The grand situational irony of the beginning of the novel is that Michael Henchard, rather than being punished for drunkenly "selling" his wife and daughter for five guineas, has become a sober, successful, and seemingly happy man by the third chapter. This is framed in Chapter 4 as a surprise for his wife, who returns with her daughter to find him, and the reader feels the unfairness of the situation for Susan keenly:
Time, the magician, had wrought much here. Watching him, and thus thinking of past days, she became so moved that she shrank back against the jamb of the wagon-office doorway to which the steps gave access, the shadow from it conveniently hiding her features. She forgot her daughter till a touch from Elizabeth-Jane aroused her. “Have you seen him, mother?” whispered the girl. “Yes, yes,” answered her companion hastily. “I have seen him, and it is enough for me! Now I only want to go—pass away—die.”
Readers might have expected Henchard to be living in squalor and failure as a result of his addiction and the horrible act of selling his wife and daughter. When Susan discovers him to be not only thriving but sober, the ironic injustice is almost too painful for her to bear. She shrinks from it, telling her daughter it makes her want to "go—pass away—die.” Susan encounters her "former" husband in a very similar situation to when she left him, but Casterbridge and Henchard himself have both apparently been changed by "Time, the magician."
This initial ironic situation sets up the overarching irony of the rest of the book—that Henchard has become a success despite his crimes and manipulations—which is only resolved by the novel's final "punishment" of his lonely death.
