withdrawn from him by degrees through Farfrae's influence and learns to despise him. The pricking of conscience subtly manifests in Henchard's solicitous love and growing jealousy. His fear of losing tie after the death of his wife is sympathetically understandable. Though he in his effrontery has been weaning Elizabeth-Jane from the sailor by saying he is her father, she understands that Henchard has himself been deceived in her identity.

Lucetta Templeman, inescapably torn between her past disgraceful entanglement with Henchard and her love for a more refined gentleman, is also pricked by her conscience. In an impulsive moment, purely out of gratitude, Henchard proposes to the Jersey woman who has been so far compromised to him. But as the years gone by, Lucetta is more convinced that she has been forced into an equivocal position with Henchard by an accident. She has discovered some quantities in Henchard, who is either well-educated nor refined in manner, that irretrievably renders him less desirable as a husband than she has at first thought him to be, notwithstanding there remains a conscientious wish to being about her union with him.

When Lucetta learns of the wife-sale, she immediately dismisses any possibility of being with him and realizes she cannot risk himself in his hands. It will have been letting herself down to take Henchard's name after such an ignominious scandal. But her past which she diligently seals, if not expunge altogether haunts her. The surreptitious history with Henchard becomes the torture of her meek conscience and the reconciling of which through a marriage with a second man remains also her secret alone.

Subtitled "A Story of a Man of Character", Henchard's origins remain unexplained but he literally begins and ends the novel away from Casterbridge, where he achieves his prominent status ironically destines his downfall, through the lampooning and skimmity-ride. A psychological study, the novel accentuates the fury that causes him to lash out against both himself and those who stand closest to him. It depicts to the fullest the very self-destructive nature of the power that causes Henchard's fall, which is so obvious through his louring invidiousness.

2004 (46) ©MY