"Pearston Stopped and Examined the Cause of Discomfiture" by Walter Paget (1863-1935)

Pearston Stopped and Examined the Cause of Discomfiture.

Walter Paget (1863-1935)

1892

19.5 cm by 14 cm

Illustrated London News, 26 November 1892, page 673

Scene from Scene from Chapter XXIV, "Misgivings on this Unexpected Re-embodiment" (p. 674, middle of the first column) in Thomas Hardy's The Pursuit of The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament -- Instalment 9. Part the Third, "A Young Man of Fifty-Nine."

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

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Commentary

The pose and the setting (to say nothing of Jocelyn's apparent youthfulness of face and figure) here echo the earlier scene with Avice II on the beach (Plate 11) and the first Avice among the rocks (Plate 2), so that Plate 17 provides a visual suggestion that Jocelyn's history is repeating itself as he meets the third Avice for the first time. But before, in youth, he and Avice stood by the boiling waters of Cave Hole; here, the tide is out. Although her hat may visually echo that worn by her mother in youth, her fashionable blouse and skirt, appropriate to her position as a governess, recall those worn by her grandmother in Plate 2. In order to extricate her foot from the cleft in the rock, Jocelyn finds it necessary to cut some of the buttons on her walking boots, such leather footwear of the period 1880-1890 being tied up by twelve to sixteen buttons for the laces (see Cunnington p. 535).

In the growing darkness of twilight below the castle ruin (upper left) Jocelyn is "fairly presentable as a pleasing man of no marked antiquity" (674)--one is reminded of the line from W. S. Gilbert's lyrics to the operetta Trial by Jury (1871): "She may very well pass for forty-three in the dusk with the light behind her." Young Avice does not apprehend until later the true age of the "trimly shaven" Jocelyn. The fading light, which Paget has attempted to capture, throws Avice's face into partial shadow, perhaps suggestive of a slight tendency towards secretiveness inherited from her mother.

Last modified 22 September 2002