Casterbridge is a town that serves as the intended destination of Alec d’Urberville’s announced preaching engagement. Its role in the narrative is brief but consequential: Alec says he set out for the fair there, yet instead comes to see Tess at Emminster and ultimately breaks his commitment to preach.

Setting and Narrative Context

Casterbridge appears in two connected moments. During Tess’s journey to the Emminster Vicarage, she crosses the high-road from Sherton-Abbas to Casterbridge while travelling westward through the countryside. The town is part of the landscape along her route, though her destination is the Vicarage, where she hopes to enlist her mother-in-law’s support and recover her absent husband, Angel Clare.

The Fair and Alec’s Engagement

Casterbridge is also the site of a fair at which Alec has undertaken to preach the Gospel from a waggon at half-past two. He shows Tess a printed announcement identifying the day, hour, and place, and says that the people expecting him are waiting while he has come all the way to see her instead. The public notice makes his competing obligation concrete: Casterbridge is not merely a place he mentions, but the destination he has left behind in order to pursue a private encounter.

Narrative Significance

When Tess urges Alec to leave her and protect Angel’s reputation, Alec says he will go, acknowledging that abandoning the fair is the first such practical joke he has played. He had recently regarded the possibility with horror, but his professed religious purpose gives way to his renewed pursuit of Tess. Casterbridge therefore marks the point of contrast between the preaching role Alec has publicly assumed and the conduct he chooses in private; his departure from the engagement accompanies, rather than ends, his attempt to regain access to Tess.