 The return of a wife after 18 years results in Michael Henchard's downfall in Thomas Hardy's novel Mayor of Casterbridge. A bad-tempered, impulsive and cruel husband, feeling burdened by his wife, Henchard sells her to a stranger for five guineas. He becomes a successful businessman and rises to the position of mayor, but the return of his wife many years later prompts his fall back into penury. The custom was also referred to in the 19th-century French play, Le Marché de Londres. Commenting on the drama and contemporary French attitudes on the custom, in 1846 the writer Angus B. Reach complained: "They reckon up a long and visionary list of our failings [... They] would as readily give up their belief in the geographical and physical existence of London, as in the astounding fact that in England a husband sells his wife exactly as he sells his horse or his dog." Such complaints were still commonplace nearly 20 years later; in The Book of Days (1864), author Robert Chambers wrote about a case of wife selling in 1832, and noted that "the occasional instances of wife-sale, while remarked by ourselves with little beyond a passing smile, have made a deep impression on our continental neighbours, [who] constantly cite it as an evidence of our low civilisation." Embarrassed by the practice, a legal handbook of 1853 enabled English judges to dismiss wife selling as a myth: "It is a vulgar error that a husband can get rid of his wife by selling her in the open market with a halter round her neck. Such an act on his part would be severely punished by the local magistrate." Originally published in 1869, Burn's Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer states that "publicly selling or buying a wife is clearly an indictable offence ... And many prosecutions against husbands for selling, and others for buying, have recently been sustained, and imprisonment for six months inflicted".
