Life's Little Ironies. A Set of Tales with Some Colloquial Sketches Entitled A Few Crusted Characters

The stories where Wessex stops being pastoral: a schoolmaster's wife who cannot forgive her son's face; a man who exchanges his child; a tranter's tale told on a carrier's van; the son who is ashamed of his mother at Oxford. Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches; these 1894 tales are his coldest, and the irony of the title is not gentle - the ordinary arrangements of respectable life are the trap.