Young, poor Michael Henchard feels trapped by his wife
and child and one night gets drunk at a fair and sells
them to a stranger called Newson. Horrified by what
he has done, he swears not to touch alcohol for twenty
years. Eighteen years later he is the mayor of Casterbridge
and a successful businessman. Believing Newson is dead,
his wife, Susan, and daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, arrive in
Casterbridge to find Henchard because she has no money.
He marries her again and they have a short happy life
together. Farfrae, a young man with modern business
ideas, arrives at the same time and becomes Henchard's
farm manager. Susan dies, and Henchard learns that
Elizabeth-Jane is really Newson's daughter. Henchard falls
out with Farfrae, who sets up a rival business, and soon
outdoes him. A woman from Henchard's past, Lucetta,
comes to Casterbridge. Henchard now wants to marry
her, but she and Farfrae fall in love. Henchard's business
fails and he loses his house so he starts drinking again.
Lucetta dies of shock after the local people make fun of
her and Henchard in public. He sees that he will now
lose his 'daughter' as well as everything else. He leaves
Casterbridge on foot. He is penniless and has lost his
family – just as at the beginning of the story. Elizabeth-
Jane remains loyal to Henchard, but he dies before she can
find him.
Chapter 1: Henchard, a farm worker aged twenty, has a
family, no job and no home. He gets drunk and sells his
wife and child for five guineas to a sailor named Newson
at a fair. Devastated at what he has done, he looks for
them without success. Henchard makes a solemn promise
not to touch alcohol for twenty years.
Chapter 2: Susan, widowed and poor, and her eighteen-
year-old daughter, Elizabeth-Jane arrive in Casterbridge to
find Henchard. She is relieved to find he is now the Mayor
and a businessman who needs a corn manager for his
growing business.
Chapter 3: Henchard employs Farfrae, a handsome
innovative Scotsman as corn manager and the business
improves. He also meets Susan and devises a plan so
that the townspeople do not find their marriage strange.
He draws closer to Farfrae and tells him about his past;
including a woman in Jersey he promised to marry.
Chapter 4: Henchard marries Susan, but she is reluctant
to have her daughter's last name changed. He and Farfrae
disagree publicly over a worker. Henchard is jealous and
organises a rival entertainment day to Farfrae's, but it fails.
Farfrae leaves him and sets up a rival business. Susan dies
but leaves a letter with the truth about her daughter.
Chapter 5: Henchard tells Elizabeth-Jane what happened
at the fair twenty years ago but reads in Susan's letter that
she is really Newson's daughter. He begins to treat her
coldly, and even encourages Farfrae to see her. Elizabeth-
Jane meets a woman at her mother's grave who is friendly
and offers her to share her house. : Lucetta, the woman from Jersey, has inherited
property in Casterbridge and has employed Elizabeth-Jane
as a housekeeper. Henchard tries to see her but they fail to
meet. Farfrae calls in to see Elizabeth-Jane, who is out. He
likes Lucetta and she loses interest in Henchard.
Chapter 7: Henchard goes bankrupt because of the
weather and his own impatience while Farfrae's business
succeeds. Henchard realises he and Farfrae compete for
Lucetta's love, so he threatens her with making their past
public so that she accepts his proposal of marriage.
Chapter 8: Henchard agrees to postpone their wedding
if Lucetta helps him buy some time to repay a debt to
Grower. She can't because she has secretly married Farfrae
and Grower acted as witness.
Chapter 9: Henchard claims the letters from his safe, and
reads them out to Farfrae without disclosing the sender.
He promises Lucetta to give tham back to her and asks
Jopp to deliver them.
Chapter 10: Jopp asks Lucetta to help him become her
husband's manager but she refuses. In a pub, he reads out
the letters to two women and they plan a skimmity-ride in
town to scorn Lucetta and Henchard.
Chapter 11: A member of the Royal family visits the
town but Henchard is not allowed to greet him. Hurt,
Henchard fights Farfrae in a barn but cannot bring himself
to kill him.
Chapter 12: Henchard is back in town to see the ride.
Farfrae does not see the ride because he is lured away from
town but Lucetta dies of the shock.
