Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Note on Two Songs

Abstract

More than in any other Thomas Hardy novel major or minor, music is a key driver of plot and mirror of character in The Mayor of Casterbridge.1 When we first see Michael Henchard on page 2 of the first chapter, walking along the road toward Weydon-Priors with the wife and child he will shortly sell, he is ‘reading, or pretending to read, a ballad-sheet’. Seven chapters and nearly two decades later, Donald Farfrae, passing through Casterbridge on his way to America, stops for the night at the King of Prussia inn and, while there, entertains some local townsfolk—and captivates Elizabeth-Jane Newson—by singing the first verse of the Scottish ballad beginning ‘It’s hame and it’s hame, hame fain would I be’ (he declines to sing the second, whose lyrics are more stridently Jacobitical); ‘Oh Nannie’, whose speaker asks his beloved if she would be content to give up the pleasures of her high city for the vicissitudes of his low country life; and ‘another or two of the like sentiment, winding up at their earnest request with “Auld Lang Syne.”’ Says the narrator: ‘Elizabeth-Jane was fond of music; she could not help pausing to listen; and the longer she listened, the more she was enraptured’.2