For the first time since its publication in 1874, this volume presents the text and illustrations of the first edition of Far from the Madding Crowd, a definitive work of nineteenth-century literature and the novel that made Thomas Hardy famous. It includes in footnotes all the revisions that Hardy made to the work, both in manuscript and serial, before 1874 and in numerous subsequent editions. A carefully-researched, accessibly-written introduction examines in detail the successive stages in Hardy's initial inscription and subsequent adjustments to the work from 1873 to the 1920s, and includes analysis of contemporary reviews, as well as a previously unpublished account of the relationship between the novel and George Eliot's Middlemarch. Appendices include discarded manuscript fragments, a discussion of the environments of the novel and consideration of the work of the compositors who first set the novel in type.