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THOMAS HARDY'S “THE MOCK WIFE,” MAUMBURY, AND THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2016

Brian Donnelly
Brian Donnelly*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

In a 1908 review article for the Times of London, Thomas Hardy commented on the previous months of excavation of the Neolithic earthwork amphitheater in Dorchester, known as the Maumbury Ring(s). Hardy had returned to Dorchester from London in 1883, and the town is most famously fictionalized in the 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. Hardy's description identifies the defining moment in the Ring's history as the execution there in 1706 of the nineteen year-old Mary Channing for allegedly having poisoned her husband. Quoting extensively from a contemporary report of Channing's trial and execution, Hardy asserts that he could find little in the statements of the case to support Channing's execution. His opinion is rather that this was a high spirited young woman forced by her parents to marry a man she did not love, whose weak indulgence of his new wife merely served to contribute to the sense of her being a woman of “careless character” that would see her wrongly condemned.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 97 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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