The policeman found him lying on the doorstep, by George du Maurier

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The policeman found him lying on the doorstep

George du Maurier

27 December 1862

Wood engraving by Joseph Swain.

6 x 4½ inches

This is the fifth illustration for Charles Warren Adams’sThe Notting Hill Mystery in Once a Week 8 (27 December 1862): 1.

An unexplained incident that subtly suggests the Baron’s malign influence. du Maurier gives the scene a powerful contemporaneity, focusing on details of the policeman’s uniform. [continued below]

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Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke.

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Such devices amplify the text’s sense of menace by placing it in recognizable urban locations – the very spaces occupied by his middle-class audience. The artist’s baroque manipulation of perspective further contributes to this unsettling immediacy, with the policeman’s right foot breaking out of the surface in the reader/viewer’s own space. du Maurier places his signature on the bottom left, as if ‘DM’ were inscribed in freshly laid concrete.

Last modified 18 June 2014