"Marian Halcombe" — Second uncaptioned headnote vignette by John McLenan for Wilkie Collins's "The Woman in White" — <span class="book">Harper's Weekly</span> (3 December 1859)

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Marian Halcombe

John McLenan

3 December 1859

9.4 cm high by 5 cm wide (3 ¾ by 2 inches), vignetted.

Second uncaptioned headnote vignette for Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel (3 December 1859), 777; p. 15 in the 1861 volume.

[Click on the image to enlarge it.]

The illustration tantalizes readers, but gives nothing away as they wonder what sort of face this young woman of elegant proportions and long, thick hair have. Thus, the illustrator here intuits Collins's purpose, namely to pique reader interest.

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Marian Halcombe. — staff artist John McLenan's second headnote vignette (composite woodblock engraving) for Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel, Instalment 2, published on 3 December 1859 in Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vol. III. Part One: "The Story Begun by Walter Hartright, of Clement's Inn, Teacher of Drawing," Chapter V, 777 (top); p. 15 in the 1861 volume.

Passage: Hartright is startled by Marian Halcombe's unattractive face

My first glance round me, as the man opened the door, disclosed a well-furnished breakfast-table, standing in the middle of a long room, with many windows in it. I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window — and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps — and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer — and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!

Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted — never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression — bright, frank, and intelligent — appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete. To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model — to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended — was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream. [Chapter V, 777; p. 15 in the 1861 volume edition]

Related Material

McLenan's regular, full-scale illustration for the second number: "My taste was sufficiently educated to enable me to appreciate the value of the drawings while I turned them over." for 3 December 1859.
Fred Walker's poster: The Woman in White for the Olympic's October 1871 adaptation

Bibliography

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 (26 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 — 25 August 1860." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 44-46.

Created 19 June 2024