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Passage Realised

As soon as Ethelberta had driven off from the Hall, Ladywell turned back again; and, passing the front entrance, overtook his acquaintance Mr. Neigh, who had been one of the last to emerge. The two were going in the same direction, and they walked a short distance together.

‘Has anything serious happened?’ said Neigh, noticing an abstraction in his companion. ‘You don’t seem in your usual mood to-night.’

‘O, it is only that affair between us,’ said Ladywell.

‘Affair? Between you and whom?’

‘Her and myself, of course. It will be in every fellow’s mouth now, I suppose!’

‘But — not anything between yourself and Mrs. Petherwin?’

‘A mere nothing. But surely you started, Neigh, when you suspected it just this moment?’ [Chapter XXI, "Street — Neigh's Rooms — Christopher's Rooms," 513]

Commentary: Ladywell and Neigh in Ethelberta's Eyes

The initial-letter vignette for November, 1875, poses a problem of identification — are the two Lincoln-lookalikes intended to be Ethelberta's grown-up brothers or her suitors, Neigh and Ladywell? Hardy had mentioned in the previous instalment that, after nine hours' labour, the "workmen-brothers" were accustomed to "making themselves as spruce as bride-grooms, according to the rules of their newly-acquired town experience" (p. 149). However, in the third plate Du Maurier gives neither brother a beard (later, in the eighth plate, the brothers have incipient beards), so that the reader is compelled to wonder if the pair are not supposed to represent the Wildean figures of clubman Alfred Neigh (his name echoically suggesting the source of his fortune, the knackering of horses) and the painter Eustace Ladywell, both of whom are romantically attracted to the clever, literary young widow. The two sophisticates encounter one another and exchange observations about Ethelberta outside the Mayfair Hall, where she has just concluded her evening's performance: "The two were going in the same direction, and they walked a short distance together" (p. 160) is probably the moment illustrated. The dialogue between Ethelberta's society acquaintances suggests that they may both be intending to make marriage proposals to her; the reader wonders whether one or the other may succeed since Ethelberta has just dismissed Christopher by telling him he must call much less frequently if she (as something of a celebrity) is to avoid becoming the subject of gossip in respectable society.

Related Material

• An Introduction to the plates

Bibliography

Allingham, Philip V. "Part Two: Du Maurier's Twenty-Two Illustrations for the Cornhill Magazine's Serialisation of Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta, July, 1875-May, 1876." The Thomas Hardy Year Book No. 40: Hardy's Artists by Philip Allingham. Guernsey: Toucan Press, 2012. 58-66.

Hardy, Thomas. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. The Cornhill Magazine. Vol. XXXII (1875).

Hardy, Thomas. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. Intro. Robert Gittings. London: Macmillan, 1975.

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

Page, Norman. "Thomas Hardy's Forgotten Illustrators." Bulletin of the New York Public Library 77, 4 (Summer, 1974): 454-463.

Sutherland, John. "The Cornhill Magazine." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989. 150.

Vann, J. Don. "Thomas Hardy (1840-1928. The Hand of Ethelberta in the Cornhill Magazine, July 1875-May 1876." in Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985. 83.

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