"Trilby, that's my name. . ."
Alfred Ellis
21 September 1895
Photograph
15.3 cm high by 10.2 cm wide
"Source: The Illustrated London News (21 September 1895): 357
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Passage adapted from the 1895 novel
As the creature looked round at the assembled company and flashed her big white teeth at them in an all-embracing smile of uncommon width and quite irresistible sweetness, simplicity, and friendly trust, one saw at a glance that she was out of the common clever, simple, humorous, honest, brave, and kind, and accustomed to be genially welcomed wherever she went. Then suddenly closing the door behind her, dropping her smile, and looking wistful and sweet, with her head on one side and her arms akimbo, "Ye're all English, now, aren't ye?" she exclaimed. "I heard the music, and thought I'd just come in for a bit, and pass the time of day: you don't mind? Trilby, that's my name — Trilby O'Ferrall."
She said this in English, with an accent half Scotch and certain French intonations, and in a voice so rich and deep and full as almost to suggest an incipient tenore robusto; and one felt instinctively that it was a real pity she wasn't a boy, she would have made such a jolly one. [Page 16, facing the illustration "Wistful and Sweet"]
Commentary
English actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, catching Paul Potter's American adaptation of the novel on the road in the spring of 1895 in Buffalo, NY, went backstage, bought the British rights to the play, and hastily returned to London to mount his own production, giving himself the role of Svengali, a part much more significant in the play than in the novel. Opposite him to play the crucial part of Trilby O'Ferrall at the Haymarket he selected twenty-year-old Dorothea Baird (1875-1933). She had debuted in London just the year before as Hippolyta in Ben Greet's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Du Maurier's text and original illustration, Trilby is wearing a military great-coat with epulettes, and is standing with her hands on her hips. The Ellis photograph would seem to be a combination of the frontispiece "It was Trilby!" and the novel's seventh illustration, "Wistful and Sweet."
Related Illustrations in Harper's New Monthly (1894)
George Du Maurier's "Whistful and Sweet (Trilby O'Farrell)" and It was Trilby [Click on image to enlarge it.]
Bibliography
Du Maurier, George. Trilby. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 88 (January 1894): 175.
Du Maurier, George. Trilby, A Novel. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895.
Ellis, Alfred. "Trilby on the English Stage." [Four black-and-white photographs]. The Illustrated London News. 21 September 1895, p. 357.
Last modified 6 July 2013