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"My taste was sufficiently educated to enable me to appreciate the value of the drawings while I turned them over."
John McLenan
3 December 1859
4 ⅝ by 4 ½ inches (11.9 cm by 11.7 cm), vignetted.
Second full-size for Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel (1861), p. 19.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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"My taste was sufficiently educated to enable me to appreciate the value of the drawings while I turned them over." — John McLenan's second regular composite woodblock engraving for Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel, Instalment 2, published on 3 December 1859 in Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vol. III. Part One: "The Story Begun by Walter Hartright, of Clement's Inn, Teacher of Drawing," Chapter VI, page 777 [p. 19 in the 1861 volume]. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Although my nerves were not delicate enough to detect the odour of plebeian fingers which had offended Mr. Fairlie’s nostrils, my taste was sufficiently educated to enable me to appreciate the value of the drawings, while I turned them over. They were, for the most part, really fine specimens of English water-colour art; and they had deserved much better treatment at the hands of their former possessor than they appeared to have received.
“The drawings,” I answered, “require careful straining and mounting; and, in my opinion, they are well worth ——”
“I beg your pardon,” interposed Mr. Fairlie. “Do you mind my closing my eyes while you speak? Even this light is too much for them. Yes?”
“I was about to say that the drawings are well worth all the time and trouble ——”
Mr. Fairlie suddenly opened his eyes again, and rolled them with an expression of helpless alarm in the direction of the window. [Part One: "The Story Begun by Walter Hartright, of Clement's Inn, Teacher of Drawing," Chapter VI, pp. 19-20 in the 1861 volume.]
Mr. Fairlie’s age, when I saw him, might have been reasonably computed at over fifty and under sixty years. His beardless face was thin, worn, and transparently pale, but not wrinkled; his nose was high and hooked; his eyes were of a dim greyish blue, large, prominent, and rather red round the rims of the eyelids; his hair was scanty, soft to look at, and of that light sandy colour which is the last to disclose its own changes towards grey. He was dressed in a dark frock-coat, of some substance much thinner than cloth, and in waistcoat and trousers of spotless white. His feet were effeminately small, and were clad in buff-coloured silk stockings, and little womanish bronze-leather slippers. Two rings adorned his white delicate hands, the value of which even my inexperienced observation detected to be all but priceless. Upon the whole, he had a frail, languidly-fretful, over-refined look — something singularly and unpleasantly delicate in its association with a man, and, at the same time, something which could by no possibility have looked natural and appropriate if it had been transferred to the personal appearance of a woman. ["Hartright's Narrative," VII, 777]
In McLenan's realisation of the Walter Hartright's interview with his crotchety employer, the drawing-master is absorbed in the study of the Rembrandt etchings, while the aristocratic Frederick Fairlie seems almost unaware of his presence. Shortly, Hartright will look up and study the Renaissance painting above Fairlie's head, a Madonna and Child by Raphael (upper left). The illustrator makes his sitters binary opposites, as the handsome, long-haired but earnest professionally dressed drawing-master sharply contrasts with his sickly, angular, but fastidiously dressed employer, the reclusive "Frederick Fairlie, Esquire, of Limmeridge House, Cumberland."
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. New York: Harper & Bros., 1861 (first printing, 15 August 1860; reissued in single-column format in 1902, 548 pages).
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vols. III-IV (26 November 1859 through 8 September 1860).
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Illustrated by Sir John Gilbert. London: Minerva, 2006.
Peters, Catherine. "Chapter Twelve: The Woman in White (1859-1860)." The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London: Minerva Press, 1992. Pp. 205-225.
Vann, J. Don. "The Woman in White in All the Year Round, 26 November — 25 August 1860." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 44-46.
Created 6 July 2024