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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Mayor of Casterbridge," Thomas Hardy crafts a poignant tale of moral complexities and social dynamics in 19th-century England. The novel follows Michael Henchard, a tragic protagonist whose impulsive decisions and flawed character lead to his ultimate downfall. Hardy employs a realistic prose style imbued with psychological depth and vivid descriptions of the Wessex landscape. This context of rural economic changes and the decline of traditional social structures reflects Hardy's critique of Victorian society, making the narrative resonate with themes of fate, estrangement, and the human condition. Thomas Hardy, born in 1840 in Dorset, had a deep connection to the rural life and landscape that shaped his upbringing, providing a rich backdrop for his literary explorations. His experiences as an architect and later as a novelist contribute to the meticulous detail found in his setting and character development. Hardy's philosophy, often tinged with pessimism and a sense of determinism, is vividly manifested in the fates of his characters, particularly in Henchard's tragic trajectory. Readers are invited to traverse the intricate web of human emotions and societal constraints within "The Mayor of Casterbridge." This novel is a compelling exploration of how ambition, regret, and redemption intertwine, making it an enduring classic that continues to provoke thought and reflection amongst its readers. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
Table of Contents
Introduction
Here a man of iron will strides into a market town he longs to command, and as his resolve hardens into pride and his fortunes swell, the unplanned tremors of a single reckless act, the slow churn of custom and rumor, and the indifferent turns of weather, trade, and time gather like a tightening net around him, until ambition and conscience, secrecy and exposure, private guilt and public ceremony collide on streets where every face can become a judge and every triumph can tip, in an instant, into the kind of reckoning no authority, however boldly won, can fully withstand, and where the past, never buried, steps forward as if it had been waiting in the crowd all along.
Thomas Hardy, an English novelist and poet working in the later Victorian period, wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge out of the landscapes and communities he called Wessex, his vividly realized version of rural southwest England. First published in 1886, the book stands among his most concentrated and severe narratives, a tragic study of character and the social fabric that contains it. Hardy’s fusion of moral gravity with minute observation helped enlarge the scope of the regional novel, revealing how local customs and economies could carry universal weight. That achievement, alongside the book’s taut construction and steady compassion, underwrites its classical standing.
The work appeared serially in the London weekly The Graphic in 1886 and in book form the same year. Its action unfolds in Casterbridge, a fictive county town modeled closely on Dorchester in Dorset, at a time when agriculture, trade, and transport were being reshaped by new markets and the coming of the railway. Hardy anchors the plot in the rhythms of fairs, hiring days, and grain exchanges, rendering the civic life of a provincial center with unusual precision. That historical texture provides the novel’s stage without overwhelming its intimate focus on the consequences of one man’s choices.
At the outset, a young hay-trusser, inflamed by drink at a country fair, commits a reckless act that will not easily fade. Shocked by himself, he later forswears alcohol, embraces severe self-discipline, and through energy and shrewdness rises to prominence in Casterbridge. The town recognizes his gifts; he becomes a figure of authority, determined to order his life and his district according to hard-won principles. Yet success cannot seal the past away. Unexpected arrivals and seemingly minor coincidences prick the membrane he has drawn around his identity, and the public stage on which he thrives becomes the arena where old consequences reappear.
The Mayor of Casterbridge is often read as an English instance of tragic form adapted to realist materials. Hardy tests whether character is destiny or whether impersonal forces—chance meetings, changes in weather, fluctuations of price—steer a life despite the sternest intent. He crafts a protagonist whose virtues and failings are inseparable: the same vigor that builds a business and steadies a town can turn, in a heat of temper or a pang of pride, into ruinous obstinacy. The novel thus probes responsibility without platitude, letting circumstance and temperament press upon each other until judgment becomes earned rather than declared.
Hardy’s Wessex is not backdrop but pressure. The town’s streets, inns, and market buildings, the barns and byways of the surrounding farms, and the enduring marks of an ancient landscape all exert a shaping force on conduct. Public spaces here are never neutral; they register and amplify reputation. Casterbridge’s economy also matters: grain harvests, shipping routes, and the expertise of skilled labor anchor the story in material reality. This attention to place and work underwrites the novel’s credibility and heightens its tension, because the protagonist’s rises and setbacks are always measurable against shared calendars, common ledgers, and remembered local rites.
Stylistically, the book balances plain, exact prose with ceremonial intensity. Hardy arranges scenes with the economy of a dramatist, using entrances, public announcements, and carefully staged encounters to turn the screw. He employs selective dialect without condescension, granting townspeople and farm workers distinctive voices while keeping narration lucid and unsentimental. Imagery clusters around weather, light, and the anatomy of the town itself, so that atmospherics carry moral weight without allegory. The result is a design that feels inevitable in retrospect yet open, as one reads, to the pricks and deviations of life, a hallmark of the novel’s long-treasured craft.
The cast is broad, yet every figure answers to the book’s central inquiry into how lives are shaped by choice, accident, and social scrutiny. Merchants, journeymen, magistrates, and hired hands compose a full civic chorus, testing authority and reflecting it back. The women in the novel—pragmatic, resilient, observant—are not mere adjuncts to male ambition but agents whose decisions recalibrate the town’s balances. Hardy is attentive to the ethics of care and dependence, the costs of secrecy, and the dignity of work. Without preaching, he allows the reader to sense how sympathy and fairness can be both demanded and denied in public life.
Its classic status rests in part on durability: the novel has remained in print, is widely studied, and continues to reward fresh angles of interpretation—from its use of classical tragic patterns to its sociology of a provincial town. It demonstrates how a regional setting can sustain universal drama, influencing expectations of what English fiction about place might accomplish. Critics have long noted how Hardy’s psychological acuity, his unsparing attention to consequence, and his orchestration of coincidence prepared the way for later explorations of interiority and social pressure, so that the book occupies a meaningful bridge between Victorian realism and emerging modern sensibilities.
