"Everything was done, even to the packing of his portmanteau." by Walter Paget (1863-1935)

Everything was done, even to the packing of his portmanteau

Walter Paget (1863-1935)

1892

19.3 by 14.5 cm.

Illustrated London News (17 December 1892): 773

Scene from XXXII, "The Pursuit Abandoned" (page 774) in Chapter IV of Thomas Hardy's The Pursuit of The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament.

Scanned image, caption, and commentary 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. ]

Commentary

Having posted a letter to his friend Somers expressing his intention to disappear from England and live out his days "on the other side of the Atlantic," Pearston contemplates how he might better free Avice III from her marriage to him, leave her a competence, and make way for a spouse more apropriate in age, the teacher Henri. As the "taedium vitae" overwhelms him in this plate, Jocelyn decides upon another course (as yet undisclosed) and writes again to Somers. Once again, as in the first plate, Pearston is alone in his London rooms, preparing for a journey -- but what a passive and introverted figure he is here compared to his younger self at the start of the visual program. In the next plate, he looks outward, to the reader and the waters of The Race, but here he looks inward. Although this "introspective" Jocelyn Pearston is unusual in Paget's extensive program of illustration, an alienated protagonist is not, for he appears by himself in plates 1, 8, and 16.

References

Hardy, Thomas. The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved. The Illustrated London News, 8 October--17 December, 1892. Pp. 426-775.

Hardy, Thomas. The Well-Beloved with The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2000.

Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.

Last modified 10 July 2015