"Looking down from the Cliff" by Mary Ellen Edwards, fifth full-page illustration for Charles Lever’s "The Bramleighs of Bishop’s Folly" (October 1867)

Looking down from the Cliff

Mary Ellen Edwards

1867

Wood engraving by Joseph Swain

15.7 cm high by 10.3 cm wide (6 ⅛ by 4 inches)

Main illustration for the fifth (October) 1867 serial number of Charles Lever’sThe Bramleighs of Bishop’s Folly in the Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 16, facing p. 387.

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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage Anticipated: Romantic Melodrama set against Irish coastal scenery

The tone of irritation he spoke in seemed to show that he was actually seeking for something to vent his anger upon, and trying to provoke some word of contradiction or dissent; but she was silent, and for some seconds they walked on without speaking.

“Look!” cried he, suddenly; “there goes Julia. Do you see her yonder on the path up the cliff; and who is that clambering after her? I'll be shot if it's not Lord Culduff.”

“Julia has got her drawing-book, I see. They're on some sketching excursion.”Culduff

“He wasn't long in throwing off his Greek fever, eh?” cried Jack, indignantly. “It's cool, isn't it, to tell the people in whose house he is stopping that he is too ill to dine with them, and then set out gallivanting in this fashion?”

“Poor old man!” said she, in a tone of half-scornful pity.

“Was I right about Julia now?” cried he, angrily. “I told you for whose captivation all her little gracefulnesses were intended. I saw it the first night he stood beside her at the piano. As Marion said, she is determined to bring him down. She saw it as well as I did.”

“What nonsense you are talking, Jack; as if Julia would condescend —”

“There's no condescension, Nelly,” he broke in. “The man is a Lord, and the woman he marries will be a peeress; and there's not another country in Europe in which that word means as much. I take it, we need n't go on to the cottage now?”

“I suppose we could scarcely overtake them?” [Chapter XVII, "At Castello," pp. 389-390]

Commentary: Jack makes a a startling discovery on the way to the L'Estranges' cottage

Although Lever presents Jack's confession about his quarrel with his fiancee, Julia L'Estrange, in the context of a picturesque seascape, Edwards expresses little interest in the natural backdrop. Her focus is upon the sympathetic sister and the brother who takes her into his confidence. Having just been promoted to the command of the gunboat H. M. Sneezer in the Mediterranean (rather than, as he had feared, an inferior post at the African station), he contemplates proposing marriage to Julia, the curate's sister, for in two years he will receive the rank of Captain. In consequence, in this fifth full-page plate Edwards focuses upon the figures rather than the picturesque coastal setting of cliffs, beach, and surf. Her treatment of the characteristic Lever scene played out in a natural setting avoids entirely both the detailing of the figures and elements of the backdrop that would, for example, have so fully engaged Lever's earlier illustrator and steel-engraver Hablot Knight Browne or 'Phiz.' Hers, then, is very much a Sixties' reaction to the earlier, caricatural style one sees in Lever's previous Irish novels, even so late a picaresque novel as Barrington (1863), in which the highly popular and prolific Dickens illustrator seems much more responsive to the Anglo-Irish author's descriptions of such natural settings, as we see in the backdrop in The Fisherman's Home, for example. Landscapes often intrude upon and occasionally even dominate the compositions of this earlier Lever illustrator, as in Maurice Scanlan, Attorney-at-Law (January 1855) in The Martin's of Cro' Martin, or, in the same novel full of characteristic Irish settings, One who never opened a cabin door without a blessing nor closed it, but to shut hope within (June 1856), or A meeting under the Greenwood tree (September 1848) in Roland Cashel. In contrast, Edwards gives us the figures and often nothing more, but what she embeds here is highly significant: Jack points out to Nelly two figures walking below them. At the end of the chapter, when we arrive at the scene, we discover that the pair below are Julia L'Estrange and Lord Culduff. Thus, Edwards has chosen to realise the very climax of the chapter rather than a less charged, introductory moment.

Geographical and Socio-political Associations: Victorian Ireland

Bibliography

Lever, Charles. The Bramleighs of Bishop’s Folly. The Cornhill Magazine 15 (June, 1867): pp. 640-664, and (July-December 1867): 1-666. Rpt. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872. Illustrated by M. E. Edwards; engraved by Joseph Swain.

Stevenson, Lionel. "Chapter XVI: Exile on the Adriatic, 1867-1872." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. Pp. 277-296.

Created 27 August 2023