Publication in serial form shaped its pace and architecture, yet the finished book reads with remarkable cohesion. Chapters crescendo toward set pieces that serve both as turning points and as civic ceremonies, drawing the reader into the town’s collective gaze. Over successive editions, the text has been presented in reliable scholarly forms, enabling close study of Hardy’s choices of scene order, description, and understatement. That solidity of form—neither showy nor slack—helps explain why the novel’s influence has been steady rather than flashy: it models how narrative inevitability can be built from scrupulous observation rather than from contrivance alone.
For first-time readers, it may help to notice how Hardy links the private register of promise and remorse to public technologies of notice: letters, town meetings, market gossip, and the legal rituals that govern trade and reputation. Weather is not decoration but timing; economy is not background but motive. Watch, too, how mercy and justice jostle within the same character and sometimes within the same scene. The pleasures here are acute: sentences that carry weight without excess, scenes that cut cleanly, and a setting so firm that the smallest misstep can be felt across an entire community.
If the novel still feels urgent, it is because it addresses questions that remain ours: how a leader earns trust and spends it; how private failings reverberate in public roles; how communities remember, forgive, or refuse to forget; how chance complicates merit. In an age preoccupied with visibility and reputation, with mobility and its costs, Hardy’s story of resolve tried by circumstance speaks plainly and powerfully. The Mayor of Casterbridge endures not as a museum piece but as a living argument about responsibility, character, and the fragile bargains by which people build their lives together.
Synopsis
The Mayor of Casterbridge, published in 1886 by Thomas Hardy, is a tragic study of character, fate, and social life in the fictional Wessex town of Casterbridge, modeled on Dorchester. The story opens at a country fair where agricultural laborer Michael Henchard, inflamed by drink and resentment, commits an unthinkable act by selling his wife and infant daughter to a passing sailor. The rash bargain, made in public and sealed in folly, becomes the moral fault line of the novel. From that moment, Hardy traces how a single impulse, performed under the gaze of a community, sets in motion long arcs of consequence.
Sobered by remorse the next day, Henchard searches in vain and then binds himself to a severe pledge of abstinence, vowing to forgo alcohol for twenty-one years. Time passes, and through force of will and practical skill he rises from itinerant hay-trusser to prosperous corn merchant, eventually becoming the respected mayor of Casterbridge. Years later, news from the sea alters the past’s closed door, and Susan and the young Elizabeth-Jane reappear in the town. Determined to make amends while preserving appearances, Henchard navigates delicate social conventions, setting up a household arrangement that attempts to repair a past wrong without inviting scandal.
Into this carefully managed respectability comes Donald Farfrae, a capable young Scotsman whose scientific grasp of grain markets and genial manner immediately command attention. Henchard, impressed, brings him into the business, finding in Farfrae both a valuable adviser and a potential heir. Yet their differences are pronounced: Farfrae is tactful, methodical, and forward-looking, while Henchard remains impulsive, proud, and tied to instinct. As Farfrae’s innovations improve efficiency and his sociability charms Casterbridge, an unintended competition takes shape. The older man’s gratitude shades into envy, and the balance of authority within the firm—and within the town’s esteem—begins to wobble under subtle pressures.
Complicating this professional relationship is the arrival of Lucetta, a woman from Henchard’s past whose history with him cannot be openly acknowledged without risk to reputation. Now independently settled and eager to claim a respectable place in Casterbridge society, she becomes a focal point for private obligations and public expectations. Her interactions with both Henchard and Farfrae expose the era’s code of propriety, in which letters, visits, and whispered recollections can bind as tightly as legal vows. The possibility that former indiscretions might surface threatens arrangements carefully staged to appear proper, drawing personal desire and civic decorum into tense proximity.
Hardy situates these lives within the volatile economics of nineteenth-century agriculture. Weather, harvest quality, and distant market signals sway fortunes by the week. Henchard’s decisions, often made in an instant and driven by pride or resentment, contrast with Farfrae’s measured calculations and attention to new methods. Their diverging approaches carry public consequences, as municipal leadership in Casterbridge is inseparable from the grain trade that feeds it. A town that celebrates spectacles and parades also judges failures in the marketplace. As profits seesaw and inventories rise or fall, esteem follows, revealing how civic honor can be gained—or lost—through commercial judgment.
At the center stands Elizabeth-Jane, whose quiet diligence and sensitivity provide a counterpoint to the men’s contest. Her education, manners, and hopes mark a path of self-improvement, yet her position is precarious, dependent on shifting adult alliances and unspoken histories. Questions of identity—who belongs to whom, and by what right—gather around her as the past begins to disclose unwelcome facts. The strain of reconciling affection with lineage tests relationships in the household and beyond. Hardy uses her perspective to measure the moral climate of Casterbridge, where kindness must contend with pride, and where the truth can both illuminate and injure.
Professional rivalry crystallizes into a broader struggle for influence, drawing in tradesmen, townspeople, and officials who gravitate toward competence and geniality. Public entertainments, civic improvements, and the careful staging of events become arenas in which allegiance is displayed. Henchard, quick to challenge and slow to yield, finds his authority contested in ways that chafe against his sense of self-made dignity. Farfrae’s rise, seemingly effortless and grounded in reasonableness, accelerates the older man’s insecurity. The town’s shifting loyalties mirror a changing era, in which adaptability and tact begin to outweigh sheer will, foreshadowing reversals that personal effort alone may not avert.
Meanwhile, the unresolved past strains the fragile membrane of respectability. A cache of private correspondence and old rumors threatens to move from discreet keeping into open circulation, making reputation itself a precarious commodity. When communal energies turn into spectacle, the cruelty of crowds overwhelms individual defenses, and a single evening’s mockery may undo years of careful poise. In the ensuing anxiety, health, judgment, and partnerships suffer. Hardy exposes a social ecosystem in which pity and condemnation coexist, and in which the same townspeople who cheer a leader can swiftly relish a neighbor’s humiliation when propriety’s thin guard is breached.
The Mayor of Casterbridge endures for its unsparing portrayal of how character collides with circumstance. Hardy charts the costs of impetuosity, secrecy, and rigidity, setting them against the gentler force of patience and practical kindness. Without dwelling on ultimate outcomes, the novel suggests that a life lived under the watch of community memory leaves little room for private redemption unless shaped by humility. It is a study of rise and decline in a provincial world that is nonetheless vast in moral consequence. The book’s lasting significance lies in its clear-eyed view of responsibility, forgiveness, and the strange governance of chance.
