by Thomas Hardy(1886)
“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.”
Thomas Hardy(1886)
A young hay-trusser gets drunk at a fair and sells his wife and daughter to a passing sailor, and the rest of his life is the long consequence of that act. Thomas Hardy published this novel in 1886, and it has the shape of Greek tragedy compressed into English rural life, its hero rising to power in Casterbridge only to fall with a completeness that feels both inevitable and unjust. Michael Henchard is proud, impulsive, and strangely honourable, a man who punishes himself more severely than fate ever could. Hardy set the story against modern agriculture, the new efficiency that renders old strengths obsolete. The final testament, in which Henchard asks that no man remember him, is one of fiction's most shattering acts of self-erasure.
Shakespeare wrote the original story of a powerful man who destroys himself, and Henchard's downfall has the same terrible momentum.
Hardy returns to the same Wessex with the same pitiless gaze, but turns it on a woman instead of a man.
Dickens builds the same architecture of a past that returns to destroy the present, but gives his hero a second chance Hardy refuses.