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She was standing before the looking-glass, apparently lost in thought.
John Collier
1880
Lithograph
Plate 15, Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet-Major
Good Words, May 1880
(full-page, facing p. 360), framed: 12.4 cm wide x 17.5 high (captioned, with page reference); illustrates a passage at the bottom of the left-hand column on the facing page (indicating the "she" is Matilda Johnson).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The next thing was the appearance of a light in the bedroom which had been assigned to Matilda Johnson. This effectually aroused the trumpet-major, and with a stealthiness unusual in him he went indoors. No light was in the lower rooms, his father, Mrs. Garland, and Anne having gone out on the bridge to look at the new moon. John went upstairs on tip-toe, and along the uneven passage till he came to her door. It was standing ajar, a band of candlelight shining across the passage and up the opposite wall. As soon as he entered the radiance he saw her. She was standing before the looking-glass, apparently lost in thought, her fingers being clasped behind her head in abstraction, and the light falling full upon her face.
'I must speak to you,' said the trumpet-major.
She started, turned and grew paler than before; and then, as if moved by a sudden impulse, she swung the door wide open, and, coming out, said quite collectedly and with apparent pleasantness, ‘O yes; you are my Bob’s brother! I didn't, for a moment, recognize you.'
'But you do now?'
'As Bob's brother.'
'You have not seen me before?'
‘I have not,' she answered, with a face as impassible as Talleyrand's.
'Good God!'
'I have not!' she repeated.
'Nor any of the—th Dragoons? Captain Jolly, for instance?'
'No.'
'You mistake. I'll remind you of particulars,' he said drily. And he did remind her at some length.
'Never!' she said desperately. [Chapter XVIII, "The Night of the Arrival," p. 158-159]'
Arlene Jackson (pp. 122-123) has incorrectly interpreted this illustration as referring to the novel's vacillating heroine, Anne Garland, rather than to the visiting actress, Matilda Johnson. Visiting the the Lovedays' mill as Bob's guest, the young actress contemplates her future as Bob's wife rather than as an aging entertainer taking more and more limited roles on the public stage at Budmouth (i. e., Weymouth). In its composition, Collier seems to be directly echoing the stance of the heroine at the window in the second Good Words serial illustration, On a fine summer morning . . . . Anne looked rather frequently from the open casement (January 1880). The similarity also presents a contrast in that the philosophical Anne looks outward, enjoying the rural scene as she contemplates her position, whereas the vain, self-centred Matilda scrutinizes her own image and considers how age will affect her features and fortunes. Whereas the story's heroine has a respectable background and no such moral blemish, Matilda — the other "young lady" of the story — has much to regret in her recent relationships with members of the Budmouth garrison. Thus, the serial reader's misinterpreting the image here would constitute a serious misreading of Hardy's accompanying text.
Although the various renderings of Matilda look nothing much alike, examination of the text should have clarified the subject's identity in Figure 10 [i. e., the above illustration]. "The pose and situation of Miss Garland (in fact, Matilda Johnson) suggests the famous PreRaphaelite painting, Millais's Mariana, painted some twenty years earlier and based on Tennyson's poem of the same name." Jackson interprets the plate as both a Collier"“mood-painting" and a tribute to his master: "Though the plate is technically well-executed, and Anne [i. e., Matilda's] presentation is provocative as she ponders her fate and her womanhood [advancing rapidly to middle age] in the mirror before her, the scene ironically serves to emphasize the unsatisfactory quality of the other illustrations. [The Hardy Review XVI-ii, p. 61]
It just a moment of sober reflection, almost immediately interrupted by Bob's brother, John, who is more than a little apprehensive about his sailor-brother's allying himself with an actress of dubious reputation. The serial reader as a subscriber of so Presbyterian a periodical publication as Good Words must have been shocked by John's revellation of Matilda's unsavoury past.
Allingham, Philip V. "John Collier's Pre-Raphaelite Illustrations to The Trumpet-Major." The Hardy Review, XVI-ii, pp. 45-86.
Hardy, Thomas. The Trumpet-Major. Illustrated by John Collier. Good Words. January-December 1880.
Hardy, Thomas. The Trumpet-Major, John Loveday, a soldier in the war with Buonaparte, and Robert His Brother, First Mate in the Merchant Service: A Tale. With an etched frontispiece by H. Macbeth-Raeburn. London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1897.
Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.
Updated 31 January 2018; Created July 2001