Historical Context
Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge is set in the early to mid-nineteenth century, roughly the 1830s to 1840s, in a fictional Wessex town modeled on Dorchester in Dorset, England. The world of the book is rooted in a market-town economy dominated by agriculture, where parish authorities, the Church of England, borough magistrates, and commercial guild-like associations structure daily life. Social rank, local reputation, and municipal office carry practical power. Hardy writes retrospectively from the 1880s about an earlier generation, allowing readers to see a traditional rural community at the moment it confronts reform, expanding markets, and new professional practices that complicate old hierarchies.
Casterbridge resembles Dorchester, long a county town with assizes, a town hall, and a mayoral system. Before widespread reform, many English boroughs were governed by self-selecting corporations with limited accountability. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 reshaped this landscape by creating elected councils, clarifying duties, and expanding civic oversight. Mayors in such towns supervised markets, policing, and ceremonial life, and they often served as magistrates. Hardy’s title highlights how municipal office could confer status and authority, while also exposing the precariousness of that prestige in a small community where gossip, ritual, and custom continued to regulate behavior alongside statute law.
The regional economy turned on corn—meaning grain—and livestock, with trade conducted through fairs, weekly markets, and, increasingly, corn exchanges. After the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, Britain enacted the Corn Laws to protect domestic producers, using tariffs and a sliding scale (notably in 1828) to manage imports. Prices in this period were volatile, influenced by harvests, wars, and policy. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 ushered in freer trade and intensified competition from abroad. Hardy’s depiction of merchants, factors, and speculators reflects a world where fortune could be made or lost with a harvest’s success and the timing of a sale.
Hiring and statute fairs were central to rural labor markets in southern England. Annually, servants in husbandry, dairymaids, carters, and casual hands sought employment for terms of service, while traders, entertainers, and vendors filled the grounds. Such fairs—like the one that opens Hardy’s narrative—combined commerce with festivity, and also provided opportunities for informal arbitration, bargaining, and communal judgment. Alehouses and temporary booths served drink and food, reflecting a permissive environment tempered by local by-laws. Hardy uses this setting to register both the economic precarity of working people and the social permeability of public spaces where private choices could become public knowledge.
Alcohol and reform were entwined in these years. The Beerhouse Act of 1830 liberalized licensing, expanding low-cost beerhouses across England and altering patterns of drinking and sociability. Almost immediately, temperance societies spread, first advocating moderation and, by the mid-1830s, promoting teetotalism. Organizations such as the British and Foreign Temperance Society (founded 1831) and later regional groups framed abstinence as moral self-help and social advancement. Hardy’s attention to oaths of abstinence and the moral pressure of sobriety invokes a recognizable Victorian discourse in which personal discipline indicated respectability, yet access to alcohol remained ubiquitous at fairs, inns, and markets where business and leisure overlapped.
Poor relief and social welfare were in transition. Under the Old Poor Law, parishes offered outdoor relief in cash or kind, administered locally with wide discretion. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 created unions of parishes, centralized administration, and promoted the workhouse test to deter dependence, reshaping relief in places like Dorset. Dorchester and neighboring parishes formed unions in the mid-1830s, establishing new workhouses and Boards of Guardians. Hardy’s characters move within a culture that stigmatized pauperism even as it relied on parish mechanisms for survival. Charity, credit, and kin networks mingle with an increasingly bureaucratic and punitive welfare regime.
The rise of a self-consciously respectable middle class reshaped provincial life. Shopkeepers, professionals, and prosperous tradesmen sought civic office, joined improvement societies, and cultivated manners that signaled probity and trustworthiness. Public dinners, processions, and newspaper notices buttressed reputations as much as account books did. In market towns, an individual could ascend to influence by mastering these codes, yet long-standing families and landowners retained symbolic authority. Hardy probes this culture of respectability, showing how ceremony, dress, and controlled sociability could open doors while leaving one vulnerable to scandal. The town thus becomes an arena where status is negotiated at the intersection of commerce and moral surveillance.
Agriculture itself was modernizing. The period saw wider use of threshing machines (contested during the Swing Riots of 1830), experiments with crop rotation, improved breeding, and, from the 1840s, growing application of fertilizers such as guano. Drainage schemes, scientific soil analysis, and new reaping technologies began to alter labor needs and business strategies, although adoption varied by region and capital. Hardy contrasts rule-of-thumb practice with methodical calculation, capturing tensions between customary knowledge and the “improving” ethos of the Victorian agricultural press and county societies. The novel’s attention to storage, grading, and risk anticipates a profession increasingly shaped by data and technique.
Transport transformed rural markets. Early in the century, turnpike trusts maintained toll roads that carried stagecoaches and wagons to ports like Weymouth. Dorset lacked a dense canal network, keeping road haulage central. From the 1840s to the 1850s, the railway reached Dorset, binding towns like Dorchester to national distribution chains and allowing faster, more reliable movement of grain, livestock, and news. The railway’s arrival changed pricing horizons and eroded local monopolies. Hardy situates Casterbridge at this threshold, where traditional pacing and face-to-face bargaining begin to give way to timetables, distant buyers, and accelerated flows of information.
The repeal of the Corn Laws intensified Britain’s integration into global grain circuits. After 1846, imports from the Baltic, the Black Sea, and, increasingly, North America supplemented domestic harvests. Steamships and better port facilities cut transit times, while the electric telegraph, spreading in the 1840s and 1850s, hastened price signals. Local dealers had to manage storage risks, quality control, and timing against a wider market they could not fully see. Hardy’s portrayal of speculation and weather-watching reflects these pressures, even when the story’s core years precede the mature system. The town’s dependence on corn magnifies the vulnerability of livelihoods to shocks near and far.
