Complete and unabridged, with 55 full-page plates by Thomas Cole, John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. The stories where Wessex stops being pastoral: a widow whose clergyman son forbids her to marry the man she loves; two brothers who let their drunken father drown to save their careers; a string of tales told on a carrier's van. Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches; these 1894 tales are his coldest, and the irony of the title is not gentle — the ordinary arrangements of respectable life are the trap. Fifty-five plates, from Constable's East Bergholt lanes to George Clausen's field workers, carry the rural England Hardy's characters walk through and betray.