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The Mayor of Casterbridge.
The Mayor of Casterbridge was written in 1884 and 1885, serialized in the Graphic from 2 January to 15 May 1886, and then published by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1886. It was the tenth of Hardy's novels to be published, but the first to be set in the county town of Dorchester, which he renamed "Casterbridge." The novel was written while Hardy was designing and then settling into Max Gate, the home he designed just outside Dorchester and only a few miles from his birthplace at Higher Bockhampton. .
Hardy made several revisions to the novel, the first for an 1887 second edition published by Sampson Low, and a more extensive revision for the 1895 Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. uniform edition (of which The Mayor became the Volume 3). As he did for most of the novels, Hardy made a final revision for Macmillan's 1912 Wessex Edition of the novels. .
The Mayor of Casterbridge and Classical Tragedy.
Leah Smith Class of 1997 .
Melissa Balint Class of 1997 .
Franklin & Marshall College.
Tragedy as an art form was invented in ancient Greek dramas. The philosopher Aristotle discussed the art form in his Poetics. This work, written down from his students' notes, was an attempt to describe what makes a tragedy. However, this ancient Greek description was interpreted in different ways in different eras. Thomas Hardy used a Victorian interpretation of Aristotle in writing The Mayor of Casterbridge. A Victorian interpretation includes the idea that Aristotle's description of tragedy is actually a definition of tragedy. The idea was that a tragedy must have a certain form, and contain certain elements, to be a proper tragedy. These elements were also understood within the context of the ideas of the nineteenth century, and it is those understandings which can be seen in The Mayor of Casterbridge. .
For instance, Aristotle noted that ancient Greek tragedies are always the personal tragedies of a particular person, the protagonist, and that person is of the upper class, someone of social nobility.
