Initial letter "T" (the aged Malster's eating breakfast) 7.5 cm high by 6.2 cm wide (3 by 2 ½inches) signed "H. P" in lower-right corner (page 385) vertically-mounted, complementing the main plate's being signed "H. Paterson" in the lower-right corner. Helen Patterson Allingham, fourth thumbnail initial-letter vignette for the serialisation of Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd in The Cornhill Magazine (April 1874), Chapters 15 ("A Morning Meeting: The Letter Again.") through 20 ("Perplexity: Grinding the Shears: A Quarrel.") in Vol. 29: pages 385 through 408 (24.25 pages in instalment). Plates: initial "T" and "I feel — almost — too much.". The wood-engraver was Joseph Swain (1820-1909). [Click on the image to enlarge it; mouse over links.]
Passage Illustrated
The initial vignette is based on the second paragraph in Chapter 15, on the same page as the small illustration: "The maltster, after having lain down in his clothes for a few hours, was now sitting beside a three-legged table, breakfasting off bread and bacon. This was eaten on the plateless system . . ." (385).
Commentary: A Symbolic Elderly Character — Col Tempo
Right: The title-page for Volume 29 of the Cornhill (1874).
The vignette realises the Old Maltster's "plateless" (385) breakfast, situated in the letter-press on the opening page of the April instalment. At one level, the little picture vivifies the simple joys of simple folk who, unlike their betters pictured opposite, are afflicted by neither social conventions nor powerful, self-destructive intellects and finely-tuned emotional states. The old man's "lack of teeth" is a metonymy for the feebleness of advanced age, and his diminutive, three-legged table the alienation of one who has outlived the rest of his generation. What he is Boldwood has surely faced the prospect of becoming, so that Boldwood's infatuation with Bathsheba is revealed as a last grasp at youth and romance, and a final denial of growing infirmity and, ultimately, of mortality.
The bald-patted, shaggy-bearded Maltster is a Tithonus figure: "he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a line — sheering off as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all" (386). We are reminded in the dialogue of the Maltster's customers of the responsibility that employers such as Bathsheba and Boldwood have towards the peasantry. Should she — or he — fail in personal and business life, as Mark Clark observes, "All will be ruined and ourselves too" (386). Gabriel seems so much at home in the society of the malthouse that his ever entering the society of the great house, exemplified by the fashionably dressed upper-middle-class figures in the accompanying plate, seems the remotest of possibilities at this point in the narrative.
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.
Created 7 November 2022