Initial J

George du Maurier

1876

Wood engraving

Decoration for Margaret Oliphant's Carita

The Cornhill Magazine 33 (1876): 642

With the serial runs of The Atonement of Leam Dundas and The Hand of Ethelberta complete, The Cornill, which clearly needed a serial with which to lead off the June issue, put Margaret Oliphant's "silver-fork" Carita on the front page, thereby indicating the kind of reader to which the magazine attemptedto appeal in the 1870s. The initial "J" (6 cm high by 3.7 cm) is not characteristic of du Maurier's other Cornhill miniatures because does not depict either a character or a scene, whereas the drawing room scene in The Doctor pretended to be absorbed in the song is quite characteristic of the formal upper-middle class and aristocratic domestic scenes of two or three characters that du Maurier seems to have favoured.

Scanned image, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham

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