Initial letter "I" (a female field-labourer raking) (page 1) vertically-mounted, 6 cm wide by 6.9 cm high, signed "H. Paterson" in the lower-right corner. Helen Patterson Allingham, sixth thumbnail vignette illustration for Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd Cornhill Magazine (June 1874), Chapters 25 ("The New Acquaintance Described.") through 29 ("Particulars of a Twilight Walk.") in Vol. 29: pages 641 through 661 (21 pages in instalment). The wood-engraver responsible for this illustration was Joseph Swain (1820-1909), noted for his engravings of Sir John Tenniel's cartoons Punch. [Click on the image to enlarge it; mouse over links.]
Right: The title-page for Volume 29 of the Cornhill (1874).
The sixth initial-letter vignette, on page 641, seems to have nothing to do with the assignation by the ferns: "In the first mead they were already loading hay, the women raking it into cocks and windrows, and the men tossing it upon the waggon" (p. 643). At this point, Troy appears, proclaiming that he has come haymaking "for pleasure" (p. 643). While the anonymous field-hands must toil in the fields, those above the working classes may indulge in a romantic idyll. By selecting as her husband a man who has no sense of obligation to the farm people, Bathsheba threatens the livelihood of all who depend upon her. In contrast to the sensible sun-hats worn by the labourers in the vignette, Troy's brimless "diminutive cap" (p. 644), mentioned in the text at this point, appears in the sixth and eighth plates. In contrast, the fieldworkers' head-coverings, "tilt bonnets covered with nankeen, which hung in a curtain upon their shoulders" (p. 643), though hardly fashionable or becoming, admirably serve their purpose in the workaday world that Bathsheba temporarily neglects for that of romance.
This sixth initial-vignette is based upon a textual moment in Ch. 25, and is the only illustration that concerns unnamed characters, male and female; in the foreground one of the women in a tilt bonnet is haymaking. The thumbnail does contribute to the texture of the story as a novel of the soil.
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
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.
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.
Created 12 December 2001 Last updated 22 October 2022