Chapter 13: Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane live
together happily. Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae renew their
relationship and get married. Newson returns and tells his
daughter the truth, which makes her very happy.
Henchard leaves the town.
Chapter 14: Elizabeth-Jane marries Farfrae and tries to
find her father to take care of him but he dies before she
can find him.
The original text
The novel first appeared serially, in twenty instalments,
in 1886 in The Graphic, an English periodical and
simultaneously in the United States. The book appeared
as soon as the serial publication was complete but it differs
a lot from the serial novel. It has been adapted for TV as a
miniseries.
Background and themes
Where the story came from: Hardy claims the story
was inspired by three actual events: the sale of a wife
by her husband reported in a local newspaper, the
uncertain harvests and the visit of Prince Albert, Queen
Victoria's husband, to Dorchester, the town upon which
Casterbridge is based, in 1849.
Fight with self: The main theme of the book is
Henchard's fight against two things: his own character
and chance. As he fights with himself, his actions and
decisions affect other people's lives, usually badly. He
often allows negative feelings to overwhelm him – at the
beginning when things seem so bad he sells his wife. He is
always honest in business, but not always kind; he is often
impatient and quick to anger, but he is capable of great
love and great loneliness. His complex character creates
uncertainty in the reader – should we feel sorry for him or
does he deserve everything that happens to him?
Chance: Chance plays an important part throughout the
story: the chance appearance of Newson in the tent when
Henchard is trying to sell his wife; the rain that spoils
Henchard's fair; the August weather that ruins Henchard's
business; the chance meeting between Farfrae and Lucetta
when they fall in love. Hardy believes that although
Henchard is a powerful character, he is never fully in
control of his life.
Alcohol also has a role here. Henchard's life improves
when he stops drinking; as he devotes himself to work,
builds a successful business and eventually becomes mayor.
Once he starts again, he loses his pride and his judgement.
Traditional versus modern: The two men represent
contrasting ways of life in the country. Henchard is
traditional and old-fashioned. Farfrae is young and
modern. Hardy was always fascinated by country customs
and ways. He often includes strange country rituals like
the skimmity-ride in his novels. They make useful plot
devices and allow him to paint pictures of colourful but
less important characters. He also uses them to reveal the
conservative side of society, which can be very cruel to
people who fall outside its strict rules of moral behaviour.
Lucetta dies because of the skimmity joke. This breaking
of the moral code becomes a very important theme in
Hardy's later novels, which shocked the reading public
and ended Hardy's novel-writing career. What has Providence done to Mr Hardy
that he should rise up in the arable land of
Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?
So wrote Hardy's friend Edmund Gosse at
the end of a review of Jude the Obscure.
It's a fair question. What made Hardy see
the world as such a dark and unforgiving
place? He grew up in a loving family,
studied and worked at a job he enjoyed,
lived in a part of the country he loved,
went on to make his living as a writer, and
became (and remains) one of the greatest
English novelists. His life had its tragedies
– the suicide of a close friend, a childless
and ultimately unhappy marriage – as well
as its philosophical darknesses (he found
the conventional notion of a benevolent
God impossible). But surely these are not
sufficient to explain an almost malevolentlydisinterested Fate that wreaks its heedless
damage upon the central characters of
his books. For Hardy, coincidences are not
merely plot devices: they are the wheels
of a Juggernaut that will crush everything
that has any association with it; and to
which the characters seem tied by virtue
of their flawed human-ness.
Hardy was compulsively interested in
how people's characteristics shaped their
lives; in local history; and in recognising
the social shifts that were changing the
landscape, workscape, philosophy and
very tenor of the world he knew. As a
writer, he bridged the span between the
high Victorian of the 1860s and the era
of Modernism in the 1920s. Around him,
the rigorous certainties of the former gave
way to the intellectual and spiritual doubtsof the latter, and the shift was registered
everywhere, from the literary cliques
of London to the labourers in Dorset –
everything was undergoing a profound
upheaval. And Hardy was caught between
the two extremes.
He was born to a builder and master
stonemason in Bockhampton, Dorset, and
although educated at home until he was
eight, he was a capable student and by
the time he was 13 was learning French
and Latin. He was also a lover of music,
something he shared with his father,
playing the violin and joining the choir.
