Initial letter "T" (Gabriel Oak, staring out into the night) (5.8 cm wide by 7.5 cm high) signed "H. P." in lower-left corner) signed "H. P" in lower-right corner (page 533) vertically-mounted. Helen Patterson Allingham, eighth thumbnail vignette illustration for Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd in The Cornhill Magazine (August 1874), 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" and "There's not a soul in my house". The wood-engraver was Joseph Swain (1820-1909). [Click on the image to enlarge it; mouse over links.]
Commentary
In the vignette opposite the main illustration, a pensive Gabriel Oak looks the other way (anticipating as well his status as detached observer at the harvest supper in Ch. 36), while in the horizontally-mounted plate a broad-shouldered Troy takes Bathsheba (clad in the same costume as that worn in plate 7 for the sake of narrative-pictorial continuity) in his arms as Boldwood (presumably unseen though present in the text) looks on, aghast, his vicious leer foreshadowing, according to Arlene Jackson, his gradual descent into madness.
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
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 26 October 2022