Hardy doesn't take the simple way out and just say, "Hey, it was fate!" No way.
In fact, The Mayor of Casterbridge is Hardy's attempt at finding some answers. Over a hundred years ago, our main man Thomas Hardy was asking these big questions too. Have you ever asked yourself why bad things happen in the world? Why people get divorced, good workers lose jobs, poor people get poorer, and gossip ruins innocent people's reputations? Well, you're not alone. What is The Mayor of Casterbridge About and Why Should I Care? And since this is a Thomas Hardy novel, we're betting that it won't be a happy death. The subtitle of the novel, "The Life and Death of a Man of Character," already tells us that Henchard will die at the end. Like most of Hardy's novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge is a tragedy – no matter what the main characters try to accomplish, the fates (or their own flaws) seem to get in the way. Unfortunately for Henchard, he made some bad decisions as a young man that come back to haunt him just as things really seem to be looking up for him. The novel follows the fortunes (and misfortunes) of a man named Michael Henchard, who becomes a grain merchant and the mayor of a town called Casterbridge. Hardy set many of his novels, including The Mayor of Casterbridge, in a fictional county of southern England that he called "Wessex." The fictional towns, farms, rivers, and forests in Wessex are common to all the "Wessex novels." You can actually find maps that critics and readers have drawn up of Hardy's imaginary county (see the "Best of the Web" section for an example), just like Lord of the Rings fans do for Middle-earth. Hardy's novels weren't always well received when he was writing, and two of his last novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, were actually criticized so harshly for being "immoral" that Hardy stopped writing novels altogether and switched back poetry. Even though he was writing during what we call the "Victorian" period (i.e., during the reign of Queen Victoria in Britain, 1837 to 1901), critics often consider Hardy's writing to have more in common with the modernist writers of the early 1900s, like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T.S. Part of what makes his novels so famous today is that they were ahead of their time in the late 1800s when he was writing.
He started and ended his writing career as a poet, writing all those novels in the middle. Yes, we said "poet" first for a reason: Hardy always thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, even though nowadays he's remembered most for his novels. Thomas Hardy was an English poet and novelist writing during the late 19th century.
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