th-Jane is young, she has a sense of playfulness and good times. But as she grows older and her sorrow increases. Elizabeth-Jane turns more to study and reflection. Towards the end of the novel, Elizabeth-Jane is a full grown woman who has her life established and knows where she stands in social status. She is melancholy and kind. A matronly woman whose speech seems highly studied and affected. Hardy does an excellent job of taking the little things society tends to overlook and accenting them to show how realistic each individual is in the town of Casterbridge. The townspeople, the buildings, and the speech of every individual throughout the novel of The Mayor of Casterbridge go to great lengths to influence the setting of Casterbridge being a realistic part of Western England based on the universal beliefs and themes of all of society as we know it. With the impression readers are given through Hardy's drawn-out pictures of detail, some readers may even be led to believe Casterbridge may have been a real town at one time. Although according to Hardy, it was only based on studying the detail of civilization itself. ...