Marriage law and custom framed private life with public consequences. Under coverture, a wife’s legal identity was largely subsumed under her husband’s, limiting property rights and recourse. Before the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 created a civil divorce court, divorce for most people was effectively inaccessible, requiring a private Act of Parliament. In working-class communities, informal separations sometimes took the public form of “wife-selling,” a practice occasionally reported in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers but never legally valid. Hardy drew on such reportage to dramatize marital constraint and public spectacle, underscoring how limited legal options could channel desperation into ritualized, notorious acts.
Communal discipline could be theatrical. Charivari and “skimmington rides” — forms of rough music documented in the southwest — subjected those who breached norms of domestic conduct to noisy public shaming. Effigies, processions, and mock trials turned streets into venues of moral judgment. Authorities alternately tolerated and suppressed these customs, which existed uneasily alongside formal law. Hardy’s inclusion of such practices emphasizes the crowd’s role in enforcing conformity, and how reputations could be made or ruined by collective display. It situates Casterbridge within a continuum where the village green, the market square, and the courtroom were contiguous stages for social control.
Religious life in Dorset was anchored by the Church of England, with its parish structures, tithes, and seasonal rhythms. Yet Nonconformity grew steadily across the nineteenth century, with Wesleyan and Primitive Methodism spreading chapels into rural districts. Chapel culture offered mutual aid, education, and a disciplined moral environment that appealed to artisans and laborers alike. Disputes over church rates and the teaching of doctrine reflected wider contests for local influence. Hardy’s villages and towns register this pluralism: bells, sermons, and chapel meetings shape calendars and consciences, while the church building itself often doubles as a civic landmark where oaths, announcements, and rites bind community memory.
Education and literacy were expanding but uneven. Sunday schools had proliferated since the late eighteenth century, and in 1833 the state made its first grant to elementary education, supplementing voluntary societies such as the National Society and the British and Foreign School Society. The 1870 Elementary Education Act later established elected school boards, yet in the book’s period many adults still relied on apprenticeship and self-teaching. Business success increasingly required account-keeping, correspondence, and technical reading from agricultural journals. Hardy’s contrast between traditional acumen and methodical record-keeping reflects a moment when literacy and numeracy became decisive tools for advancement in trade and municipal life.
Labor relations in Dorset were tense. In 1830, the Swing Riots saw rural workers across southern England protest low wages and the spread of threshing machines. Four years later, the Tolpuddle Martyrs — farm laborers from the village of Tolpuddle near Dorchester — were convicted for administering unlawful oaths as part of a friendly society and transported to Australia. Their case sparked mass demonstrations in London and nationwide petitions; pardons followed, and some returned by the late 1830s. This local history of protest and punishment shadows Hardy’s setting, revealing how authority, law, and the desire for collective protection collided in the fields and courts of Wessex.
Hardy published The Mayor of Casterbridge in 1886, first in serial form in a London illustrated weekly and simultaneously in America, then as a volume. Writing for late-Victorian readers, he blended documentary exactitude about Dorset with the broader currents of realism and emerging naturalism. Scientific and secular debates after mid-century — including evolutionary thought challenging providential explanations — helped shape a literary climate attentive to causation, environment, and contingency. By looking back to earlier decades, Hardy could explore how character meets circumstance under pressures from market forces, municipal reform, and communal ritual, inviting readers to reconsider progress and its human cost.
Taken together, these contexts reveal the novel as both mirror and critique of its era. Hardy stages a provincial society negotiating the shift from customary authority to regulated, elected governance; from local monopolies to national and global markets; from unquestioned patriarchal power to contested marital and communal norms. Economic liberalization promises opportunity but multiplies risk; moral improvement campaigns elevate conduct but sharpen surveillance; new techniques increase efficiency yet unsettle livelihoods. Casterbridge thus becomes a case study in modernization’s ambiguities, showing how personal fates are entangled with law, custom, and technology in a rural England moving, unevenly, into the modern age.
Author Biography
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and poet whose work bridges late Victorian realism and the emerging sensibilities of the twentieth century. Best known for his fiction set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex, he explored the pressures of social convention, chance, and environmental change on ordinary lives. His novels and later poetry combine unsentimental observation with a tragic sense of human limitation, yielding narratives and lyrics that question religious certainties and social norms. Though controversies marked parts of his career, Hardy’s body of work has remained central to English literature, informing modern discussions of narrative form, regionalism, and ethical complexity.
Hardy received formal training as an architect and began his working life in that profession while reading widely on his own. Time spent in London exposed him to the period’s intellectual debates, including evolutionary theory and positivist philosophy, which deepened his skepticism toward orthodox belief. He admired Romantic and early Victorian poetry and studied classical tragedy and the Bible, influences that shaped his tone and sense of fatality. Professional discipline from architecture—attention to structure, design, and material detail—translated into his prose and verse. This combination of practical apprenticeship and self-directed study underlies his later innovations in regional realism and poetic form.
Hardy turned to literature in the 1860s and published early novels that tested his range, including Desperate Remedies (1871), Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) established his reputation and introduced many readers to Wessex, a landscape modeled on southwestern England. Its portrayal of rural communities, economic rhythms, and personal misjudgments signaled Hardy’s commitment to depicting ordinary life without moral simplification. Success in serial and book form enabled him to pursue fiction full-time, and he developed a method that balanced incident with atmosphere, integrating landscape as an active presence in narrative.
Through the 1870s and 1880s Hardy produced a series of major novels: The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, and others that deepened his exploration of character and setting. In the 1890s he published Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, works that confronted sexual double standards, education barriers, and the weight of social stigma. Their frankness prompted public controversy and pressures from publishers and reviewers. While some contemporaries found the outlook bleak, later readers recognized the artistry of his plotting, the precision of his descriptive prose, and his probing of institutional constraints on personal aspiration.
After the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure, Hardy ceased writing novels and devoted himself mainly to poetry and dramatic verse. His first collection, Wessex Poems (1898), began a steady sequence that included Poems of the Past and the Present (1901) and subsequent volumes. The Dynasts (1904–1908), a three-part epic in verse on the Napoleonic wars, extended his tragic vision to a continental scale, presenting history as shaped by impersonal forces. Across these works he experimented with stanza forms, dialect, and song-like measures, while articulating a world-view often described as agnostic, stoic, and deterministic, attentive to chance and unintended consequence.
