Andrew's Wiki
Mayor Casterbridge

a study of character: one tragic Shakespearean knockoff, living in forgotten times, with unfree labor, superstitions, and the ghosts of the past

• Michael Henchard, our tragic villain, moody and superstitious; uneducated and uninterested in the subtleties of other people’s emotions, he casts off everyone he loves in fits of temper, passion, or pride; goes bankrupt trying to wreak revenge; ends up damning himself for good in deceiving Elizabeth-Jane to keep her around
• Susan Henchard, sold off, simple enough to believe that it was legal; takes her daughter back to Henchard to secure daughter’s future
• Elizabeth-Jane Henchard, really Newson’s child, though people keep this truth from her; sane, sensible, loving, and virtuous, she gets the man she wants in the end
• Donald Farfrae, the Scotchman with equal parts business acumen and romance; falls for the fickle and amoral Lucetta, but returns to Elizabeth-Jane; can’t understand Henchard’s hatred of himself when he takes Henchard’s women, money, and political position
• Newson, the sailor who buys Susan, a good father apparently
• Lucetta, who had an affair with Henchard, was compromised and ran after him to make her an honest woman; she falls in love with Farfrae instead, dishonestly marrying him before he knows her true past

• Social mobility: it’s unpredictable; there for you to win and to lose, equally
• Casterbridge
  • a relic of history, Hardy uses it to explore how things “used to be” in England before technologies such as the railroad invade
  • not urban, it is not a Northern metropolis or a London, but instead a mere “knot of energies” that already existed
  • Roman ties to ancient history; a place where different social sets are thrown together physically (note the footnote nostalgia!)
  • full of the ancient past
• Distrust of alcohol, gaiety, and commerce (it can let you sell people literally)
• Proliferation of inventions and mechanisms; but the ones they have then are laughable and inefficient (not dangerous yet; no railroad access yet)
• Trust in science to help all areas of human life
• The limit of human suffering: Henchard does survive quite a lot of pain in silence
• Geography as a stage: the bridges map behavior (the depressing places), just as the crossroads do (social mixing), and the position of Lucetta’s drawing room across from the market square
  • especially before transportation
• Architecture (211): Hardy loves strewing the technical vocab around
• Businessman: Hardy shows an awareness of how capital works—living on your interest and not the principle; how the crops obey the weather rather than foreign markets (national protection schemes and mercantilism still going on); how Farfrae uses the commodity like the stock market; the use of capital in order to pioneer private revenge (256)
• The Past coming to Haunt You
• The difference between Nature and social law (294): a theme Hardy will develop later in //Jude//, for example