The Mayor of Casterbridge

Summary

The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character opens with one of the most startling scenes in English fiction. At a country fair in Weydon-Priors, the young hay-trusser Michael Henchard, drunk on rum-laced furmity, sells his wife Susan and their baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a sailor, Richard Newson, for five guineas. Sober and ashamed the next morning, he swears in a church to drink no alcohol for twenty-one years, the years he has lived. About eighteen years later Susan and her daughter come to the market town of Casterbridge, believing Newson lost at sea, and find Henchard a prosperous corn merchant and the town's mayor. He remarries Susan without revealing the past to Elizabeth-Jane. He also hires Donald Farfrae, a capable young Scot who improves the business, but his jealousy soon turns friendship into rivalry. Farfrae sets up on his own, courts Elizabeth-Jane, and gradually overtakes Henchard in trade, in public favor and eventually as mayor. After Susan dies, Henchard learns from a letter that Elizabeth-Jane is not his daughter but Newson's; his own child died in infancy. He grows cold toward her. Lucetta Templeman, a woman from Jersey with whom Henchard once had an affair, arrives to marry him but falls in love with Farfrae and marries him instead. Henchard's ruin is completed by rash speculation on the harvest and by the public revelation, from an old furmity-woman brought before him in court, that he once sold his wife. Their old letters, read aloud in a tavern, lead to a skimmity-ride, a mocking procession that shames Lucetta, who collapses and dies. Reduced to working for Farfrae and drinking again once his oath expires, Henchard comes to depend on Elizabeth-Jane's affection. When Newson returns alive, Henchard tells him that his daughter is dead, a lie that is soon exposed. He leaves Casterbridge rather than face her. He dies in a hut on Egdon Heath, attended only by his former workman Abel Whittle, leaving a bleak will asking that no one mourn him. Elizabeth-Jane marries Farfrae and reflects that happiness is only an occasional episode in a general drama of pain. Hardy subtitled the book a study of 'a man of character', and the novel is often read as a tragedy in the classical sense, in which Henchard's temper and pride, together with chance, bring about his fall.

Top Lessons

• Character is fate

  Hardy quotes Novalis to suggest that Henchard's temperament drives his ruin, yet chance repeatedly turns against him. The novel invites debate over how far people make their own fate.

• The past cannot be buried

  Every secret Henchard keeps, the sale, his affair with Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane's parentage, eventually returns. Hardy shows how concealment compounds wrongdoing.

• Old ways and new

  Farfrae's modern methods, bookkeeping and machinery replace Henchard's rule of thumb. The rivalry reflects a changing rural economy.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Henchard's drunken wife-sale, his twenty-one-year vow of abstinence and his return to drink chart alcohol's role in his life.

• Chapters I–II

  The furmity laced with rum, the sale and the vow.