Chapters 10-18 (No spoilers, please)

[ConnieAnnKirk]

Again, for readers who like to discuss as they read, please do not discuss areas of the plot after the end of Chapter 18.  Thank you!

[Everyman]

ELee gave us some excellent information showing that the wife-swapping incident Hardy used to introduce the story was not an invention, but a historic reality.

Then I read in chapter 11 about the coliseum that "that for scores of years the town-gallows had stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators." I'm wondering whether these events, too, were historically based.

[Everyman]

The incident with the pennies used to close Susan Henchard's eyes was both amusing and, I found, interesting. It presented a legitimate moral dilemma in the lives of the very poor.

Should respect for the wishes of the dead prevent the use of money for the relief of misery of the poor? It wasn't desecrating her grave; the pennies were buried not with her but separately in the garden once they had performed their function of closing her eyes. Henchard had no interest in them. Should they have just been left there to be found, perhaps, by some gardener a hundred years or more later who was perhaps turning over the ground to plant a new tree? Or was it right to make use of them by those who had so little that four pennies were a meaningful addition to their happiness?

[emmajane]

Yeah a sort of four pennies or eternal damnation type of situation.

But on a different note, I just read Jude the Obscure and have decided that Hardy likes to use 4 characters and develop their relationships. I like this though. It allows the reader to really understand the relationships that develop.