The Folio Society, London, 1989.
 
The book is in excellent condition, with some minor shelfwear to the slipcase with the covers bound in Regency rayon cloth blocked with decorative motif of corn dolly drawn by the artist. Introduction by Angela Thirlwell and wood engravings by Peter Reddick.
 
Under the Greenwood Tree or The Mellstock Quire: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School was published anonymously in 1872. It was Hardy's second published novel, and the first of what was to become his series of Wessex novels. Critics recognise it as an important precursor to his later tragic works, setting the scene for the Wessex that the author would return to again and again.
 
Hardy himself called the story of the Mellstock Quire and its west-gallery musicians "a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of [the 1850s]."