He becomes Henchard’s friend and later is hired by him. Also arriving in the town is a Scottish man, Donald Farfrae, who works in agricultural science. Susan, adamant that her marriage to Newson is still valid, questions the legitimacy of her marriage to Henchard, but is willing to pretend that it is valid as well. Henchard learns that her owner, Newson, became lost at sea, forcing Susan to search for him to regain a livelihood.
Henchard commits to send for Lucetta and ask for her hand in marriage, but Susan suddenly reappears with their daughter, Elizabeth-Jane. Lucetta, aware that she should marry Henchard to get back into polite society, is concerned that people will look down on them for negating his existing marriage. He goes back to Casterbridge, leaving Lucetta behind, for the time being, anxious about his past marriage and the fact that he is already technically married. Though Lucetta is wary, she is too infatuated to reject him.
He falls in love with her, but still never reveals the circumstances of his past marriage, deciding, instead, to claim that Susan had run away and is probably dead. One day, feeling sick on a business trip to Jersey, Henchard meets Lucetta Le Sueur who gives him medical aid. Despite this reputation, he has never revealed the event of losing his wife and child people conclude that he must be a widower. Henchard, now a successful merchant of grain, as well as the Mayor of Casterbridge, is well known for his adamance about the virtues of sobriety. The novel shifts to eighteen years after the tragic sale. He vows to not drink again for the next twenty-one years. Regaining his sobriety the next day, he can no longer retract the sale because they have all departed. The buyer is Richard Newson, a sailor passing through town. Drunk on rum, twenty-one-year-old Michael Henchard, feuding with his wife, Susan, impulsively auctions her and their baby daughter off for five guineas. The novel begins at a country fair in Wessex, a fictional English county. The novel is known for its rich characterization of the pursuit of social and economic mobility in the mid-nineteenth century and its portrait of how personal vices can damage one’s fate. Taking place in a fictional rural England sometime in the 1840s, the story follows the exploits of a young hay trucker Michael Henchard as he traverses English social life and struggles to improve his standing. The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character (1886) is a novel by Thomas Hardy, an English novelist and poet.
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