"There's not a soul in my house."
Helen Paterson Allingham
August 1874
Wood-engraving
12.3 cm high by 10.5 cm wide (4 ⅞ by 4 ¼ inches), framed, in Vol. XXX, Chapter XXXIV, page 233, in The Cornhill Magazine.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"There's not a soul in my house." in Chapters 34 ("Home Again: A Juggler") through 38 ("Rain: One Solitary Meets Another") in Vol. 30: pages 233 through 256 (25 pages in instalment); plates: initial "T" (5.8 cm wide by 7.5 cm high) signed "H. P." left of centre at bottom margin and "There's not a soul in my house." (facing page 233) horizontally-mounted, 10.5 cm wide by 16.1 cm high, signed "H. Paterson" in the lower-left corner. The wood-engraver responsible for this illustration was Joseph Swain (1820-1909). [Click on the image to enlarge it; mouse over links.]
Above: The initial-letter vignette and first full page of the eighth instalment of the story: B.
Commentary
Cainy Ball's mention of High Church and High Chapel at the end of the July instalment leave the reader concerned that Bathsheba's infatuation with Troy will lead her to marry him in the August instalment, an apprehension increased by the sexual implication of the pose and caption of the August "dark plate": "There's not a soul in my house but me to-night." (facing page 233).
In the seventh plate, Boldwood's threat left her nowhere to turn, appealing to the viewer for sympathy; now she is turned away from the viewer, finding comfort in the tall, solid, tower-like figure of Troy in uniform. However, in attempting to have the reader see Troy as Bathsheba sees him, Helen Allingham fails to reveal character traits which Hardy feels are significant, namely Troy's insensitivity and deviousness, evident in this episode when Troy deceives Boldwood about his intention to marry Bathsheba and about his not having married Fanny Robin. In Helen Allingham's rendition of Sergeant Frank Troy there is little of what Hardy specifically identifies in Troy here or elsewhere; we see neither his "devil-may-care" manner nor his being a mean-spirited "trickster" (p. 235) who relishes Boldwood's anguish (mixed in the plate with grim-faced anger at being duped). Based on textual detail, the plate reveals the "old tree trunk under the hedge immediately opposite" on which Troy proposes that he and Boldwood sit, but implies in Troy's stalwart figure neither the malicious joy evidenced in his interview with Boldwood, nor the obstructive pride that impedes Gabriel from saving the ricks on the night of the harvest supper later on in the instalment. Thus, the reader must mediate between the letter-press and the illustrations to form an accurate assessment of Hardy's villain.
Equally misleading in the text and in the caption of the plate, however, is the wanton sexuality of Bathsheba implicit in her remarking to Troy that she has dismissed all her household servants for the night "so nobody on earth will know of your visit to your lady's bower" (p. 237). Hardy's text and the accompanying illustration promise the reader the titillation of premarital sex — indeed, the plate thus captioned underscores this possibility in true Sensation Novel style; Hardy, pushing the limits of what sexual activity a family magazine would permit, then frustrates that expectation when Troy, now safely inside Bathsheba's house, reveals to the reader and Boldwood that, since they are already married, there is nothing improper in their spending the night together alone.
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.
Hardie, Martin. Water-colour Painting in Britain, Vol. 3: The Victorian Period, ed. Dudley Snelgrove, Jonathan Mayne, and Basil Taylor. London: B. T. Batsford, 1968.
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.
Holme, Brian. The Kate Greenaway Book. Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1976.
Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.
Turner, Paul. The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, 2001.
Created 12 December 2001 Last modified 26 October 2022