The Mayor of Casterbridge

Ahhh an old classic.

This one was kind of a stretch for me to read, but it was great. I've read Thomas Hardy before, having borrowed Far from the Madding Crowd, which was the book that established Hardy as a brilliant writer. This book was interesting in its own way. The subtitle for the novel is "The Life and Death of a Man of Character", and I really thought the main protagonist Michael Henchard, was more of an idiot, than a man of character.

The story starts at a fair in Casterbridge where a young Mr. Henchard, who makes his living selling hay, gets drunk on rum laced furmity (boiled cracked wheat. I'd put rum in it too if I had to eat it.) and sells his wife Susan and  baby daughter Elizabeth Jane in an auction to a sailor for five guineas. The next day, when he's sober, he realizes it's too late to get his  family back, and he really doesn't search much because he doesn't want to reveal how much of an idiot he for selling his family. So he vows to never touch alcohol for as long as he's been alive, which at that moment in time was TWENTY ONE YEARS.

Fast forward nineteen years, Mr. Henchard is now the mayor of Casterbridge and a very successful man. No one likes him because he has a foul temper and he's very secretive and impulsive and selfish. But totally sober. The people in Casterbridge think he's a widower, because he refuses to tell the truth about what happened to his family ( can you blame him? "once when I was 21 I got real trashed, and auctioned off my family...."). After a while Henchard begins to believe this lie and think that his wife is dead.  So when he goes of f to the isle of Jersey for a business trip, he meets and begins to fall in love with this lady named Lucetta, who takes care of him when he gets sick. Their relationship seems to be of a sexual nature, because at one point it's revealed that Lucetta's reputation in Jersey has taken a bit of a nosedive since she met him. But they decide to get married.

Around the same time that Henchard decides to send for Lucetta, his not so dead wife Susan and daughter Elizabeth Jane appear in Casterbridge. How convenient, right? Well Susan is not the sharpest pin in the hatbox, and she believed for a while that her supposed marriage to the sailor, Mr. Newson was legal, but now she is thinking that she was still married to Henchard. Since Mr. Newson is lost at sea, and Susan and her daughter are poor, she goes looking for Henchard to square away some truths and get some financial help.  We are also introduced to another grain salesman  Donald Farfrae of Scotland, whom I like to call "Emo McScottish Kilt" because everyone knows he's pining for the lochs, but he refuses to go home. Henchard befriends him and offers him a job and confides in him secrets of his past life.

Henchard and Susan are reunited, and in an effort to keep up appearances, he sets her and Elizabeth Jane up with a house, and begins to court Susan. They keep all their past life a secret from Elizabeth Jane, because they feel she would be better off not knowing. What about Lucetta? Henchard tells her that the marriage is off, and she asks for her letters back. She never gets them back due to a family emergency. The return of  his wife and daughter sets in motion a decline in Henchard's fortunes and he has a series of bad decisions and luck that leads to the end of his friendship with Donald. This is mostly because Donald becomes well liked due to his amiable nature, smarts and  the fact that he's everything Henchard wishes he could be. Elizabeth Jane takes a liking to him as well and they begin courting, with help from Susan.

Then things get kind of ugly and you realize how much of a lying, deceptive bastard Henchard is, but I'll let you discover that part. The chapters are short, and the story is excellent, especially for an old timey book (it was written in 1886).

Happy Reading!

-Alex