The Mayor of Casterbridge | Thomas Hardy| Macmillan Education

This copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge is pubished by Macmillan Education Ltd in 1977 and is most likely not available in mint condition anymore.  Reading the book with yellowing pages is a very very strange experience because the setting of the story was almost contemporary.  The Mayor of Casterbridge was initially serialized weekly for magazines, hence there were plenty of cliffhangers to keep readers in suspense and interested to follow the story.  This would be akin to drama series today.

To say that reading The Mayor of Casterbridge is akin to watching a snappy intrigue-filled well-written and fast-paced drama is not an exaggeration.  In fact I was quite hooked before Chapter 1 ended, and found it difficult to put the book down.  There was a mysterious family in poor circumstances that Hardy did not think it important for readers to know who they were.  There was a large three-legged crock, over which a haggish creature was slowing stirred the contents of the pot - a imagery of a witch stirring her cauldron inadvertently sprung into my mind, and it has been many many many moons since I last read Macbeth.

At the end of the book, I was quite thoroughly exhausted from the trials of Henchard, and almost thought some parts of the book familiar in the plots of movies and dramas.  Perhaps The Mayor of Casterbridge was a huge influence on the works of many scriptwriters.

There were two things in the book that were unfamiliar to me: furmity and skimmington-ride.  I wasn't able to locate either term in a dictionary, and resorted to the web for them.  In a nutshell, furmity is porridge in the medieval times.  A skimminton-ride is akin to a shame parade, possibly something like the 洗门风custom depicted in 《戏说台湾》, with loud music.

Prior to reading The Mayor of Casterbridge, I was quite apprehensive to read Hardy as I thought his works were heavy, being written during the Victorian era.  Yet as I read The Mayor, I am appreciative that Hardy chose to write this story and set in contemporary to his time.  Sometimes I feel that writers who attempt to set their stories in long by-gone eras somehow aren't able to really reflect the society of the times, and as readers who have not lived through those times, we could only read them really as fiction.