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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9780553210248
ISBN: 0553210246
Label: Bantam Classics
Manufacturer: Bantam Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 352
Publication Date: 1981-03-01
Publisher: Bantam Classics
Product Release Date: 1981-03-01
Studio: Bantam Classics

From its spectacular opening–the astonishing scene in which drunken Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a passing sailor at a county fair–to the breathtaking series of discoveries at its conclusion, The Mayor of Casterbridge claims a unique place among Thomas Hardy’s finest and most powerful novels.

Rooted in an actual case of wife-selling in early nineteenth-century England, the story build into an awesome Sophoclean drama of guilt and revenge, in which the strong, willful Henchard rises to a position of wealth and power–only to suffer a most bitter downfall. Proud, obsessed, ultimately committed to his own destruction, Henchard is, as Albert Guerard has said, “Hardy’s Lord Jim…his only tragic hero and one of the greatest tragic heroes in all fiction.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Despite the melodrama, a worthy read
Review: In some ways this is a hard book to get into since it is set in a totally different culture from ours -rural England of the mid-nineteenth century. You would think that that is close enough in time to not be a problem. But to me the things like their courtship customs, or what is considered scandalous/honorable behavior, are really at a variance with the way we act today that I found it hard to relate to. Add to this some of the implausible melodrama and coincidences that make up the plot and I almost ended up putting down the book.

However I kept reading and in the end I thought it was an excellent story. This is because it illustrated a truth about life that I could empathize with. How a man through pride, anger, stubbornness and alcoholism could end up destroying his relationships with all of the people he is close to and in middle age end up being alienated from everyone who was important to him in his life. Since this story was written there have been millions of guys like Michael Henchard. The details of their lives are different, their endings may have been different. But there is an underlying truth that is the same. That aspect of the story is timeless.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Allegory of the King Saul/David story
Review: Thomas Hardy has a reputation for writing bleak, sad stories. The Mayor happens to be my first Hardy read, and I can't tell you how saddening I found the overall tale.

Many points are made by Hardy: dealing with the past and its haunting effects; pride before the fall; and even the folly of mental inflexibility.

I couldn't shake the parallel of the King Saul/David story from the Bible while reading this. You have the powerful man who takes in an apprentice then becomes overcome with jealousy and envy as his apprentice eventually outshines him. And rather than putting his usurped life in perspective, allows his anger and envy to make matters much worse.

I saw Michael as a flawed man who is redeemed by his sense of duty and obligation.

I think the theme of duty to world versus self is important here. Michael's duty to his first family overrides his desire to be with his new girlfriend Lucetta. He probably would have been happier with Lucetta; but wouldn't we as the audience have seen him as selfish if he had chosen her instead of Susan? Both women were manipulative, one aggressively, one passively, so it probably didn't matter. But it does raise the question of how much of our personal happiness should be sacrificed for societal duties.

Donald Farfrae, the Scottish apprentice is put here purely to provide Michael Henchard with a foil. I don't feel he is developed at all, and is kind of dull, as is Elizabeth Jane.

There are character driven stories and plot-driven stories. And in plot-driven stories, you know that the characters' personalities or decision-making won't really matter in how things end. That's an aspect of Mayor...that some may find the most frustrating. You never could shake the feeling that destiny was unalterable. I, however, had no problem with it. It was a good ride.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Powerful read, but not a happy one
Review: Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is a story about Michael Henchard attempts at redemption and the many sorrows, pain, and misery that comes with his decision to uphold his pride and name. To say that Henchard is the only character that suffers in this novel would be a misrepresentation; almost every character at some point suffers immensely in some trial of life, whether it is death of someone close, pain of separation, or the frustration of a relationship. For these reasons, this work is not a "light" read by any stretch of the imagination, and will probably test even the optimist's patience in getting through. Still, Hardy's story, the descriptions of the countryside and the characters' inner feelings, as well as the way he ties together every character in this book, is a remarkable feat and makes for a powerful read.

The story begins with Michael Henchard walking with his wife, Susan, to the fair as they cross the countryside. While there, in an act of drunkenness, Henchard sells his wife to a sailor, and seemingly sets in motion his irreversible bad fortune. Not being able to find his wife the next day, he makes an oath to not drink alcohol for 21 years, the exact amount of years he has lived. The novel then fast forwards 19 years to find Henchard the Mayor of Casterbridge, and a noteworthy man of respect. Susan finds him, marries him after forgiving him, but there are many secrets that both parties have and will have until the end of the novel. It seems that many of these secrets are the character's downfalls. Henchard, while Mayor of Casterbridge, meets a man named Donald Farfrae, who he comes to like and implores to stay in town; however, eventually he and Farfrae become bitter rivals in not only their business and society, but also in their relationship with Lucetta, a woman who had an affair with Henchard in the past.

Henchard's fallacy of character lay in his stubborn pride and his foolish belief that name and appearance is everything. He sometimes tries to create a façade, or cover up one sin with another secret or problem. When he tries to persuade Lucetta to marry him, so as to not destroy her name, he retorts: "But it is not by what is, in this life, but by what appears, that you are judged." He is a tragic individual who seems to not be able to change his views long enough to make something right occur; when something does go well, it is short lived. He even gets to a point where he connects himself with an ominous and unpreventable fate, at one point referring to himself as Cain. He never really heeds Elizabeth's attempts at love until very late in the novel when tragic occurrences seem to be set in motion.

