The Mayor of Casterbridge

Comparative · 2027 Leaving Cert

Thomas Hardy’s novel about a man who sells his wife at a fair, climbs to the top of a small town, and then watches his whole world come apart. If you have it as a comparative text, this is your starting point.

The book opens with one of the most shocking moments in any text on the course. Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, gets drunk on rum-laced furmity at Weydon-Priors fair and auctions off his wife Susan and their baby daughter to a passing sailor. He wakes the next morning sober and horrified, swears an oath not to touch alcohol for twenty-one years, and sets out to find them. He fails. That single act, done in a few careless minutes, is the seed of everything that follows.

Years later we meet Henchard again, now the respected Mayor of Casterbridge and a successful corn merchant. He has built a life on hard work and force of personality. Then the past walks back through the door: Susan returns with her grown daughter Elizabeth-Jane, and a clever young Scotsman named Donald Farfrae arrives in town. Farfrae becomes first Henchard’s friend and employee, then his rival in business and in love. As Farfrae rises, Henchard falls. Old secrets surface, debts come due, and Henchard’s own stubborn, jealous temper does the rest. By the end he has lost his position, his fortune, and everyone he cared about, dying alone with a will that asks to be forgotten.

For the Comparative, this is a gift of a text. The plot is driven by character and consequence, so it speaks directly to General Vision and Viewpoint, to the Cultural Context of a rigid, reputation-obsessed Victorian town, and above all to Theme or Issue, where Henchard’s downfall gives you fate, guilt, pride, and chance to write about. Hardy keeps asking the question at the heart of the course: how much of a life is fixed by who you are, and how much by what happens to you?

Study The Mayor of Casterbridge

Start with the angle below. It breaks the novel down for the comparative mode you are most likely to be asked about, with the key moments and quotations you need to back up your points.