"'I am very, very sorry!' Jocelyn exclaimed." by Walter Paget (1863-1935)

"I am very, very sorry!" Jocelyn exclaimed." by Walter Paget

Walter Paget (1863-1935)

1892

19 x 14 cm

Illustrated London News (5 November 1892): 577

Scene from Chapter XVI (continued), "The New Becomes Established" (p. 577, bottom of the first column) in Chapter IV of Thomas Hardy's The Pursuit of The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament.

Scanned image, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham.

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Commentary

The reader begins the November 5th instalment secure in the knowledge that Jocelyn (a familiar figure by now, in bowler hat and suit) will at least get to hold his beloved's hand. But following the text, the reader (like Jocelyn himself) will not have his expectations fully met, for he is holding it on the pretext of examining the damage that he has inadvertently caused by laying one of the "pebbles" upon her hand instead of upon her sheet. They are not "walking out together"; rather, he meets her (not entirely by chance) upon the beach on a sunny morning near the Red King's Castle.

Paget has well captured Avice's tranquility with Jocelyn--she is obviously not emotionally moved by him in the least. Paget has captured neither her commonness (as reflected in her spoken diction and grammar) nor the beauty that Jocelyn finds mystical; nevertheless, he shows that she is not as refined and well-read as her mother by the plainness of her costume. Increasingly, her cheekiness is represented by her "little hat with its bunch of cock's feathers (p. 547), which Paget employs as a continuing feature of her illustrations of the second Avice after Jocelyn's initial lamp-lit encounter with her. Avice II is, however, as demure and sylph-like as Hardy describes her being on the beach, drying her laundry, her purple cotton frock with little black crape bows, signifying mourning, on the cuffs. However, Paget gives us the merest glimpse of those pink, perfectly proportioned forearms, whereas Hardy's text exposes the dimples on her elbows and her "shapely pink arms" (577), words which directly reflect Jocelyn's appraisal of her youthful beauty.

References

Buck, Anne. Victorian Costume and Costume Accessories. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1961.

Cunnington, C. Willet, and Phyllis Cunnington. Handbook of English Costume in the Nineteenth Century. Boston: Plays Inc., 1970.

Hardy, Thomas. The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament. The Illustrated London News, 8 October--17 December, 1892. Pp. 426-775.

Hardy, Thomas. The Well-Beloved with The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2000.

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

Last modified 7 August 2002