Hardy’s later poetry refined themes of memory, time, and the persistence of feeling. Lyrics written in the early 1910s, often associated with bereavement, exhibit an intimacy and technical economy that shaped the reception of his verse. Subsequent collections engaged the upheavals of the First World War and everyday rural experience with equal seriousness. Critics who had dismissed his style as plain came to value its resourceful syntax, varied meters, and tonal range. By the 1920s he was regarded as a leading poetic voice, and his poems influenced subsequent generations for their frankness about loss and for their unsentimental clarity.
Hardy died in 1928, by which time his reputation as both novelist and poet was secure. He is memorialized in Westminster Abbey, reflecting his stature in British letters. His influence extends across fiction and poetry: later novelists grappled with his treatment of place and social constraint, while poets drew on his direct diction and stoic irony. Ongoing adaptations for stage and screen have introduced new audiences to his narratives without exhausting their complexity. Scholars continue to mine his work for insights into regional identity, secular thought, environmental perception, and narrative technique, ensuring Hardy’s continued presence in contemporary literary discussion.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Chapter 1.
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. 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.
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. He wore a short jacket of brown corduroy, newer than the remainder of his suit, which was a fustian waistcoat with white horn buttons, breeches of the same, tanned leggings, and a straw hat overlaid with black glazed canvas. At his back he carried by a looped strap a rush basket, from which protruded at one end the crutch of a hay-knife, a wimble for hay-bonds being also visible in the aperture. His measured, springless walk was the walk of the skilled countryman as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference personal to himself, showing its presence even in the regularly interchanging fustian folds, now in the left leg, now in the right, as he paced along.
What was really peculiar, however, in this couple’s progress, and would have attracted the attention of any casual observer otherwise disposed to overlook them, was the perfect silence they preserved. They walked side by side in such a way as to suggest afar off the low, easy, confidential chat of people full of reciprocity; but on closer view it could be discerned that the man was reading, or pretending to read, a ballad sheet which he kept before his eyes with some difficulty by the hand that was passed through the basket strap. Whether this apparent cause were the real cause, or whether it were an assumed one to escape an intercourse that would have been irksome to him, nobody but himself could have said precisely; but his taciturnity was unbroken, and the woman enjoyed no society whatever from his presence. Virtually she walked the highway alone, save for the child she bore[1q]. Sometimes the man’s bent elbow almost touched her shoulder, for she kept as close to his side as was possible without actual contact, but she seemed to have no idea of taking his arm, nor he of offering it; and far from exhibiting surprise at his ignoring silence she appeared to receive it as a natural thing. If any word at all were uttered by the little group, it was an occasional whisper of the woman to the child — a tiny girl in short clothes and blue boots of knitted yarn — and the murmured babble of the child in reply.
The chief — almost the only — attraction of the young woman’s face was its mobility. When she looked down sideways to the girl she became pretty, and even handsome, particularly that in the action her features caught slantwise the rays of the strongly coloured sun, which made transparencies of her eyelids and nostrils and set fire on her lips. When she plodded on in the shade of the hedge, silently thinking, she had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play. The first phase was the work of Nature, the second probably of civilization.
That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the parents of the girl in arms there could be little doubt. No other than such relationship would have accounted for the atmosphere of stale familiarity which the trio carried along with them like a nimbus as they moved down the road.
The wife mostly kept her eyes fixed ahead, though with little interest — the scene for that matter being one that might have been matched at almost any spot in any county in England at this time of the year; a road neither straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly, bordered by hedges, trees, and other vegetation, which had entered the blackened-green stage of colour that the doomed leaves pass through on their way to dingy, and yellow, and red. The grassy margin of the bank, and the nearest hedgerow boughs, were powdered by the dust that had been stirred over them by hasty vehicles, the same dust as it lay on the road deadening their footfalls like a carpet; and this, with the aforesaid total absence of conversation, allowed every extraneous sound to be heard.
For a long time there was none, beyond the voice of a weak bird singing a trite old evening song that might doubtless have been heard on the hill at the same hour, and with the self-same trills, quavers, and breves, at any sunset of that season for centuries untold. But as they approached the village sundry distant shouts and rattles reached their ears from some elevated spot in that direction, as yet screened from view by foliage. When the outlying houses of Weydon-Priors could just be described, the family group was met by a turnip-hoer with his hoe on his shoulder, and his dinner-bag suspended from it. The reader promptly glanced up.
“Any trade doing here?” he asked phlegmatically, designating the village in his van by a wave of the broadsheet. And thinking the labourer did not understand him, he added, “Anything in the hay-trussing line?”
The turnip-hoer had already begun shaking his head. “Why, save the man, what wisdom’s in him that ‘a should come to Weydon for a job of that sort this time o’ year?”
“Then is there any house to let — a little small new cottage just a builded, or such like?” asked the other.
The pessimist still maintained a negative. “Pulling down is more the nater of Weydon. There were five houses cleared away last year, and three this; and the volk nowhere to go — no, not so much as a thatched hurdle; that’s the way o’ Weydon-Priors.”
The hay-trusser, which he obviously was, nodded with some superciliousness. Looking towards the village, he continued, “There is something going on here, however, is there not?”
“Ay. ’Tis Fair Day. Though what you hear now is little more than the clatter and scurry of getting away the money o’ children and fools, for the real business is done earlier than this. I’ve been working within sound o’t all day, but I didn’t go up — not I. ’Twas no business of mine.”
The trusser and his family proceeded on their way, and soon entered the Fair-field, which showed standing-places and pens where many hundreds of horses and sheep had been exhibited and sold in the forenoon, but were now in great part taken away. At present, as their informant had observed, but little real business remained on hand, the chief being the sale by auction of a few inferior animals, that could not otherwise be disposed of, and had been absolutely refused by the better class of traders, who came and went early. Yet the crowd was denser now than during the morning hours, the frivolous contingent of visitors, including journeymen out for a holiday, a stray soldier or two come on furlough, village shopkeepers, and the like, having latterly flocked in; persons whose activities found a congenial field among the peep-shows, toy-stands, waxworks, inspired monsters, disinterested medical men who travelled for the public good, thimble-riggers, nick-nack vendors, and readers of Fate.
