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At a country fair, a young hay-trusser named Michael Henchard gets drunk on rum-laced furmity and sells his wife and baby daughter to a sailor for five…
At a country fair, a young hay-trusser named Michael Henchard gets drunk on rum-laced furmity and sells his wife and baby daughter to a sailor for five guineas. Waking sober and ashamed, he swears not to touch drink for twenty-one years. Years later his wife returns with her daughter and finds him a prosperous corn merchant and the mayor of Casterbridge. But Henchard's pride, his temper and the past he cannot bury slowly destroy everything he has built.
Context and significance
Thomas Hardy published the novel in 1886; Casterbridge is his portrait of Dorchester, the Dorset market town where he lived. Henchard, a man of great strength and greater flaws, is one of the most tragic figures in Victorian fiction, a King Lear of the corn market. Read also Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and see his life.
About the author
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was the son of a stonemason in a Dorset hamlet and trained as an architect, restoring country churches. His novels, set in the imaginary region of Wessex, began with modest success, and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) allowed him to write full time.
After the storm of criticism over Jude the Obscure in 1895 he gave up novels for poetry and wrote some of the best English poems of the twentieth century, many of them about his first wife Emma after her death. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart in his home parish.