Title: The Mayor of Casterbridge

Author: Thomas Hardy

First Published: 1886

First Sentence: One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.

Subtitled “The Life and Death of a Man of Character”, The Mayor of Casterbridge is yet another of Hardy’s masterpiece. It’s even more tragic than Jude the Obscure, which was already a melancholic read for me.

“Never a one of the prizes of life will come unless I undertake it.”

Mayor is essentially a story of action-and-reaction, of a man whose past sins have finally caught up with him, and whose attempts at redemption end with a heartbreaking death, as all Hardy novels do.

Unlike Jude Fawley who is a genuinely kind soul, Michael Henchard is quite the opposite of a protagonist. He’s a bad breed and all throughout the novel, the readers know it. He sold his wife and baby, but he tries to be a better man.

“But darkness makes people truthful.”

It seems like Henchard keeps making deliberate mistakes which put himself deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Henchard’s wife was dissevered from him by death; his friend and helper Farfrae by estrangement; Elizabeth-Jane by ignorance.

And Farfrae, oh, the Scotchman who brought change upon Casterbridge. He who is always the better man, the smarter businessman, the preferred mayor. But he’s still one of the reason that Henchard wastes away…

“But I cannot discharge a man who was once a good friend to me. How can I forget that when I came here ’twas he enabled me to make a footing for mysel’?”

The ending is a perfectly poignant conclusion to the novel.

“But think of me sometimes in your future life – you’ll do that, Izzy? Think of me when you are living as the wife of the richest, the foremost man in town, and don’t let my sins, when you know them all, cause ‘ee to quite forget that though I loved ‘ee late I loved ‘ee well.“