Complete and unabridged, with 55 full-page plates by Richard Wilson, Joseph Wright of Derby and William Hogarth. Ten portraits of Wessex ladies of the old families, told by antiquaries at a club meeting: a woman who marries her groom, one who buys a husband, one who prefers the man's letters to the man. Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches; he took these from parish registers and county histories, and the magazine editors cut them heavily — the ladies do things that were not supposed to be printed. Fifty-five landscape plates by painters including Paul Sandby and George Morland, from harbours and castles to harvest fields, extend the antiquarian Wessex of the tales into the wider British scene.