Thomas Hardy

A first edition of Hardy’s rare first book, Desperate Remedies.

• Sold as a set of 3 volumes.
• Thomas Hardy (English).
• London: Tinsley Brothers, 1871.
• Octavo.
•  vi, 304; [vi], 291; vi, 274 pages.
• Part of an edition of 500 copies, with all half-titles.
• Bound in forest green half morocco backed marble boards with gilt ruling, gilt titles on five-banded spine, and top edge gilt, marble endpapers with handsome bookplate of heiress Gustavia Senff on upper pastedowns.

Hardy's first novel manuscript was turned down by George Meredith, reading for Chapman & Hall, who advised him to write something with a more "complicated" plot, than the first novel, which he'd entitled The Poor Man and the Lady. He decided to write a a mystery novel with tinges of the Gothic romance, but also heavy with allusions to Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley, and with entire youthful Hardy poems inserted into the text as prose. An ambitious first novel, it transcended the contemporary models that he had used for structure – Wilkie Collins, for instance – by showing his complicated characters as dominated by their own instincts and the limitations of their social worlds.