Passage Illustrated: Boldwood deigrates Bathsheba's Love for Troy

“I’ll punish him — by my soul, that will I! I’ll meet him, soldier or no, and I’ll horsewhip the untimely stripling for this reckless theft of my one delight. If he were a hundred men I’d horsewhip him —” He dropped his voice suddenly and unnaturally. “Bathsheba, sweet, lost coquette, pardon me! I’ve been blaming you, threatening you, behaving like a churl to you, when he’s the greatest sinner. He stole your dear heart away with his unfathomable lies! ... It is a fortunate thing for him that he’s gone back to his regiment — that he’s away up the country, and not here! I hope he may not return here just yet. I pray God he may not come into my sight, for I may be tempted beyond myself. Oh, Bathsheba, keep him away — yes, keep him away from me!”

For a moment Boldwood stood so inertly after this that his soul seemed to have been entirely exhaled with the breath of his passionate words. He turned his face away, and withdrew, and his form was soon covered over by the twilight as his footsteps mixed in with the low hiss of the leafy trees.

Bathsheba, who had been standing motionless as a model all this latter time, flung her hands to her face, and wildly attempted to ponder on the exhibition which had just passed away. Such astounding wells of fevered feeling in a still man like Mr. Boldwood were incomprehensible, dreadful. Instead of being a man trained to repression he was — what she had seen him.

The force of the farmer’s threats lay in their relation to a circumstance known at present only to herself: her lover was coming back to Weatherbury in the course of the very next day or two. Troy had not returned to his distant barracks as Boldwood and others supposed, but had merely gone to visit some acquaintance in Bath, and had yet a week or more remaining to his furlough. [Chapter 31, "Blame — Fury," 10]

Commentary: Boldwood threatens to horsewhip Frank Troy for his "theft" of Bathsheba

The seventh plate and vignette, for July (Chapters 30-33), illustrate incidents in Chapters 31 and 32 respectively. In Bathsheba flung her hands to her face (facing page 1 in Volume XXX), Allingham has selected a moment that the reader initially expects will occur in Chapter 30, "Hot Cheeks and Tearful Eyes." However, the moment depicted occurs in Ch. 31, "Blame: Fury." The subject is Bathsheba's distress after her interview with Boldwood (seen disappearing into the distance), who she believes intends to assault ("horsewhip) Frank Troy. Hardy had furnished her with little enough on which to base the illustration other than the heroine's gesture indicative of emotional conflict, and the general setting, on a road three miles from her farm at twilight amidst "leafy trees" (p. 10).

Here, the illustrator has passed over the dramatic confrontation between the confused heroine and her jealous lover to focus on her reaction to his accusation that she has unwisely allowed herself to become smitten by a gallant outward appearance — the "brass and scarlet" (p. 9) of a sergeant's uniform. She fears that Boldwood means to harm Troy, and blames herself for provoking this jealous passion through her foolishly sending Boldwood the valentine. This confrontation foreshadows the final confrontation between Boldwood, finally engaged to Bathsheba, and the husband returned from the dead in the serial's final illustration, Troy next advanced into the middle of the room, took off his cap (December 1874).

Above: The initial-letter vignette and first full page of the seventh instalment of the story: B.

Although Paterson's background details seem inconsistent with Hardy's Wessex, Bathsheba's white dress and hat set her off from the gathering gloom in sky and woods. Paterson has not depicted the "heap of stones by the wayside" (p. 10) on which Bathsheba sits after her encounter with Boldwood. She has, however, supplied a high wooden fence of a type not commonly seen in Wessex, and large conifers that block out the letter-press's "coppery cloud which bounded a green and pellucid expanse in the western sky" (p. 11).

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.

Hardie, Martin. Water-colour Painting in Britain, Vol. 3: The Victorian Period, ed. Dudley Snelgrove, Jonathan Mayne, and Basil Taylor. London: B. T. Batsford, 1968.

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.

Holme, Brian. The Kate Greenaway Book. Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1976.

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

Turner, Paul. The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, 2001.

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Created 12 December 2001

Last updated 5 November 2022