The fictional town in Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is Casterbridge. The town is Hardy's imaginative version of Dorchester, the Dorset town where he spent much of his youth.
The novel, published in 1886, follows Michael Henchard, a hay trusser who becomes mayor of Casterbridge after rising from poverty. His impulsive decision to sell his wife at a fair years earlier returns to haunt him, driving the novel's themes of fate, guilt, reputation, and personal change.
Casterbridge belongs to Hardy's fictional Wessex, a recurring landscape that blends real places in southern England with invented names and histories. Hardy often used this approach to create a setting that felt geographically recognizable without being a literal map of Dorset.
Readers sometimes confuse Casterbridge with Weatherbury, another Hardy setting featured in Far from the Madding Crowd. Budmouth and Melchester are also fictional or adapted locations in Hardy's wider Wessex world, but Casterbridge is the town at the centre of this novel.