Study Guide to The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

BRIGHT NOTES: The Mayor of Casterbridge

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ISBN: 978-1-645424-90-1 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-645424-91-8 (eBook)

Published in accordance with the U.S. Copyright Office Orphan Works and Mass Digitization report of the register of copyrights, June 2015.

Originally published by Monarch Press.

Ken Sobel, 1964

2019 Edition published by Influence Publishers.

Interior design by Lapiz Digital Services. Cover Design by Thinkpen Designs.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data forthcoming.

Names: Intelligent Education

Title: BRIGHT NOTES: The Mayor of Casterbridge

Subject: STU004000 STUDY AIDS / Book Notes

CONTENTS

1) Introduction to Thomas Hardy

2) Introduction to The Mayor of Casterbridge

3) Textual Analysis

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-14

Chapters 15-24

Chapters 25-36

Chapters 37-45

4) Character Analyses

5) Critical Commentary

6) Essay Questions and Answers

7) Glossary

8) Bibliography

INTRODUCTION TO THOMAS HARDY

LIFE OF HARDY

Thomas Hardy, the son of a building contractor, was born in 1840 in a small town in Dorset, in southwestern England. He attended church regularly with his family, and later taught in the local Sunday school. As a boy he memorized all the services, and this knowledge underlies the frequent references to religion in his works. In addition, Thomas’ father was a musician who played at church services, and the boy followed in his father’s footsteps by learning to play the violin. This was the start of a lifelong interest in music, which also figures prominently in his books. Although young Hardy’s education was not particularly good, there were books in his home and he read all he could. At the age of sixteen, he left school and was apprenticed to an architect. Hardy is thus one of the relatively few well-known English writers who did not have a university education (Shakespeare and Dickens are others). Although his formal studies stopped, he continued to educate himself. He would arise early in the morning and study for an hour or two before leaving for work. In this way he continued to read various Latin and English authors and also taught himself Greek. In 1862 he left the architect’s office, well trained as a draftsman and with a considerable amount of reading behind him. At the age of twenty-two he left Dorset for London. There young Hardy came into contact for the first time with the advances of the modern world. It must be understood that life in the Dorset of the 1840’s and 1850’s had hardly changed in its broad outlines since the Middle Ages. It was nearly completely rural in character, and at that time v/as still, sufficiently isolated from the rest of the world for few of the industrial and mechanical aspects of modem civilization to have come to it. (Dorset provides the setting for most of Hardy’s novels and stories, including those that are generally thought to be his best. Hardy, however, changed the name of Dorset to Wessex, and he changed the names of all the towns he wrote of as well. A map of the Wessex country, with both the real and fictional names of the places that occur in Hardy’s work, is to be found in the edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles edited by Carl J. Weber—see Bibliography.) In London he worked as an architect. He also studied French, visited art galleries and the great London exposition, and continued his course of reading. During these years he wrote the first of his poems to survive. It is clear that he greatly expanded his mental horizons, but he paid a price for his excessive exertions—his health suffered and he was generally unhappy. In 1867 he returned to Dorset, but not as a full-time architect. He temporarily stopped writing poetry and made his first attempt at prose fiction. Hardy had reached a real crossroads in his life. By 1868 he had completed his first novel—The Poor Man and the Lady—which, though it was rejected, convinced him that he should continue his efforts at novel-writing. In the same year he did his last work as an architect, and it was during this time that he met the girl he was to marry. It was altogether a most crucial year for Hardy.

HIS NOVELS

Ail Hardy’s novels were written during the next twenty-eight years. The Poor Man and the Lady was a slashing social satire, and when it was rejected Hardy switched to writing romances, stories with complicated plots and much sensational action. He began with Desperate Remedies in 1871, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). These books are highly autobiographical (as are the first novels of most writers), and they were reasonably well reviewed. Under the Greenwood Tree was the first of the novels to have a rural setting. Before A Pair of Blue Eyes appeared as a book, it came out as a serial in a magazine, and this set a pattern—nearly all the rest of Hardy’s novels were first published in this form. (This was a common practice for novelists in general in the nineteenth century.) In 1874 he published Far from the Madding Crowd, the earliest of the novels which are generally read today. This book received very favorable reviews, and Hardy followed it with The Hand of Ethelberta in 1876. The latter work is not a pastoral novel because Hardy decided that he did not want to be identified in the public mind as a writer who could only write about cows and sheep. Throughout his novel-writing career Hardy was very sensitive to the reading public, and he often acknowledged that he sought popularity. The next book Hardy composed is certainly among his best and most popular—The Return of the Native (1878). This was followed by several volumes which are not among his most successful efforts: The Trumpet-Major (1880), A Laodicean A 1881), and Two on a Tower (1882). By this time Hardy was recognized to be one of England’s leading novelists, and this reputation was greatly enhanced by the books that appeared in the next decade. This period of Hardy’s career saw the production of those novels that have ensured him lasting fame. In 1886 there was The Mayor of Casterbridge, in 1887 The Woodlanders; 1891 saw Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, the last novel he wrote, appeared in 1896. (The Well-Beloved came out in 1897, but it had been written in 1892.) Throughout these years Hardy was composing short stories as well as novels, and several volumes of these stories appeared, as follows: Wessex Tales (1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), and Life’s Little Ironies (1894). (A last book of stories, A Changed Man, The Waiting Supper, and Other Tales, came out much later, in 1913.) After Jude the Obscure Hardy mainly wrote poetry. It should be remembered that he started out as a poet and had been composing poetry throughout the time he was writing novels. The last novels he published were all very controversial, and they caused Hardy to undergo some very severe criticism. This criticism, which sometimes amounted to personal abuse, combined with his continuing love for poetry and his newly won financial security, caused him to abandon the novel and return to poetry. Wessex Poems, which contained some of his earliest work, came out in 1898 and was received very well. In 1901 he published Poems of the Past and Present. The first part of his great epic poem The Dynasts appeared in 1903. It deals with the Napoleonic Wars and is one of the longest poems in English. The second and third parts came out in 1906 and 1908. The satirical title of Time’s Laughing-Stocks (1909) indicates something of the bitter tone of this collection of ballad-like poems about sexual infidelity and unsuccessful marriage. It is thought that Hardy’s own marriage was not especially happy, but its tensions were not to last much longer. In 1912 his wife Emma died. Hardy expressed his deep feeling for her in several of the poems that made up his next collection of verse: Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914). Hardy was then seventy-two, and the loss of his wife was a great shock. His life seemed to disintegrate, and he passed through two disastrous, disorganized years. In 1914, however, he married again, and his life once more regained its balance. In the same year the First World War broke out, but it did not check his inspiration. He continued to write, and in 1917 brought out Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses. He followed this by Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), the verse drama The Queen of Cornwall (1923), Human Shows (1925), and finally Winter Words, published posthumously in the year of his death, 1928.

HARDY’S TIME

The age in which Hardy wrote, sometimes called the late Victorian period (after Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 to 1901), was one of great change and many difficulties. In fact, in the Victorian period we can see the beginnings of many of the problems of our own time. English society was experiencing severe strains in its attempts to adjust to vast alterations in its structure, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles reflects its author’s concern with several of the most pressing problems of his time. Hardy depicts the effects of the pressure of the new, urban, and industrial civilization on the old, rural, and agricultural life of Wessex. He exposes the hypocrisy of the rules that govern sexual behavior and the position of women in society. The third leading theme of the book is the question, especially acute in his day, of how to live in a time when religion no longer