Plot Summary

A party of nineteen people is assembled in Higher Crowstairs, a shepherd's cottage near Casterbridge. A stranger joins them to seek shelter for the rough weather. A second stranger comes in, and sings a song that reveals he's a hangman. A third strangers enters briefly, but then flees.

They are interrupted by a gunshot, a signal that means a prisoner has escaped. The people leave the cottage to seek the third stranger and arrest him. They bring him to Casterbridge jail, but he turns out to be the wrong man. The first stranger was the actual convict, Timothy Summers, a man who stole sheep out of poverty. The third stranger was his brother. The conclusion is that there won't be a hanging in the morning.

Background

The story is a pastoral history told by an omniscient narrator more than fifty years after the event. The sheep-stealer is a kind of folk hero who stole to survive and escaped by outsmarting his hangman.

Casterbridge was the name for Dorchester in Thomas Hardy's Wessex

Thomas Hardy's Wessex

The English author Thomas Hardy set all of his major novels in the south and southwest of England. He named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the Norman Conquest. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist,...

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Publication

The Three Strangers was published in Longman's Magazine

Longman's Magazine

Longman's Magazine was first published in November 1882 by C. J. Longman, publisher of Longmans, Green & Co. of London. It superseded Fraser's Magazine...

and Harper's Weekly

Harper's Weekly

Harper's Weekly was an American political magazine based in New York City. Published by Harper & Brothers from 1857 until 1916, it featured foreign and domestic news, fiction, essays on many subjects, and humor...

in March 1883. Five years later it became the first of five stories in Hardy's Wessex Tales

Wessex Tales

Wessex Tales is an 1888 collection of tales written by Thomas Hardy, many of which are set before Hardy's birth in 1840.Through them, Thomas Hardy talks about nineteenth century marriage, grammar, class status, how men and women were viewed, medical diseases and more.-Contents:In 1888, Wessex Tales...

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