The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Fate of Michael Henchard’s Character

Abstract

In editions read today the title-page of the novel always identified as The Mayor of Casterbridge in fact reads The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character. This is a complex announcement, almost every substantive element of which rewards inspection, but it is perhaps more appropriate to begin further back historically, for, as with other novels, Hardy only gradually came to this fully-fledged description of his fiction. The earliest version of the title, written at the head of the holograph manuscript and used for both English and American serializations in 1886, was simply The Mayor of Casterbridge. There are also two intermediate versions to consider. When Hardy revised the text of the novel for the English first edition towards the end of 1886, he decided to provide a more elaborate title: The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character. Contemporary reviewers found material in this statement on which they could base a critical discussion of the novel, and in one of those characteristic responses to the fooleries of critics to which Hardy found himself throughout his life only too prone, he reduced this version when the novel was first reprinted in 1887 in one volume to The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character.