But his family's social status and lack of
funds meant any further education was
out of the question, so at 16 he went
to study under the architect John Hicks,
and at about the same time, met Horatio
(Horace) Moule. For the next 15 years or
so, Moule was to be a friend and mentor,
introducing Hardy to the contemporary
authors and the Greek writers, whose
sense of the tragic was to be echoed in
much of Hardy's work. Moule was a man
of profound charm, charisma, intellect
and personality, blighted with melancholia
and a tendency to alcohol. He eventually
committed suicide in 1873. There is no
evidence to suggest a sexual element to
their closeness, but Moule's life (and death)
had the same depth of effect on Thomas
Hardy as Arthur Hallam's had on Tennyson
– something at the very root of life was
expressed by the friendship; something
crushingly destroyed by the death.
Before that tragedy, however, Hardy
was making a living as an architect, and
in 1862 he took a post in a practice in
London. Here his pained sensitivity to
the niceties of the English class system
and his belief that reform in all areas of
English social life (philosophical, religious
and political) was necessary were honed
by his exposure to wider culture and to
other writers and philosophers. But his
health was never strong; and the urge to
live in the countryside he loved so much
meant he returned to Dorset five years
later. He had been writing poetry for some
time, but it was felt that the publishers
wanted prose. So he started writing
novels, though at first the publishers didn't
want them, either. He destroyed his first
one, but was persuaded to carry on, and
between 1872 (Under the GreenwoodTree) and 1898 (The Well-Beloved) he
wrote 18 novels, including six or seven of
the greatest works in English fiction. These
are tragedies that bring together strong
characters and an implacable Fate (often
one that seems to pass judgement on the
basis of conventional morality) in an area
of south-west England that Hardy knew,
loved, understood – and mythologised as
Wessex. One of these was The Mayor of
Casterbridge.
It explores many of his core themes:
the traps of convention; the ramifications
of character; class and social structure; the
conflicts between love and loyalty, self and
the greater good; fate; religion; and many
other issues, all laced within a story that
– for all its apparent improbability – has
its starting point in fact. Hardy collected
items that matched his view of the way
life treated people, and incorporated them
in his works; and he noticed a story in a
local paper about a man selling his wife at
a fair. It seemed a perfect springboard for
the characters he had in mind. Henchard
is not just a victim of circumstance – his
fate is rooted in his inherent characteristics
and the decisions he makes are based on
his nature. The same is true of Farfrae,
Elizabeth-Jane (although she was
somewhat softened in later editions, which
rather reduced her strength of character)
and even Susan and Newson. This is why
the novel has the subtitle A Story of a
Man of Character (although which man is
meant by this is not completely clear). The
lives that are played out are not merely at
the whim of fate, God or even, to some
extent, the novelist. They are the natural
extensions of the characters themselves.
The novel was serialised in the Graphic
with some trepidation, since Hardy was
developing a reputation for controversy
that would only grow over the remaining
10 years of his life as a novelist. His
opposition to many of the standard mores
put him at odds with the establishment,
and the reception afforded his later works
– one Bishop actually burned a copy of
Jude the Obscure and, as Hardy pointed
out, that was probably only because he
couldn't burn the novelist – decided him
to give up the form altogether and return
to his first love, poetry.
Between 1898 and the end of his
life, Hardy published no more novels, butconcentrated on poems and epic verse. He
was awarded the Order of Merit in 1910,
having earlier refused a knighthood, and a
major edition of his works was published
in 1912. But the same year, his wife – from
whom he had been essentially estranged
for almost two decades – died; and her
death proved a wellspring of profound
emotion and inspiration as he remembered
their earlier happiness. He married his
secretary Florence Dugdale two years
later, and continued to publish verse and
autobiography until his death in 1928.
So what had Providence done to Mr
Hardy? Nothing of itself, perhaps. It was
his fate to be gifted with a sense of the
effects of character on life, of the capacity
for unhappiness, of the shifts undermining
the social world; his fate to have a poetic
imagination, a deep understanding of
irony and a mind that could not accept a
conventional theology. And it was his fate
to act upon these inherent gifts and flaws,
just as his heroes and heroines did....!!!!