the mayor of casterbridge by thomas hardy

In 1862, Hardy moved to London, where he worked as an assistant architect, read widely, and began writing. While learning architecture, Hardy studied the classics with a university-educated tutor named Horace Moule. His father, Thomas, was a builder and mason his mother, Jemima Hand, was a cook.Īfter attending schools in his village, Bock-hampton, and in Dorchester, Hardy was apprenticed at age sixteen to his father's employer, an architect. Thomas Hardy was born June 2, 1840, in a village near Dorchester in the southwestern region of England that would become the setting for his novels. Michael's success is temporary, though, as circumstances and his own weaknesses of character combine to bring about his downfall in spite of his attempts to right the wrong he committed years before.

When the sailor is reported lost at sea, the cast-off wife and now-grown daughter set out to find Michael, who has become an affluent businessman and the mayor of Casterbridge. Most of the novel takes place eighteen to twenty years after this event. The Mayor of Casterbridge is, from beginning to end, the story of Michael Henchard, a skilled farm laborer who, in a drunken rage, sells his young wife, along with their infant child, to a passing sailor. Thomas Hardy was an established author at the time and had published nine previous novels (a first, unpublished novel has been lost), but The Mayor of Casterbridge is considered his first masterpiece some regard it as his greatest tragic novel. The first publication in book form was later that year.

New introduction by Pamela Dalziel, in addition to providing a basic introduction to the novel, analyses Hardy's representation of the modern and makes an original contribution to discusion of the character of Elizabeth-Jane as proto-feminist.The Mayor of Casterbridge, originally entitled The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character, was first published serially in a London periodical in 1886.

Pamela Dalziel's new introduction incorporates the latest critical thinking on the novel and offers an original analysis of Hardy's representation of the modern and his characterization of Elizabeth-Jane in the.

The only critically established text of the novel, based on a comprehensive study of the manuscript and Hardy's.

This edition is the only critically established text of the novel and Pamela Dalziel's new introduction considers Hardy's complex response to the modern world in his characterization.

Henchard is a modern-day tragic hero, but his story is also a journey towards love. Eighteeen years later his temperament again thwarts his attempts to make amends. Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter on a drunken impulse at a local fair.

The mayor of casterbridge by thomas hardy