Complete and unabridged, with 57 full-page plates by Jean-François Millet, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny. A carrier's cart on a Sussex road, a marriage between people out of two different Englands, and a wife who declines to be simplified by either of them. Ollivant had broken his back falling from a horse and wrote his first book flat on it over several years; the country here is the Downs he could see from the window. The epigraph promises more suffering to come, and it is not a joke. Fifty-seven plates of farm carts, sheepfolds and shepherds by painters such as Constable and Daubigny, 1792 to 1885, keep the downland and its labour in view throughout.
