Desperate Remedies

Census claim CONFIRMED: Tinsley Brothers, London, 1871 is the true first — Hardy's first published book and first novel, and among the rarest of Victorian three-deckers, especially in original cloth. No competing British or American issue of 1871 exists. The first American edition is Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1874, in the Leisure Hour Series, three years later; the census's Holt 1874 date is correct and no precedence question arises. Only the Tinsley three-volume set is the collected first.