 The return of a wife after 18 years results in Michael <unk> 's downfall in Thomas Hardy 's novel Mayor of <unk> . A bad @-@ tempered , impulsive and cruel husband , feeling burdened by his wife , <unk> 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 " . 
