The Mayor of Casterbridge

"The Mayor of Casterbridge" is a classic novel written by Thomas Hardy. The novel was first published in 1886 under the complete title "The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character".

It is considered as one of the best novels written by Hardy and is particularly recognised for the complex manner in which the character of the protagonist Michael Henchard has been crafted by him.
In "The Mayor of Casterbridge", Thomas Hardy set out to examine how a man's choices affect his life in the long run. Set in the early nineteenth-century in Casterbridge, a fictional town in Dorset in southwestern England, Hardy used his unique understanding of the poor and the rich to create the unique plot.

"The Mayor of Casterbridge" is, from beginning to end, the story of Michael Henchard, a skilled farm labourer who, in a drunken rage, sells his young wife, along with their infant child, to a passing sailor. Most of the novel takes place eighteen to twenty years after this event. When the sailor is reported lost at sea, the cast-off wife and now-grown daughter set out to find Michael, who has become an affluent businessman and the mayor of Casterbridge. Michael's success is temporary, though, as circumstances and his own weaknesses of character combine to bring about his downfall in spite of his attempts to right the wrong he committed years before.