The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy is set in a fictional town in England in the mid nineteenth century. The novel begins with a description of an unhappily married couple and their baby on a journey and who happen to stop at a fair in the fictional village of Weydon-Priors.
The husband, Michael Henchard and his wife Susan enter a tent that sells furmity which was a meal prepared from corn in the grain, milk, flour, raisins, currants and other ingredients. Henchard requests the woman preparing furmity to add large quantities of rum into his portion and gets heavily drunk. In a drunken fit, Henchard makes a public statement at an auction at the fair that he wants to sell his wife which is in fact illegal. Susan is meek and illiterate and does not protest to being sold. A sailor named Richard Newson buys Susan for five guineas and takes her away with the baby. When Henchard wakes up sober the next morning he realizes the gravity of his actions and tries to find his wife and child but fails.
Eighteen years later Henchard is the Mayor of a town named Casterbridge. Susan and her daughter Elizabeth-Jane who are led to believe that Newson has been lost at sea, travel to Weydon-Priors to try to find Henchard and meets the furmity woman with whom Henchard has left a message that if ever Susan comes looking for him to tell her that he could be found at Casterbridge. The novel explores the themes of love, hatred and revenge. Henchard possesses a volatile and unpredictable character which causes him to make several wrong decisions throughout his life that negatively affects the lives of other characters in the novel.
