5/16/2023 0 Comments Drawn to life mayor![]() He published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, in 1898 and continued to write poetry throughout his remaining years. Reaction to Jude the Obscure (1896) was so harsh that Hardy gave up writing novels. Other major works of this period were a collection of short stories, Wessex Tales (1888), and the dark and controversial Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). The Mayor of Casterbridge also represented a new achievement in the novel form by successfully blending a psychological portrait of one man with a depiction of the social realities of a particular time and place. The Mayor of Casterbridge, published in 1886, was considered pivotal in Hardy's career, as its male main character was more fully developed than those in previous novels. By the late 1870s, he was an established member of England's literary elite. (His first, unpublished novel has been lost.) But it was Far from the Madding Crowd, published in 1874, that ensured his reputation. His first published novel, Desperate Remedies, came out in 1871 and was quickly followed by two others. Hardy also began writing novels at this time, and it was Emma who encouraged him to leave architecture and write full time. Hardy's work took him back to Dorchester and then to Weymouth, where he met Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he married in 1874. Poems that he submitted to periodicals were rejected, but an article, "How I Built Myself a House," was published. In 1862, Hardy moved to London, where he worked as an assistant architect, read widely, and began writing. While learning architecture, Hardy studied the classics with a university-educated tutor named Horace Moule. His father, Thomas, was a builder and mason his mother, Jemima Hand, was a cook.Īfter attending schools in his village, Bock-hampton, and in Dorchester, Hardy was apprenticed at age sixteen to his father's employer, an architect. Thomas Hardy was born June 2, 1840, in a village near Dorchester in the southwestern region of England that would become the setting for his novels. Michael's success is temporary, though, as circumstances and his own weaknesses of character combine to bring about his downfall in spite of his attempts to right the wrong he committed years before. When the sailor is reported lost at sea, the cast-off wife and now-grown daughter set out to find Michael, who has become an affluent businessman and the mayor of Casterbridge. Most of the novel takes place eighteen to twenty years after this event. The Mayor of Casterbridge is, from beginning to end, the story of Michael Henchard, a skilled farm laborer who, in a drunken rage, sells his young wife, along with their infant child, to a passing sailor. Thomas Hardy was an established author at the time and had published nine previous novels (a first, unpublished novel has been lost), but The Mayor of Casterbridge is considered his first masterpiece some regard it as his greatest tragic novel. The first publication in book form was later that year. The Mayor of Casterbridge, originally entitled The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character, was first published serially in a London periodical in 1886. ![]()
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