The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy, starts when a hard working but short tempered man drinks a bit too much, starts complaining about his marriage and then wakes up the next morning with a horrible hangover and the shocking memory of selling his wife to a passing sailor. Horrified by his own actions the man swears off all alcohol and after two decades of sobriety winds up becoming a wealthy business man and the mayor of the town of Casterbridge. But all that is thrown into chaos when his long lost wife shows up in town…
With that sort of set up you might imagine this to be a sort of moral thought experiment; a story questioning whether a life of dedicated hard work can ever make up for a single atrocious mistake.
It’s not.
The best way I can describe the book is as an old English soap opera. Hardly a page goes by without some sort of needlessly damaging secret or improbable but destructive coincidence raining drama and destruction down upon the cast. This was likely influenced by the fact that the book was originally released one chapter per week in local periodicals, making it important that something interesting always be happening.
That said it’s still an enthralling read about people whose strong passions lead them to consistently sabotage their own happiness. It’s not necessarily a thought provoking or inspiring book but it is undeniably a very human story.
Word Count: 119270 words
Average Word Size: 4.28 letters
Median Word Size: 4 letters
Longest Word: conscientiousness (17 letters)
Sentence Count: 6611 sentences
Average Sentence Length: 18.04 words
Median Sentence Length: 15 words
Longest Sentence: 115 words long
Other clocks struck eight from time to time—one gloomily from the gaol, another from the gable of an almshouse, with a preparative creak of machinery, more audible than the note of the bell; a row of tall, varnished case-clocks from the interior of a clock-maker’s shop joined in one after another just as the shutters were enclosing them, like a row of actors delivering their final speeches before the fall of the curtain; then chimes were heard stammering out the Sicilian Mariners’ Hymn; so that chronologists of the advanced school were appreciably on their way to the next hour before the whole business of the old one was satisfactorily wound up.