Neither of our pedestrians had much heart for these things, and they looked around for a refreshment tent among the many which dotted the down. Two, which stood nearest to them in the ochreous haze of expiring sunlight, seemed almost equally inviting. One was formed of new, milk-hued canvas, and bore red flags on its summit; it announced “Good Home-brewed Beer, Ale, and Cyder.” The other was less new; a little iron stove-pipe came out of it at the back and in front appeared the placard, “Good Furmity[1] Sold Hear.” The man mentally weighed the two inscriptions and inclined to the former tent.
“No — no — the other one,” said the woman. “I always like furmity; and so does Elizabeth-Jane; and so will you. It is nourishing after a long hard day.”
“I’ve never tasted it,” said the man. However, he gave way to her representations, and they entered the furmity booth forthwith.
A rather numerous company appeared within, seated at the long narrow tables that ran down the tent on each side. At the upper end stood a stove, containing a charcoal fire, over which hung a large three-legged crock, sufficiently polished round the rim to show that it was made of bell-metal. A haggish creature of about fifty presided, in a white apron, which as it threw an air of respectability over her as far as it extended, was made so wide as to reach nearly round her waist. She slowly stirred the contents of the pot. The dull scrape of her large spoon was audible throughout the tent as she thus kept from burning the mixture of corn in the grain, flour, milk, raisins, currants, and what not, that composed the antiquated slop in which she dealt. Vessels holding the separate ingredients stood on a white-clothed table of boards and trestles close by.
The young man and woman ordered a basin each of the mixture, steaming hot, and sat down to consume it at leisure. This was very well so far, for furmity, as the woman had said, was nourishing, and as proper a food as could be obtained within the four seas; though, to those not accustomed to it, the grains of wheat swollen as large as lemon-pips, which floated on its surface, might have a deterrent effect at first.
But there was more in that tent than met the cursory glance; and the man, with the instinct of a perverse character, scented it quickly. After a mincing attack on his bowl, he watched the hag’s proceedings from the corner of his eye, and saw the game she played. He winked to her, and passed up his basin in reply to her nod; when she took a bottle from under the table, slily measured out a quantity of its contents, and tipped the same into the man’s furmity. The liquor poured in was rum. The man as slily sent back money in payment.
He found the concoction, thus strongly laced, much more to his satisfaction than it had been in its natural state. His wife had observed the proceeding with much uneasiness; but he persuaded her to have hers laced also, and she agreed to a milder allowance after some misgiving.
The man finished his basin, and called for another, the rum being signalled for in yet stronger proportion. The effect of it was soon apparent in his manner, and his wife but too sadly perceived that in strenuously steering off the rocks of the licensed liquor-tent she had only got into maelstrom depths here amongst the smugglers.
The child began to prattle impatiently, and the wife more than once said to her husband, “Michael, how about our lodging? You know we may have trouble in getting it if we don’t go soon.”
But he turned a deaf ear to those bird-like chirpings. He talked loud to the company. The child’s black eyes, after slow, round, ruminating gazes at the candles when they were lighted, fell together; then they opened, then shut again, and she slept.
At the end of the first basin the man had risen to serenity; at the second he was jovial; at the third, argumentative, at the fourth, the qualities signified by the shape of his face, the occasional clench of his mouth, and the fiery spark of his dark eye, began to tell in his conduct; he was overbearing — even brilliantly quarrelsome.
The conversation took a high turn, as it often does on such occasions. The ruin of good men by bad wives, and, more particularly, the frustration of many a promising youth’s high aims and hopes and the extinction of his energies by an early imprudent marriage, was the theme.
“I did for myself that way thoroughly,” said the trusser with a contemplative bitterness that was well-night resentful. “I married at eighteen, like the fool that I was; and this is the consequence o’t.” He pointed at himself and family with a wave of the hand intended to bring out the penuriousness of the exhibition.
The young woman his wife, who seemed accustomed to such remarks, acted as if she did not hear them, and continued her intermittent private words of tender trifles to the sleeping and waking child, who was just big enough to be placed for a moment on the bench beside her when she wished to ease her arms. The man continued —
“I haven’t more than fifteen shillings in the world, and yet I am a good experienced hand in my line. I’d challenge England to beat me in the fodder business; and if I were a free man again I’d be worth a thousand pound before I’d done o’t. But a fellow never knows these little things till all chance of acting upon ’em is past.”
The auctioneer selling the old horses in the field outside could be heard saying, “Now this is the last lot — now who’ll take the last lot for a song? Shall I say forty shillings? ’Tis a very promising broodmare, a trifle over five years old, and nothing the matter with the hoss at all, except that she’s a little holler in the back and had her left eye knocked out by the kick of another, her own sister, coming along the road.”
“For my part I don’t see why men who have got wives and don’t want ’em, shouldn’t get rid of ’em as these gipsy fellows do their old horses,” said the man in the tent. “Why shouldn’t they put ’em up and sell ’em by auction to men who are in need of such articles? Hey? Why, begad, I’d sell mine this minute if anybody would buy her!”
“There’s them that would do that,” some of the guests replied, looking at the woman, who was by no means ill-favoured.
“True,” said a smoking gentleman, whose coat had the fine polish about the collar, elbows, seams, and shoulder-blades that long-continued friction with grimy surfaces will produce, and which is usually more desired on furniture than on clothes. From his appearance he had possibly been in former time groom or coachman to some neighbouring county family. “I’ve had my breedings in as good circles, I may say, as any man,” he added, “and I know true cultivation, or nobody do; and I can declare she’s got it — in the bone, mind ye, I say — as much as any female in the fair — though it may want a little bringing out.” Then, crossing his legs, he resumed his pipe with a nicely-adjusted gaze at a point in the air.
The fuddled young husband stared for a few seconds at this unexpected praise of his wife, half in doubt of the wisdom of his own attitude towards the possessor of such qualities. But he speedily lapsed into his former conviction, and said harshly —
“Well, then, now is your chance; I am open to an offer for this gem o’ creation.”
