Some months ago now we got ourselves a DVD of the 'Mayor of Casterbridge', for once buying if from new, rather than as a hand-me-down from a charity shop or Epsom Library. And found it rather good - around 4 hours worth of television drama from an outfit called Sally Head productions, which the web site (http://sallyheadsite.wordpress.com/) tells us is headed up by a couple of ladies with strong careers in TV drama behind them - and for what appears to be a strong outfit, an oddly uncomplicated and unsophisticated web site.
Slightly puzzled that I had remembered nothing of the large Jersey strand of the plot, but perhaps I had not read the book as often as I had thought and a re-reading was clearly indicated. So out with the Kindle and its £1.39 complete edition, a bit clunky but OK if all you want to do is to read one of the books in it from one end to the other, which I did.
The first impression from the read was that Henchard, despite his temper, his various lapses and his other faults, was in many ways a decent man. He was hard working; he was, or at least he tried to be kind in his rough and ready sort of way; he behaved well at the time of his bankruptcy. He knew something of his own faults.
The second was that it was an unnecessary lie, someone else's lie which brought him down. If the wife that he had sold had not lied about the paternity of her grown-up daughter when she wanted back twenty years later, the tragedy might not have happened. He was hard done by by the Jersey lady who came to live on top of him (as it were) in Casterbridge in order to get him to marry her after all, but then married the man who had become his business rival - while withholding from this rival the Henchard part in her life before, which economy with the truth played no small part in bringing her down in her turn. And Henchard might have done better had he been more honest about the wife whom he had sold - but perhaps that is more a comment on the social climate of the times, a climate in which it was hard to move on from marital & romantic disasters. (One aspect of which was Henchard's regret that as an ambitious young man, he had saddled himself with a wife and children before he got himself established. An attitude which survived into the lunch time conversations of the tradesmen on the building sites of my youth).
But then, when he was down, he lied, on an impulse, to the daughter's real father, a lie which caused much distress. A daughter who was almost too good to be true, a daughter who reminded me of the saintly heroines of humble origin who manage to catch their men in Trollope's novels - Lucy Robarts, for example, in 'Framley Parsonage'. And in a novel which depended on all sorts of coincidences - but coincidences which did not seem to matter very much. The plot might have creaked a bit but the people in it did not.
I also noticed a look forward to Jude the Obscure in the heroic efforts of the daughter to educate herself. To pull herself up into the middling classes from the labouring classes amongst whom she had been brought up. A subject to which Hardy, to some large extent a self educated man himself, would be sensitive.
Despite Hardy's reputation as chronicler of rural Dorset, the book is not really about the country, and in so far as it is about anything other than the people in it, is much more about a market town set in the country than the country itself. But I can see how all this might attract a generation of urban readers with not too distant rural antecedents, perhaps with nostalgia for the dreamy country of their childhood, the generation caught up in the great migration from country to town during the 19th century, a migration of which Hardy was himself part, spending a good part of his life in London.
A good read.
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