Orley Farm

Orley Farm

John Everett Millais

Wood engraving by the Dalziels

6¼ x 4¼ inches

Anthony Trollope,Orley Farm, Vol 1. Pictorial frontispiece.

Millais’s frontispiece for Orley Farm is a picture of a real place, Julian Hill; for a while owned by Trollope’s father, in 1862 it was used as a preparatory school. With the author’s permission the proprietor, Edward Ridley Hastings, re-named it ‘Orley Farm School’. The image sets the scene but is barely an accurate prediction of the text to follow. The inclusion of bucolic elements in the form of a cow being milked, a pool and delicate trees, all suggest the harmonies of the English idyll rather than Trollope’s harsh tale of guilt and retribution.

  • Anthony Trollope
  • Orley Farm
  • Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke.

    [You may use this image, which has been reproduced with permission of Professor Julia Thomas, DMVI, Cardiff University, Wales, UK, without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]