She turned to her husband and murmured, “Michael, you have talked this nonsense in public places before. A joke is a joke, but you may make it once too often, mind!”
“I know I’ve said it before; I meant it. All I want is a buyer.”
At the moment a swallow, one among the last of the season, which had by chance found its way through an opening into the upper part of the tent, flew to and from quick curves above their heads, causing all eyes to follow it absently. In watching the bird till it made its escape the assembled company neglected to respond to the workman’s offer, and the subject dropped.
But a quarter of an hour later the man, who had gone on lacing his furmity more and more heavily, though he was either so strong-minded or such an intrepid toper that he still appeared fairly sober, recurred to the old strain, as in a musical fantasy the instrument fetches up the original theme. “Here — I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman is no good to me. Who’ll have her?”
The company had by this time decidedly degenerated, and the renewed inquiry was received with a laugh of appreciation. The woman whispered; she was imploring and anxious: “Come, come, it is getting dark, and this nonsense won’t do. If you don’t come along, I shall go without you. Come!”
She waited and waited; yet he did not move. In ten minutes the man broke in upon the desultory conversation of the furmity drinkers with. “I asked this question, and nobody answered to ‘t. Will any Jack Rag or Tom Straw among ye buy my goods?”
The woman’s manner changed, and her face assumed the grim shape and colour of which mention has been made.
“Mike, Mike,” she said; “this is getting serious. O! — too serious!”
“Will anybody buy her?” said the man.
“I wish somebody would,” said she firmly. “Her present owner is not at all to her liking!”
“Nor you to mine,” said he. “So we are agreed about that. Gentlemen, you hear? It’s an agreement to part. She shall take the girl if she wants to, and go her ways. I’ll take my tools, and go my ways. ’Tis simple as Scripture history. Now then, stand up, Susan, and show yourself.”
“Don’t, my chiel,” whispered a buxom staylace dealer in voluminous petticoats, who sat near the woman; “yer good man don’t know what he’s saying.”
The woman, however, did stand up. “Now, who’s auctioneer?” cried the hay-trusser.
“I be,” promptly answered a short man, with a nose resembling a copper knob, a damp voice, and eyes like button-holes. “Who’ll make an offer for this lady?”
The woman looked on the ground, as if she maintained her position by a supreme effort of will.
“Five shillings,” said someone, at which there was a laugh.
“No insults,” said the husband. “Who’ll say a guinea?”
Nobody answered; and the female dealer in staylaces interposed.
“Behave yerself moral, good man, for Heaven’s love! Ah, what a cruelty is the poor soul married to! Bed and board is dear at some figures ‘pon my ‘vation ’tis!”
“Set it higher, auctioneer,” said the trusser.
“Two guineas[2]!” said the auctioneer; and no one replied.
“If they don’t take her for that, in ten seconds they’ll have to give more,” said the husband. “Very well. Now auctioneer, add another.”
“Three guineas — going for three guineas!” said the rheumy man.
“No bid?” said the husband. “Good Lord, why she’s cost me fifty times the money, if a penny. Go on.”
“Four guineas!” cried the auctioneer.
“I’ll tell ye what — I won’t sell her for less than five,” said the husband, bringing down his fist so that the basins danced. “I’ll sell her for five guineas to any man that will pay me the money, and treat her well; and he shall have her for ever, and never hear aught o’ me. But she shan’t go for less. Now then — five guineas — and she’s yours. Susan, you agree?”
She bowed her head with absolute indifference.
“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. Standing in the triangular opening which formed the door of the tent was a sailor, who, unobserved by the rest, had arrived there within the last two or three minutes. A dead silence followed his affirmation.
“You say you do?” asked the husband, staring at him.
“I say so,” replied the sailor.
“Saying is one thing, and paying is another. Where’s the money?”
The sailor hesitated a moment, looked anew at the woman, came in, unfolded five crisp pieces of paper, and threw them down upon the tablecloth. They were Bank-of-England notes[3] for five pounds. Upon the face of this he clinked down the shillings severally — one, two, three, four, five.
The sight of real money in full amount, in answer to a challenge for the same till then deemed slightly hypothetical had a great effect upon the spectators. Their eyes became riveted upon the faces of the chief actors, and then upon the notes as they lay, weighted by the shillings, on the table.
Up to this moment it could not positively have been asserted that the man, in spite of his tantalizing declaration, was really in earnest. The spectators had indeed taken the proceedings throughout as a piece of mirthful irony carried to extremes; and had assumed that, being out of work, he was, as a consequence, out of temper with the world, and society, and his nearest kin. But with the demand and response of real cash the jovial frivolity of the scene departed. A lurid colour seemed to fill the tent, and change the aspect of all therein. The mirth-wrinkles left the listeners’ faces, and they waited with parting lips.
“Now,” said the woman, breaking the silence, so that her low dry voice sounded quite loud, “before you go further, Michael, listen to me. If you touch that money, I and this girl go with the man. Mind, it is a joke no longer.”
“A joke? Of course it is not a joke!” shouted her husband, his resentment rising at her suggestion. “I take the money; the sailor takes you. That’s plain enough. It has been done elsewhere — and why not here?”
“’Tis quite on the understanding that the young woman is willing,” said the sailor blandly. “I wouldn’t hurt her feelings for the world.”
“Faith, nor I,” said her husband. “But she is willing, provided she can have the child. She said so only the other day when I talked o’t!”
“That you swear?” said the sailor to her.
“I do,” said she, after glancing at her husband’s face and seeing no repentance there.
“Very well, she shall have the child, and the bargain’s complete,” said the trusser. He took the sailor’s notes and deliberately folded them, and put them with the shillings in a high remote pocket, with an air of finality.
The sailor looked at the woman and smiled. “Come along!” he said kindly. “The little one too — the more the merrier!” She paused for an instant, with a close glance at him. Then dropping her eyes again, and saying nothing, she took up the child and followed him as he made towards the door. On reaching it, she turned, and pulling off her wedding-ring, flung it across the booth in the hay-trusser’s face.
