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"Just as my head was on the door she caught fast hold of my dress, and stopped me."
John McLenan
4 February 1859
11.3 cm high by 8.8 cm wide (4 ⅜ by 3 ½ inches), framed, p. 69 (p. 76 in volume).
Eleventh regular illustration for Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel (1860).
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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"Just as my head was on the door she caught fast hold of my dress, and stopped me." — John McLenan's composite woodblock engraving for the eleventh weekly number of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel, published on 4 February 1860 in Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vol. IV, close of Part Three: "The Story continued by Marian Halcombe, in Extracts from her Diary," p. 69; "November 27th," p. 76 in the 1861 volume. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
“Not so soon!” she pleaded. “Oh, Marian, not so soon!”
The slightest hint she could give was enough for me. I rose to leave the room, and fight her battle for her at once with Mr. Fairlie.
Just as my hand was on the door, she caught fast hold of my dress and stopped me.
“Let me go!” I said. “My tongue burns to tell your uncle that he and Sir Percival are not to have it all their own way.”
She sighed bitterly, and still held my dress.
“No!” she said faintly. “Too late, Marian, too late!”
“Not a minute too late,” I retorted. “The question of time is our question — and trust me, Laura, to take a woman’s full advantage of it.”
I unclasped her hand from my gown while I spoke; but she slipped both her arms round my waist at the same moment, and held me more effectually than ever. ["The Story continued by Marian Halcombe, in Extracts from her Diary, "November 27th," p. 69; p. 75 in the 1861 volume edition]
Laura, the Victorian ideal, is shown to have so fragile a sense of self that her identity can be broken down in the course of a few weeks. By dutifully sacrificing her own feelings top her dead father's wishes, and by accepting that marriage with Walter is impossible because of the difference in social station, Laura herself takes the first step towards the annihilation of her personality. [Peters, 224]
To a modern reader Laura Fairlie's feeling conflicted about her marriage to Glyde seems farfetched: in western society, no self-respecting young woman will simply yield to the dictates of her dead father and marry a man twenty-five years her senior. But Laura Fairlie is a twenty-year-old (not yet in her majority, in other words) in the England of the 1850s, not the Britain of our times. She has tried the leverage of a prior attachment with Glyde, but has failed, never suspecting that Glyde's sole motivation is gaining control of her estate, although certainly both her attorney, Gilmore, and her half-sister, Marian Halcombe, have their suspicions.
McLenan here recognizes that his role is to make manifest and credible Laura's internal conflict as she feels torn between her obligations to her father and her class on the one hand, and her desire to marry Walter Hartright on the other. She agrees to marry Glyde, but is shocked when she learns that the ceremony is to be "so soon." By the end of the year, she will be Lady Glyde, and her portable property will be his. And after the December marriage, he gradually reveals himself "as a particularly English type of shabby bully, cruel in speech and violent in action" (Peters, 218). The vacillation heightens the novel's suspense ("Will she, or won't she?"), and sets up the loss of identity plot later in the story, when Glyde and Fosco steal her identity because, conveniently enough, Laura has a half-sister who considerably resembles her: Anne Catherick, The Woman in White, Mr. Fairlie's other daughter. "Laura's fragile psychological identity, as well as her legal one, is threatened by the existence of Anne Catherick, her ghostly other self" (Peters, 221).
Here, then, McLenan contrasts Laura's passivity and anguish with the rationality of her half-sister, who tries every strategy available to her to prevent the marriage. In the previous serial novel from England to run in Harper's Weekly, a sensible heroine had been torn between two equally attractive and sensitive professional young men, Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities. Here the marital complication, as the illustrations for the eleventh number make clear, result in considerable internal conflict of another order, the arrangement made between Laura's father and Glyde being the social and emotional problem since, although not especially perceptive like Maria, Laura is possessed of a scrupulous sense of honour and filial duty.
The illustrator here teases us, showing Laura's desperation but keeping Marian's response enigmatic as her pillar-like figure, a head taller than Laura's, remains with her back turned towards the viewer.
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 (16 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 1859 — 25 August 1860." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 44-46.
Created 9 July 2024