Thomas Tough (June 2, 1840-January 11, 1928) was born in England. He was a British author and poet. He was the son of a country carpenter and builder. He practiced architecture before starting with poetry and books. Several of his books, starting with his second, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), are set in the imaginary county of Wessex. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his first famous work was followed by The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Hardy's works were progressively at odds with Victorian morality, and public anger at Jude so disgusted him that he wrote no more books. He got back to poetry with Wessex poems (1898), Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), and The Dynasts (1910), a large poetic drama of the Napoleonic Wars.

The first full scholarly edition of Desperate Remedies (1871), Thomas Hardy's first published novel.

List of illustrations; General editor's preface; Acknowledgements; Chronology; Abbreviations; Introduction; Desperate Remedies; Editorial emendations; List of variants - accidentals; End-of-line word division; Appendix A. Hardy's prefatory notes; Appendix B. Frontispieces; Appendix C. Description of principal texts; Explanatory notes.