Thomas Hardy and The Mayor of Casterbridge

There are perhaps not many survivors today who are lusty enough to have outlasted the cataclysms and other upheavals of the present century as to be able to conjure up the solemn scene and doleful sight when Thomas Hardy (1840—1928) was accorded the highest honour to an English man of letters at his death in 1928—the burial of his ashes in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey and the obituary announcing not only in the British press but in the newspapers around the world that English literature had been deprived of its most eminent figure. Now that two generations have just passed,