Initial letter "D" (Frank Troy's attempting to beautify Fanny's grave by lamplight) (page 1) vertically-mounted "B" (6 cm wide by 7.5 cm high), signed "H. P." in lower-left corner. Helen Patterson Allingham, eleventh thumbnail vignette illustration for Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd in The Cornhill Magazine (November 1874), Chapters 43 ("Fanny's Revenge.") through 47 ("Adventure by the Shore") in Vol. 30: pages 490 through 512 (24 pages in instalment). The wood-engraver responsible for this illustration was Joseph Swain (1820-1909). [Click on the image to enlarge it; mouse over links.]
Right: The title-page for Volume 30 of The Cornhill Magazine (1874).
The eleventh initial-letter vignette, on page 490, ge clockwise to read the full-scale plate's caption "Her Tears Fell Fast Beside the Unconscious Pair," that Troy will weep at Fanny's coffin in his wife's presence and that he will dig at Fanny's grave are clearly telegraphed, and that there will be an irreparable rupture in his relationship with Bathsheba is strongly implied.
The initial-letter vignette seems to imply Bathsheba's response to Frank's death as it depicts the pensive heroine in a private room of the Three Choughs Inn, where she awakens after her swoon, whereupon her preserver, Boldwood, leaves the room (top of page 619). The juxtaposition of the eleventh plate and its vignette suggests that, Bathsheba, her former impetuosity subsumed by her recent domestic anguish into a "Patient Griselda" pose, is contemplating (and perhaps even attempting to visualise) the circumstances of her husband's reported drowning. The accompanying text on the first page of the November instalment transports us back to the point before she learns of Troy's accidental death in "Carrow" (in later versions, "Lulwind") Cove. In the vignette, she is sitting at a window which overlooks a cityscape (that of Casterbridge) rather than the Weatherbury landscape. The position of her hands implies resignation, but there is nevertheless an expectant expression on her face. When Bathsheba refuses to credit the news of her husband's death, the reader wonders whether she is actuated by a superior intuition or by the all too human tendency to deny the personal catastrophe. Perhaps the absence of an actual body is responsible for her being "full of a feeling that [Troy] is still alive" (p. 620).
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Volume One: 1840-1892; Volume Three: 1903-1908, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978, 1982.
Hardy, Thomas. Far From the Madding Crowd. With illustrations by Helen Paterson Allingham. The Cornhill Magazine. Vols. XXIX and XXX. Ed. Leslie Stephen. London: Smith, Elder, January through December, 1874. Published in volume on 23 November 1874.
Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.
Created 27 October 2022