The Mayor of Casterbridge

MICHAEL HENCHARD'S WILL. "That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. & that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. & that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. & that nobody is wished to see my dead body. & that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. & that no flours be planted on my grave. & that no man remember me."

Wife sale at Weydon Fair through rise, Farfrae rivalry, skimmity-ride, and death alone form the life and death of a man of character with classical inevitability, so plot scores 90.

The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular.

Henchard, Farfrae, Elizabeth-Jane, Lucetta, and the Weydon past are typed but warmly individuated — pride and consequence without flattening into allegory only — so cast scores 88.

Lucetta next recognized him, and more mistress of herself said archly, "The 'Lass of Gowrie' from inside of a seed-drill—what a phenomenon!" Satisfied at last with his investigation the young man stood upright, and met their eyes across the summit.

Forty-five chapters tracing rise, rivalry, and fall with market-town rhythms and set-piece crises maintain steady moral pressure rather than thriller tempo, so pace scores 85.

One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.

Hardy's character prose — the perpendicular facial angle, the furmity tent, the pencilled will — renders inner pride and outer ruin with the same precision as Tess's landscape fatalism, so prose scores 90.

They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now.

Weydon-Priors, Casterbridge corn market, Mixen Lane, and the death cottage form Upper Wessex as a moral geography of grain, gossip, and public shame, so world scores 89.

"Five guineas," said the auctioneer, "or she'll be withdrawn. Do anybody give it? The last time. Yes or no?" "Yes," said a loud voice from the doorway. All eyes were turned.

Ch.I's wife auction in the furmity tent is among the most shocking openings in Victorian fiction; the reader is committed before Casterbridge is named, so hook scores 92.

"Five guineas—and she's yours. Susan, you are a law to yourself now at last are you not? Bless yer soul, take your time. Say she's yours, and I will put my hand to it."

The subtitle's "Life and Death of a Man of Character" and the wife sale as origin of civic respectability — Hardy's ironic determinism anticipates modern tragedy of reputation, so innov scores 88.

"That no man remember me." "To this I put my name. MICHAEL HENCHARD." What Henchard had written in the anguish of his dying was respected as far as practicable by Elizabeth-Jane, though less from a sense of the sacredness of last words, as such, than from her independent knowledge that the man who wrote them meant what he said.

Henchard's pencilled will and Elizabeth-Jane's restrained grief form among the bleakest and most formally complete character deaths in English fiction, so ending scores 93.