The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy, 1886

Authors of classic works of literature tend to gain a reputation in popular culture – Lawrence is raunchy, Dickens is long-winded and a bit preposterous, Joyce impenetrable, Pinter full of pauses, and Shakespeare “difficult”. Sometimes these reputations are justified; more often they are cliches that are dispelled as soon as one reads the author concerned. But they are astonishingly pervasive, and sometimes damagingly so. Tell a student that Shakespeare is difficult often enough and sooner or later they will believe it. I am sometimes guilty in falling for these stereotypes, and I did with Hardy. Based on the evidence of a reading of the undeniably bleak ‘Jude the Obscure‘ (which I can’t believe I reviewed six years ago!) I accepted the idea that Hardy is depressing, slow, and that his characters invariably come to an unfortunate end.

‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ confounded many of those expectations. It is fast paced and packed with incident. But literary clichés don’t come from nowhere, and most have some truth in their origins. True to his instincts Hardy ensures that this novel’s protagonist and his family are never able to escape completely the consequences of the fatal decision taken in the opening chapter.That decision, as you may know, is made by the eponymous Thomas Henchard, then a lowly agricultural labourer. In a fit of drunken anger Henchard decides to sell his wife and child. Wife sales were by this time a well-established form of divorce, in particular in rural communities. It was widely believed that they legalised the process of separation. The ‘purchaser’ was usually the man that the wife had left her husband for. The sales were usually conducted publicly on market days. In other words they were akin to a piece of theatre, in which the old relationship was formally dissolved, and the new recognised and legitimised. The Wikipedia entry on wife sales in highly recommended by the way. All the textual indications are that the wife sale in ‘Casterbridge’ is not like this at all, but a spontaneous decision, done in a drunken fit of anger, regretted thereafter, and that the buyer is a stranger. In other words not an informal rural divorce at all, but a vicious form of spousal abuse in which the wife and child were treated as the husband’s property to be bought and sold.