Passage Illustrated: Alec D'Urberville turned Village Preacher

Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against the houses as though it were a place of the dead. Nearing the central part, her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing the barn not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances of the preacher.

His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that she could soon catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of the barn. The sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of St Paul. This fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a dialectician. Although Tess had not heard the beginning of the address, she learnt what the text had been from its constant iteration —

“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?”

Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in finding that the preacher’s doctrine was a vehement form of the view of Angel’s father, and her interest intensified when the speaker began to detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by those views. He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners. He had scoffed; he had wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewd. But a day of awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had been brought about mainly by the influence of a certain clergyman, whom he had at first grossly insulted; but whose parting words had sunk into his heart, and had remained there, till by the grace of Heaven they had worked this change in him, and made him what they saw him.

But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice, which, impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec d’Urberville. Her face fixed in painful suspense, she came round to the front of the barn, and passed before it. The low winter sun beamed directly upon the great double-doored entrance on this side; one of the doors being open, so that the rays stretched far in over the threshing-floor to the preacher and his audience, all snugly sheltered from the northern breeze. The listeners were entirely villagers, among them being the man whom she had seen carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable occasion. But her attention was given to the central figure, who stood upon some sacks of corn, facing the people and the door. The three o’clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction that her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established as a fact indeed. [End of Book Fifth, "The Woman Pays," Chapter XLIV, 573; in 1897 volume edition, pp. 391-392]

Commentary: An Improbable "Justification by faith"

The full caption: “The three o'clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction which had been gaining ground in Tess ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established as a fact indeed. The preacher was Alec D'Urberville."” (end of instalment). Plate 7 from the weekly illustrated serialisation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Three-quarter page illustration with text below, bottom of column 1 (end of Ch. XLIV and of the eighteenth instalment).

This last contribution by Johnson is his most significant. Unlike most of the incidents that he has chosen for realisation, this one occurs at a maximum point of tension, at the climax and curtain of a serial instalment. Revealing this moment proleptically, well in advance of the reader's encountering it in the text, engages the reader in the moments leading up to it. The reader cannot judge, of course, from the plate what the upshot will be, nor how either Alec or Tess will react to this unexpected reunion. How improbable a transformation, from masher to preacher!

For a woman who has been trudging the roads to and from Emminster for several days and who no longer "care[s] anything about [her] appearance" (XLII: 574), Johnson's Tess is surprisingly well turned out, and her respectable black dress bears no traces of dust from the thoroughfare. Her recent chopping of swedes at Flintcomb-Ash and loss of her work-boots are not reflected in her upright carriage and respectable middle-class attire. Interestingly, for the reader in 1891, Tess's hat would have implied that the determined wearer was what C. Willet Cunnington in English Women's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century terms a "New Woman," for such a hat would have been symbolic of "emancipation" (352).

Note: The next illustration in this serialisation is by a different illustrator: Wehrschmidt's Plate 19. For the complete list, see here.

Bibliography

Allingham, Philip V. "The Original Illustrations for Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles Drawn by Daniel A. Wehrschmidt, Ernest Borough-Johnson, and Joseph Sydall for the Graphic (1891)." The Thomas Hardy Year Book, No. 24 (1997): 3-50.

Allingham, Philip V. "Six Original Illustrations for Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles Drawn by Sir Hubert Von Herkomer for the Graphic (1891)." The Thomas Hardy Journal, Vol. X, No. 1 (February 1994): 52-70.

Cunnington, C. Willet. English Women's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. London: Faber & Faber, 1937.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles in the Graphic, 1891, 4 July-26 December, pp. 11-761.

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

Vann, J. Don. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles in the Graphic, 4 July 26 — December 1891." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985, pp. 88-89.

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