I WAS intrigued by your piece about the man who sold his wife but surprised there was no reference to the remarkable similarity between this story and the plot of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge.

So I checked on Wikipedia which gives the publication of the novel as 1886 i.e. after the sale in 1839 but before Camidge’s report in 1893.

Did Hardy hear of the story before Camidge and base his novel on it, or was Camidge’s write-up coloured by having read Hardy?

Probably this is one of those “chicken-or-egg” questions to which we will never find a full answer, but it might make a interesting subject for a thesis for a student of English literature.

FB Granger, Via Veneziano, Milan, Italy.