Mayor of Casterbridge : An Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Contexts Criticism

The text of this edition is based on the Wessex Edition of 1912, which was revised and corrected by the author.

It has been collated with the Mellstock Edition of 1920, for which Hardy submitted final corrections.

"Backgrounds and Contexts" provides new and invaluable source material on Victorian Dorset and, in particular, Dorchester, Hardy’s native home and the town upon which Casterbridge is based.  Included are six of Hardy’s nonfiction writings, notably excerpts from his essay "The Dorsetshire Laboure" (1883), in which he frankly comments on the social changes he has witnessed in the county.  Hardy’s Wessex is further examined in an essay by Michael Millgate, by maps of Casterbridge and Wessex, and by a key to local place names.  Christine Winfield discusses the novel’s manuscript and its complicated history.

"Criticism" collects seventeen wide-ranging assessments of the novel--six new to the Second Edition--from both contemporary and modern critics, including Virginia Woolf, Albert J. Guerard, Julian Moynahan, John Paterson, Michael Millgate, Irving Howe, J. Hillis Miller, Ian Gregor, Elaine Showalter, George Levine, William Greenslade, H. M. Daleski, and Suzanne Keen.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), enduring author of the twentieth century, wrote the classics Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and many other works.

Phillip Mallett is honorary senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, a vice president of the Thomas Hardy Society, and an honorary fellow of both the Centro Universitario di Studi Vittoriani e Edoardiani and the French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies. He was the editor of the Thomas Hardy Journal from 2008 to 2018. His published work includes?Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life; eight edited collections of essays, including?Thomas Hardy in Context?and?The Victorian Novel and Masculinity; Norton Critical Editions of?The Return of the Native and?The Mayor of Casterbridge; and?editions of Under the Greenwood Tree and Flora Thompson’s?Lark Rise to Candleford?for Oxford World’s Classics.