ABSTRACT
in the last paragraph of The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy tells the reader that his self-effacing heroine Elizabeth-Jane never ceased to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen. Hardy too never ceased to wonder at the large proportion of a man's life which is determined by pure chance, and he transfers this thought to a great many of the characters in his novels. It is mere chance that makes Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native become the manager of a diamond-shop in Paris. Hardy saw nothing unusual in this dispensation. 'That waggery of fate,' he wrote, 'which started Clive as a writing clerk, Gay as a linen-draper, Keats as a surgeon, and a thousand others in a thousand other odd ways, banished the wild and ascetic heath-lad [Clym] to a trade' which sent him first to Budmouth (Hardy's fictional name for Weymouth). 'Yeobright did not wish to go there, but it was the only feasible opening. Thence he went to London; and thence, shortly after, to Paris.' There is not a little autobiography written into this account of how Clym Yeobright became a diamond merchant.
