The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Mayor of Casterbridge is an 1886 novel by the English author Thomas Hardy, subtitled The Life and Death of a Man of Character. It is one of his Wessex novels, set in a fictional rural England where Casterbridge stands for Dorchester in Dorset, where Hardy spent his youth, and it was first published as a weekly serialisation beginning in January 1886.

The novel opens with Henchard selling his wife Susan and their daughter at a fair, an act he regrets immediately and then spends his life living down. When Susan returns years later the family circumstances unravel in stages: a business rival proves more capable than Henchard is, his secret is threatened by the people who know it, and the temper responsible for the original crime keeps returning.

Hardy is writing about a man of strong feeling in a changing agricultural world, and the book carries the fatalism of his later work without the extremes of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Its interest lies in character as something that good intentions cannot repair, and in the way a small town keeps the past permanently available.