The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Mayor of Casterbridge, which was subtitled The Life and Death of a Man of Character, was written by Thomas Hardy. The book’s main focus is “the spiritual and material career of Micheal Henchard, whose governing inclinations are tragically at war with each other” (Penguin Classics, Blurb). Henchard, in a fit of drunkenness, has decided to sell his wife and daughter at a fair. Afterwards, Henchard becomes a wealthy man and the mayor of the town Casterbridge. His wife and child seek him out years later. In the end, it is neither his supposed child, Elizebeth-Jane, nor his wife, Susan, who ruins him but his own self-destructive nature.

The novel was published serially in the Graphic and in Harper’s Weekly. The Graphic was the English version and Harper’s Weekly was the American version. They ran concurrently over the nineteen-week period from January second to May fifteenth in the year of 1886. There were no major differences between the serial versions “except that for reasons of space Harper’s Weekly omitted some passages which were restored in later editions” (Norton Critical Edition, xiii). There were three hundred changes from the manuscript. Essentially, they were only minor “local” improvements. For example, in the Graphic the slang words “damn it” become “hang it”. It appears that the American Harper’s Weekly was not so worried about the novel’s usage of “inappropriate” language.

There were various cancelled plotlines for The Mayor of Casterbridge. The “notes or plans Hardy had made for the novel before he began writing have not survived” (Norton Critical Edition, xiii). Therefore, there is a great interest in the manuscript as “evidence” of these ever-changing plotlines. The Norton Critical Editon of the novel says that through the various plotlines they deducted that “as Hardy began writing, large areas of the action were still to be decided: at one stage there were two be two daughters, one staying with Henchard, the other going with Susan and Newson” (xiii). Furthermore, “the Elizebeth-Jane of the opening chapters was not to die, so the figure we meet in the body of the novel was to be Henchard’s real daughter” (xiii). Hardy’s reasoning for the many plot changes was to “distribute the interest of the novel more evenly” (xiii).