Name: The Mayor of Casterbridge
ISBN: 9781502444554

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Like many of Hardy’s novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge is set in the fictional county of Wessex in the mid 1800s. It begins with Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, drunk on rum, auctioning off his wife and baby daughter at a village fair. The next day, overcome with remorse, Henchard resolves to turn his life around. When we meet Henchard eighteen years later, temperance and hard work have made him wealthy and respectable. However, he cannot escape his past. His secret guilt, his pride, and his impulsive temper all serve to sabotage his good name. The Mayor of Casterbridge was published in 1886, first as a magazine serial and then later that year as a book. It is perhaps most noteworthy for the psychological portrait of Michael Henchard, a tragic character who remains sympathetic while simultaneously being deeply flawed. Typical of other Hardy novels, it also vividly depicts life in the rural countryside at that time.

What Hacker News says

ljspragueOct 2024

This also makes you think his book would be depressing to read but I've read the Mayor of Casterbridge and I would call it joyful. Odd.

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ZeroGravitasAug 2024

The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character by Thomas Hardy (1886)

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-hardy/the-mayor-of-...

I notice from that link it was on a top 100 Great British novels list.

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gumbyApr 2024

> In the novels of Ian McEwan, a pattern recurs. The main character makes a mistake — just one — which then hangs over them forever. ... This plot trick is said to be unbecoming of a serious artist.

Hmm, yet Thomas Hardy is (correctly IMHO) is considered a great artist worthy of having novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge included in the canon.

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louhikeSep 2019

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, my favorite book of all time.

I loved the characters, how they evolved and their relations with them. A weak character will through years become successful while another character they admired will fail miserably.

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scarecrowbobAug 2026

Yeah, I feel you on that.

It took about 20 years for my philosophy and literature degrees pay off.

I know more now, but I had to start -somewhere- even if it was hard to get the whole context.

Much of that time between putting in all that work and feeling like it was worth it was spent reading a lot of other things and amassing life experience, raising my kids, and working in unrelated professions.

However, having that context for the experiences I was getting is probably why it feels useful in retrospect.

Even though I didn't really understand Sartre or Kirkegaard or whoever (and I suspect that they don't have the best ideas all the time), having them available to me was helpful.

To me, even if I didn't totally get the context of "Pride and Prejudice" or "The Mayor of Casterbridge" or "Ulysses" or "Pamela" or "Borderlands/La Frontera" or "The Sun Also Rises":

a) knowing that these were things people do deeply explore was helpful and

b) the little bits that did resonate have stayed with me.

Further, it's been very useful to re-visit these texts as I've gotten older has been supremely interesting.

So yeah, education is wasted on the young and all but it set me up well.

As a not-super-old 48-year-old with adult children, I'm quite pleased that I can review the texts from my 20s and will be able to do the same if I get to be in my 70s or 80s.

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