The Mayor of Casterbridge | Social Concerns
The Major of Casterbridge opens with a brilliant and ominous scene that sets forth many key social concerns of this novel of colliding cultures. At Wedon Fair, a rural, communal custom tracing back at least to feudal times in southwestern England, a stranger and his family come to mingle with other bucolic people. The fair is itself a vestige of a past culture, one the novel will show as on the verge of extinction. At the fair strangers are welcomed, and the tent, with its "furmity," a local brew that can be, and in this case is, enhanced by rum at the consumer's request, can...
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