The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character is novel by the English author Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy's Wessex novels, it is set in a fictional rural England with Casterbridge standing in for Dorchester in Dorset where the author spent his youth. The novel is considered to be one of Hardy's masterpieces, although it has been criticised for incorporating too many incidents: a consequence of the author trying to include something...