The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy

You wouldn’t want to live in Hardy’s Wessex. In the first chapter of this corker, a drunken farmer sells his wife and daughter to a sailor. In remorse, he gives up the booze and becomes a respectable citizen, but obviously his past comes back to haunt him.

The fast-paced plot is absurd, frankly, driven by a succession of outrageous coincidences and more convenient eavesdropping than a Shakespeare comedy, but the overall fatalistic vision is irresistable.

Incidentally, there is one conversation about lower class, rustic language in which two of the examples given are dumbledore and hagrid. Hmm.

Contains the word elsewhither.