Still, despite all his problems, and all his pride, he is a "likeable" character because he makes the effort at retribution and is sorrowful each time he gets hit with a dilemma or makes an unfavorable decision. He has the willingness and conscience to try to amend his deficiencies, but, in the end, he just makes too many mistakes, and has too much pride to reverse his fortunes.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Neither cheerful nor uplifting, but always compelling and moving!
Review: Michael Henchard, a down-on-his-luck, unemployed hay trusser, succumbs to the siren call of alcohol at a country fair. Subconsciously feeling his wife, Susan, is holding him back from success in this world, he awakes to sobriety the next morning and realizes that, in a foolish fit of pique, he has auctioned her and his daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, off to a sailor. Despite his frantic efforts to find them, they have disappeared. Ravaged with guilt over his selfish, impulsive act, he swears he will not take another drink for twenty-one years.

Whether his wife was indeed one of Henchard's problems is left for the reader to ponder as Henchard moves to Casterbridge, prospers wildly in business and eventually becomes the town's leading citizen and mayor. Henchard's wheel of fortune, however, begins to spin on a wobbly axle as Donald Farfrae, an enterprising young Scot travelling to seek his fortune, enters his employ as the manager of his business. At the same time, Susan and Elizabeth-Jane, re-enter Henchard's life believing that Michael Newson, the sailor who had purchased them some nineteen years earlier, has perished at sea. Henchard's life truly begins to come apart when Lucetta Templeman, a former lover, also moves to Casterbridge and, ashamed of her past romantic entanglement with Henchard, seeks to hold him to his promise of marriage!

Hardy raises many issues but, not expressing his own opinion through an unequivocal direction in the story's plot line, seems content to leave these issues as topics for sober analysis by his readers. Hardy questions the conflict between the merits of tradition vs modernization. There is the enormous irony that Henchard's success as a business person seems clearly attributable in part to his tee-totalling vow but is founded upon the five guineas seed capital raised through the auction of his wife and daughter! Henchard seems to epitomize the constant personal conflicts we all face between decisiveness and strength of character as opposed to impulsiveness and stubborn bullheaded intransigence! One wonders whether Lucetta is flighty, coquettish, thoughtless and selfish or is she an early manifestation of modern woman sadly out of time and years ahead of the ladies around her? Is Farfrae to be admired or scorned for his meteoric rise to power in Casterbridge and his complete devastation of Henchard's place among his peers?

Perhaps the most powerful moment of the entire novel comes with the discovery of Henchard's will and his words directing that the world leave him to rest in forgotten isolation and that no person mark or mourn his passing in any fashion. Once again, we are left to decide for ourselves whether Henchard's life should be pitied, forgiven, admired or looked upon with scorn and disgust.

To the readers of the day, "The Mayor of Casterbridge" would have been perceived as a darkly pessimistic tragedy that might have evoked emotions akin to those raised by Shakespeare's "Hamlet" or Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex". A classic worthy of the term, "The Mayor of Casterbridge", certainly never cheerful or uplifting, is however many, many things - compelling, moving, disturbing, thought-provoking and poignant. Above all, it is worthy of being read and enjoyed by any lover of classic 19th century British Literature.

Paul Weiss

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Oedipus Updated
Review: In the novels of Thomas Hardy, tragedy can be an externalized force like Egdon Heath in THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE or it can be of the internalized sort, the kind that Michael Henchard brings on himself in THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE. In either case, nature is unforgiving, a quality which is a given in any of Hardy's works. When tragedy is of the latter kind, then the protagonist is not unlike the doomed tragic hero from classical Greek drama wherein he is first seen as a great or simply a good man who suffers from a tragic flaw, the results of which drag him down so that by the end of the action, his state is so miserably pathetic that the reader/audience can do no more than shake their heads in sorrow at his downfall, that in another and less proud man need not have happened at all.

Michael Henchard is the post-Victorian man of mixed qualities who like Oedipus, commits a sin and then spends the rest of the book trying to make amends. His sin is maudlin self-pity. He allows his current debased financial position to lead him to drink, all the while blaming his wife and child. At an auction, he offers his family for the sale to the highest bidder. He ignores the warnings from those present that he is courting disaster. An unknown man offers the highest bid and off he goes, taking Henchard's wife and child with him. Hardy takes pains to place Henchard squarely in the middle of this somber farce. Hardy gives no name to the successful bidder nor does he allow the reader to note the wife's actions. She, surprisingly, remains silent, but weeping. Henchard, by contrast, is loud, crude, and obnoxious. He occupies central stage until the next chapter when he sobers up, is filled with remorse, and then tries to set things right. He fails and winds up the leading citizen of Casterbridge. The image of the drunken Henchard and the mayor Henchard are startlingly unlike. The latter is sober, industrious, and respectable, causing the reader to commiserate with him. But the tragedy of Henchard does not lie merely in a series of vain regrets. Just as he seems to undergo permanent rehabilitation of self, his ex-wife shows up again, with a new child from the now dead bidder. Hardy complicates the plot with his usual unwieldy complications. As a result, Henchard plunges again into the depths of despair; this time he shows that his old sins of false pride and egotism have returned with a vengeance. He tries to bankrupt his business partner Farfrae, for reasons purely of jealousy. It becomes progressively more difficult for the reader to maintain the same sympathy that they had earlier. Later, at the novel's close, Henchard is made to wander like a wounded Lear, and this alone partially elevates him back to his previous stature of a tragic figure. He, like Lear, dies repentant. From his death, the audience discovers that the essence of a tragic fall lies not so much in how much sympathy that protagonist garners during that fall but rather in how true to life his fall was. Michael Henchard was neither saint nor reprobate sinner. He was the Victorian Everyman with a mixture of goodness and mean-spiritedness, either of which could emerge under the right circumstances. At his fall, the reader saw that the "right" circumstances were sufficiently ordinary so that anyone of us might have done the same. This is the essence of the tragedy of THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE.

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