“Mike,” she said, “I’ve lived with thee a couple of years, and had nothing but temper! Now I’m no more to ‘ee; I’ll try my luck elsewhere. ’Twill be better for me and Elizabeth-Jane, both. So good-bye!”
Seizing the sailor’s arm with her right hand, and mounting the little girl on her left, she went out of the tent sobbing bitterly.
A stolid look of concern filled the husband’s face, as if, after all, he had not quite anticipated this ending; and some of the guests laughed.
“Is she gone?” he said.
“Faith, ay! she’s gone clane enough,” said some rustics near the door.
He rose and walked to the entrance with the careful tread of one conscious of his alcoholic load. Some others followed, and they stood looking into the twilight. The difference between the peacefulness of inferior nature and the wilful hostilities of mankind was very apparent at this place. In contrast with the harshness of the act just ended within the tent was the sight of several horses crossing their necks and rubbing each other lovingly as they waited in patience to be harnessed for the homeward journey. Outside the fair, in the valleys and woods, all was quiet. The sun had recently set, and the west heaven was hung with rosy cloud, which seemed permanent, yet slowly changed. To watch it was like looking at some grand feat of stagery from a darkened auditorium. In presence of this scene after the other there was a natural instinct to abjure man as the blot on an otherwise kindly universe; till it was remembered that all terrestrial conditions were intermittent, and that mankind might some night be innocently sleeping when these quiet objects were raging loud.
“Where do the sailor live?” asked a spectator, when they had vainly gazed around.
“God knows that,” replied the man who had seen high life. “He’s without doubt a stranger here.”
“He came in about five minutes ago,” said the furmity woman, joining the rest with her hands on her hips. “And then ‘a stepped back, and then ‘a looked in again. I’m not a penny the better for him.”
“Serves the husband well be-right,” said the staylace vendor. “A comely respectable body like her — what can a man want more? I glory in the woman’s sperrit. I’d ha’ done it myself — od send if I wouldn’t, if a husband had behaved so to me! I’d go, and ‘a might call, and call, till his keacorn was raw; but I’d never come back — no, not till the great trumpet, would I!”
“Well, the woman will be better off,” said another of a more deliberative turn. “For seafaring natures be very good shelter for shorn lambs, and the man do seem to have plenty of money, which is what she’s not been used to lately, by all showings.”
“Mark me — I’ll not go after her!” said the trusser, returning doggedly to his seat. “Let her go! If she’s up to such vagaries she must suffer for ’em. She’d no business to take the maid —’tis my maid; and if it were the doing again she shouldn’t have her!”
Perhaps from some little sense of having countenanced an indefensible proceeding, perhaps because it was late, the customers thinned away from the tent shortly after this episode. The man stretched his elbows forward on the table leant his face upon his arms, and soon began to snore. The furmity seller decided to close for the night, and after seeing the rum-bottles, milk, corn, raisins, etc., that remained on hand, loaded into the cart, came to where the man reclined. She shook him, but could not wake him. As the tent was not to be struck that night, the fair continuing for two or three days, she decided to let the sleeper, who was obviously no tramp, stay where he was, and his basket with him. Extinguishing the last candle, and lowering the flap of the tent, she left it, and drove away.
Chapter 2.
The morning sun was streaming through the crevices of the canvas when the man awoke. A warm glow pervaded the whole atmosphere of the marquee, and a single big blue fly buzzed musically round and round it. Besides the buzz of the fly there was not a sound. He looked about — at the benches — at the table supported by trestles — at his basket of tools — at the stove where the furmity had been boiled — at the empty basins — at some shed grains of wheat — at the corks which dotted the grassy floor. Among the odds and ends he discerned a little shining object, and picked it up. It was his wife’s ring.
A confused picture of the events of the previous evening seemed to come back to him, and he thrust his hand into his breast-pocket. A rustling revealed the sailor’s bank-notes thrust carelessly in.
This second verification of his dim memories was enough; he knew now they were not dreams. He remained seated, looking on the ground for some time. “I must get out of this as soon as I can,” he said deliberately at last, with the air of one who could not catch his thoughts without pronouncing them. “She’s gone — to be sure she is — gone with that sailor who bought her, and little Elizabeth-Jane. We walked here, and I had the furmity, and rum in it — and sold her. Yes, that’s what’s happened and here am I. Now, what am I to do — am I sober enough to walk, I wonder?” He stood up, found that he was in fairly good condition for progress, unencumbered. Next he shouldered his tool basket, and found he could carry it. Then lifting the tent door he emerged into the open air.
Here the man looked around with gloomy curiosity. The freshness of the September morning inspired and braced him as he stood. He and his family had been weary when they arrived the night before, and they had observed but little of the place; so that he now beheld it as a new thing. It exhibited itself as the top of an open down, bounded on one extreme by a plantation, and approached by a winding road. At the bottom stood the village which lent its name to the upland and the annual fair that was held thereon. The spot stretched downward into valleys, and onward to other uplands, dotted with barrows, and trenched with the remains of prehistoric forts. The whole scene lay under the rays of a newly risen sun, which had not as yet dried a single blade of the heavily dewed grass, whereon the shadows of the yellow and red vans were projected far away, those thrown by the felloe of each wheel being elongated in shape to the orbit of a comet. All the gipsies and showmen who had remained on the ground lay snug within their carts and tents or wrapped in horse-cloths under them, and were silent and still as death, with the exception of an occasional snore that revealed their presence. But the Seven Sleepers had a dog; and dogs of the mysterious breeds that vagrants own, that are as much like cats as dogs and as much like foxes as cats also lay about here. A little one started up under one of the carts, barked as a matter of principle, and quickly lay down again. He was the only positive spectator of the hay-trusser[4]’s exit from the Weydon Fair-field.
This seemed to accord with his desire. He went on in silent thought, unheeding the yellowhammers which flitted about the hedges with straws in their bills, the crowns of the mushrooms, and the tinkling of local sheep-bells, whose wearer had had the good fortune not to be included in the fair. When he reached a lane, a good mile from the scene of the previous evening, the man pitched his basket and leant upon a gate. A difficult problem or two occupied his mind.
