The Mayor of Casterbridge
- Downloads
- Under 100
- First published
- 1886
- Pages
- 322
Listen to The Mayor of Casterbridge Audiobook Free
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Chapter 01
27:58 -
Chapter 02
9:31 -
Chapter 03
10:22 -
Chapter 04
15:54 -
Chapter 05
13:20 -
Chapter 06
10:02 -
Chapter 07
15:32 -
Chapter 08
15:13 -
Chapter 09
18:06 -
Chapter 10
8:55 -
Chapter 11
12:06 -
Chapter 12
11:31 -
Chapter 13
10:13 -
Chapter 14
19:37 -
Chapter 15
15:04 -
Chapter 16
14:12 -
Chapter 17
15:11 -
Chapter 18
10:13 -
Chapter 19
17:30 -
Chapter 20
21:09 -
Chapter 21
15:59 -
Chapter 22
22:16 -
Chapter 23
17:10 -
Chapter 24
18:03 -
Chapter 25
11:16 -
Chapter 26
22:23 -
Chapter 27
19:24 -
Chapter 28
9:41 -
Chapter 29
17:43 -
Chapter 30
10:49 -
Chapter 31
10:01 -
Chapter 32
16:35 -
Chapter 33
16:43 -
Chapter 34
18:17 -
Chapter 35
10:20 -
Chapter 36
20:21 -
Chapter 37
14:52 -
Chapter 38
14:59 -
Chapter 39
14:58 -
Chapter 40
12:28 -
Chapter 41
20:43 -
Chapter 42
16:14 -
Chapter 43
19:58 -
Chapter 44
21:28 -
Chapter 45
15:09
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is a public domain work.
The audio edition streams in the page. There is no audio file to download.
About this book
At a country fair, drunk and resentful, the young hay-trusser Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter to a passing sailor. He wakes ashamed, swears off drink, and over the next eighteen years remakes himself into the prosperous mayor of Casterbridge. Then the woman he wronged returns, and the buried past begins to pull his hard-won life apart. Thomas Hardy traces the slow ruin of a proud, impulsive man undone as much by his own temperament as by circumstance, set against the fading rural Wessex he made his own. First published in 1886, the novel stands among his finest studies of character and fate.
From the opening pages
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. 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.
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Book facts
- Author
- Thomas Hardy
- First published
- 1886
- Reading time
- About 8 hours
- Pages
- 322
- Language
- English
- Genre
- British Classics
- Formats
- PDF, EPUB, Read online, Audiobook
- Audio read by
- Debra Lynn