The Mayor of Casterbridge

Michael Henchard, drunk and humiliated at a country fair, auctions off his wife Susan and infant daughter to a passing sailor for five guineas in the novel's opening pages, and Hardy spends the rest of the book demonstrating that this single impulsive act, rather than any later misfortune, is the true engine of everything that eventually destroys him; the subtitle, A Man of Character, is Hardy's own gloss on the novel's argument, that Henchard's ruin belongs to his own volatile, proud, generous-to-a-fault temperament far more than to bad luck, even once he has become Casterbridge's wealthiest grain merchant and mayor.

Donald Farfrae, the young Scottish manager Henchard hires and then grows jealous of, embodies a newer, cooler, more rational style of business that steadily outcompetes Henchard's older, instinctive, sentiment-driven methods, and Hardy is careful to make the rivalry about temperament and economic modernization at once: Henchard's generosity and his rages come from the same unguarded impulsiveness, while Farfrae's calm, methodical competence, genuinely likeable rather than coldly calculating, simply belongs to a version of commerce that has less and less use for a man who runs his business and his relationships on the same volatile passion.

When Susan and their now-grown daughter Elizabeth-Jane return to Casterbridge years later, Henchard's attempt to reclaim a stable family life keeps colliding with his own inability to leave well enough alone, concealing truths, manipulating relationships, and repeatedly sabotaging exactly the security he claims to want; Hardy builds his tragedy less around any external antagonist than around a man whose worst enemy, in every scene, keeps turning out to be his own next impulsive decision.

The itinerant furmity-seller who witnessed Henchard sell his wife at the fair resurfaces decades later, now an old woman testifying in Henchard's own courtroom as mayor, and casually exposes his entire buried past in open session; Hardy uses the coincidence deliberately rather than apologetically, since the novel's whole argument is that character produces consequences that outlast any effort to outrun them, and a man's worst act eventually finds its way back to the exact civic position he built to bury it.