The Mayor of Casterbridge

Comparative · 2027 Leaving Cert

Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a man selling his wife at a country fair and spends the rest of the novel making him pay for it. Hardy’s own subtitle tells you what kind of book it is.

“The Life and Death of a Man of Character”Hardy’s subtitle

The novel was published in 1886 and set in the Wessex of Hardy’s invention, based on Dorchester in Dorset. Casterbridge is a market town, still walled by its Roman ruins, where corn is bought and sold and where everybody’s business is public. Hardy is precise about the economics of it, because the plot turns on harvests, prices and credit.

It is on the comparative list for 2027. It works best for Theme or Issue and for General Vision and Viewpoint, since the question of whether Henchard is destroyed by fate or by his own temper is exactly the kind of argument those modes reward.

The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Story in Five Beats

One. Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, gets drunk on rum at a fair at Weydon-Priors and auctions his wife Susan and their baby daughter to a passing sailor, Newson, for five guineas. In the morning he swears off alcohol for twenty one years and cannot find them.

Two. Eighteen years later Susan returns, believing Newson drowned, with a grown daughter named Elizabeth-Jane. Henchard is now Mayor of Casterbridge and a prosperous corn merchant. He remarries Susan quietly to avoid scandal.

Three. Donald Farfrae, a young Scot passing through, saves Henchard’s business with a method for reviving spoiled grain. Henchard hires him, becomes devoted to him, then jealous of him, and drives him out. Farfrae sets up in competition and wins.

Four. Everything unravels at once. Susan dies, and a letter reveals that Elizabeth-Jane is Newson’s daughter, not his. A bad harvest gamble ruins him. Lucetta, a woman with a claim on his past, marries Farfrae and is then destroyed by the townspeople in a skimmity-ride, a public procession mocking her.

Five. Bankrupt and working as a labourer for Farfrae, Henchard lies to Newson to keep Elizabeth-Jane, and is found out. He leaves Casterbridge, dies in a hut on the heath, and leaves a will instructing that nobody remember him.

One Bad Hour, Paid For Over Twenty Years

The wife sale is the engine of the entire novel and Hardy stages it in the first chapter, before we know anything about the man. That order matters. We meet Henchard as the worst thing he ever did, and then spend four hundred pages learning that he is also generous, hardworking, capable and wretchedly sorry.

The oath he swears the next morning is the other half of it. Twenty one years without alcohol is a real act of will, and Hardy respects it. But the vow expires during the novel, and when it does, Henchard drinks again. Nothing in this book is ever finished with.

Character Is Fate, Except When It Is Not

Hardy borrows a line from Novalis and puts it directly into the text: character is fate. Then he spends the novel testing whether it is true. Henchard’s temper loses him Farfrae, his pride loses him his business, and his lie to Newson loses him Elizabeth-Jane. All self-inflicted.

But look at the weather. Henchard consults a rural forecaster, buys heavily on a prediction of a bad harvest, and is ruined when the sun comes out. Farfrae, doing nothing differently, is made rich by the same change. Hardy will not let you settle on either explanation, and the best answers on this text hold both: a man with these flaws in a universe this indifferent.

The New Way and the Old

Farfrae is not a villain and that is deliberate. He is cheerful, fair, popular, sings well, and does business by ledger and machine while Henchard does it by memory and handshake. The horse-drill arriving in the marketplace is the moment the novel dates Henchard, and it is a piece of agricultural equipment doing the work of a whole argument.

For Cultural Context, this contrast is your material: a town moving from a personal economy to a modern one, and a man whose entire authority rests on the old way. Note that Farfrae ends up with Henchard’s business, Henchard’s house, Henchard’s title and Henchard’s stepdaughter.

A Town That Watches

Casterbridge is a character. Business is conducted in the street, gossip circulates through Mixen Lane and the Three Mariners, and the community enforces its own judgements. The skimmity-ride is the clearest case: an old rural punishment revived to humiliate a woman for her sexual past, and it kills her.

Hardy is careful to show that the crowd is not simply cruel. The same people are warm, funny and generous elsewhere. That inconsistency is the point, and it gives you something more interesting to say than the town is oppressive.

The furmity woman is the mechanism. She served Henchard the rum-laced porridge at Weydon-Priors in the first chapter, disappears for twenty years, and then reappears in his own courtroom as a defendant while he sits as magistrate. She recognises him and says what he did in front of the whole town. Hardy could have had the secret leak out gradually. Instead he brings the past back in person, in public, in the room where Henchard holds authority, and destroys his standing in a page. If you are writing about how the novel is constructed, this is the scene to use.

Who’s Who

Michael Henchard is proud, impulsive, physically powerful and incapable of moderation in anything, including remorse.

Donald Farfrae is competent, likeable and slightly cold. His grief for Lucetta is genuine and does not last long.

Elizabeth-Jane is the novel’s moral centre and its survivor. She reads, observes, expects little, and is the only character whose judgement is never wrong.

Susan accepts the sale, accepts the return, and dies with one letter that detonates the second half of the book.

Lucetta wants respectability more than anything and is destroyed by a town that will not grant it.

Henchard’s will is the last thing in the novel and the most examinable single passage in it.

“& that no man remember me.”Michael Henchard’s will

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Four moments cover almost any question: the wife sale at Weydon-Priors, the arrival of the horse-drill, the skimmity-ride, and the will. Together they give you guilt, change, community and consequence. If the question is about vision and viewpoint, argue from the will rather than from the death itself, because a man who writes his own erasure is making a claim about the whole book, and you can agree or disagree with him in your answer.

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