Complete and unabridged, with 98 full-page plates by Jurriaen Andriessen, Francisco Goya and Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. A drunk sells his wife at a country fair, sobers up, swears off drink for twenty-one years and becomes mayor of the town - and then the man who bought her comes back. Hardy took the wife-sale from newspaper reports, where it happened often enough to be a recognized custom, and built the most relentless of his plots on it. Ninety-eight plates of Gainsborough and Bakhuizen, from shipwrecks and coastal quays to country portraits, give the novel's sea of troubles a fitting face.