Initial letter "H" (a horse in the darkness) (page 1) vertically-mounted, 10.6 cm wide by 15.8 cm high, signed "H. Paterson" in the lower-right corner. Helen Patterson Allingham, seventh thumbnail vignette illustration for Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd in The Cornhill Magazine (June 1874), Chapters 30 ("Hot Cheeks and Tearful Eyes") through 33 ("In the Sun: A Harbinger") in Vol. 30: pages 1 through 22 (22.8 pages in instalment). The wood-engraver responsible for this illustration was Joseph Swain (1820-1909). [Click on the image to enlarge it; mouse over links.]
Right: The title-page for Volume 29 of the Cornhill (1874).
Commentary
The initial letter vignette complements the full-size plate by focusing on the exterior action of the narrative in the following chapter, "Night: Horses Tramping," as Jan Coggan and Gabriel Oak mistakenly pursue an unknown thief who has stolen Dainty, tracking the horse and gig during the small hours of the night. The connection between the main illustration and the vignette is that Bathsheba's concern about Troy's safety has prompted her to travel north to Bath, where he had said he would be visiting relatives. The faint light as Jan inspects the tracks at the cross-roads, the fact that the pursuers are riding bareback, and the darkness of the woods all contribute to the sense of mystery and suspense, compelling the reader first to get through the instalment to the moment realised, then move on to its resolution, when Coggan and Oak confront the driver of the gig at the tollgate. That Bathsheba and not a gipsy is the driver comes as something of a surprise to the reader, who then interprets Bathsheba's rashness and haste in undertaking the journey by night as the direct consequence of her emotional conflict in the early part of the seventh instalment.
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.
Created 28 October 2022