After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Every unexpected disaster and sudden reversal in The Mayor of Casterbridge stems from its opening, in a plot which draws as much from realist fiction as Shakespearean tragedy and the sensation novel.

Mary Wellesley and Mark Ford join Clare Bucknell to unpick the many strands in Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novel. They explore how the novel – at once ‘algorithmic’, theatrical and fatalistic – is suffused with Hardy’s class anxieties, affinity with Dorset and fascination with pagan England.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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Further reading and listening from the LRB:

Mary and Mark discuss Hardy’s medievalism on the LRB Podcast:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind⁠

Mark discusses Poems of 1912-13 with Seamus Perry in Love and Death:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/love-and-death-poems-of-1912-13-by-thomas-hardy⁠

 James Wood on Hardy’s life:⁠

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/james-wood/anxious-pleasures⁠

Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts⁠

Next episode: New Grub Street by George Gissing.