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Headpiece [Dorchester High Street from the bottom of the hill]
Alfred Parsons
March 1891
Lithograph
12 cm high by 12.3 cm wide
From Thomas Hardy's Wessex Folk (subsequently renamed A Few Crusted Characters) in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (March 1891): 594.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
It is a Saturday afternoon of blue and yellow autumn time, and the scene is the High Street of a well-known market-town. A large carrier’s van stands in the quadrangular fore-court of the White Hart Inn, upon the sides of its spacious tilt being painted, in weather-beaten letters: 'Burthen, Carrier to Longpuddle.' These vans, so numerous hereabout, are a respectable, if somewhat lumbering, class of conveyance, much resorted to by decent travellers not overstocked with money, the better among them roughly corresponding to the old French diligences.
The present one is timed to leave the town at four in the afternoon precisely, and it is now half-past three by the clock in the turret at the top of the street. In a few seconds errand-boys from the shops begin to arrive with packages, which they fling into the vehicle, and turn away whistling, and care for the packages no more. At twenty minutes to four an elderly woman places her basket upon the shafts, slowly mounts, takes up a seat inside, and folds her hands and her lips. She has secured her corner for the journey, though there is as yet no sign of a horse being put in, nor of a carrier. At the three-quarters, two other women arrive, in whom the first recognizes the postmistress of Upper Longpuddle and the registrar’s wife, they recognizing her as the aged groceress of the same village. At five minutes to the hour there approach Mr. Profitt, the schoolmaster, in a soft felt hat, and Christopher Twink, the master-thatcher; and as the hour strikes there rapidly drop in the parish clerk and his wife, the seedsman and his aged father, the registrar; also Mr. Day, the world-ignored local landscape-painter, an elderly man who resides in his native place, and has never sold a picture outside it, though his pretensions to art have been nobly supported by his fellow-villagers, whose confidence in his genius has been as remarkable as the outer neglect of it, leading them to buy his paintings so extensively (at the price of a few shillings each, it is true) that every dwelling in the parish exhibits three or four of those admired productions on its walls. [Life's Little Ironies, A Few Crusted Characters, Osgood McIlvaine edition, 219-20]
This introductory plate establishes Hardy's "Casterbridge" (Dorchester) as the chief setting for the framed tales that the passengers in Mr. Burthen's van tell the traveller, John Lackland, who has recently returned to Wessex from "across the ocean." Since Tony Kytes, the protagonist of the first story, is also a carrier, and the headpiece contains a number of carriers' vans (right) parked at the bottom of the High Street hill, this Parsons' headpiece introduces all nine framed-tales and anticipates the initial story in the collection, "Tony Kytes, The Arch-Deceiver", a French farce which Hardy has translated from a stage drawing-room to a Dorset carrier's van.
Alfred Parsons, R. A. (1847-1920) received numerous commissions from various British publishers during this period in what might be termed "nature illustration." Since 1870 he had established an artistic reputation principally as a landscape and botanical painter. As his forté was gardens, he was a natural choice for the illustrations of Andrew Lang's Wordsworth (1897), for example. Parsons became an illustrator for both Harper's Weekly and Harper's New Monthly Magazine through such American contacts as his friend the writer Francis Davis Millet, and the illustrators E. A. Abbey and Fred Barnard, all of whom he met at the artistic community in the village of Broadway in the Cotswolds (Worcestershire). Although he illustrated half-a-dozen significant books between 1880 and 1900, he published only one illustrated book in his own right, Notes in Japan (Harper & Bros., 1896). His chief interests throughout his career, landscape painting and garden design, inform his illustrations of Hardy's short fiction, which as Henry James notes, take the form of American idealizations of England: "Mr. Parsons learned so well [at the artists' colony] how Americans would like England to appear. . . . The England of his pencil . . . is exactly the England that the American imagination, restricted to itself, constructs from the poets, the novelists, from all the delightful testimony it inherits" ("Our artists in Europe," 1889).
Charles Green (1840-98), one of the original Dickens Household Edition artists, provided the remainder of the serial's monthly illustrations in the spring numbers of Harper's New Monthly Magazine for 1891. As one of "New Men of the Sixties" Green had a realist style well suited to the lithographic representations of Hardy's "Wessex Folk." After serial publication, Hardy revised these framed-tales for publication in anthologies on three separate occasions between 1894 and 1896 before preparing his final versions for the 1912 Wessex edition. Even though Harper and Brothers in New York owned the illustrations, this publisher did not use them in its own anthology of Hardy's ironic tales (1894). And no volume edition issued subsequently has featured these pleasing visual accompaniments to the comi-tragic anecdotes about the ironic fates of his Dorset characters.
As Martin Ray notes, the uncaptioned Parson's headpiece for the "Introduction" assists the writer in emphasizing the social realism and "drawn from life" qualities of the collection: "Hardy's chief concern appears to have been to add precise local detail, which often has its source in a familiar reality" (232). The market town in which he sets the opening is clearly Dorchester, "and the inn from which carriers departed from the east of town was indeed the White Hart Inn" (232). The passengers who gradually fill up the van are all going home towards "Upper Longpuddle," which is Hardy's fictional name for his native village, High Bockhampton.
Since the view of carriers’ vans parked at the bottom the High Street possesses almost photographic realism, Parsons either sketched it in situ or worked from a sketch or photograph provided by the author. In this instance, we have possible evidence of a drawn-from-the-life scenario in the form of a letter in the Syracuse Library from Hardy to Parsons. Parsons visited Hardy in Dorchester, likely towards to end of January, in the period immediately prior to the publication of his Dorchester illustration in Harper's New Monthly Magazine. “The Alfred Parsons Letter consists of a photocopy of a letter written by Thomas Hardy and addressed to Alfred Parsons. The letter is written on "Max Gate near Dorchester" letterhead and dated only 'Thursday Jan 24.' Hardy discusses arrangements for a visit from Parsons later in the week" (Syracuse Library).
Hardy's extant correspondence suggests that he collaborated closely only with a few of his magazine illustrators, namely George DuMaurier and Helen Paterson Allingham; otherwise, he usually forwarded suggestions for illustrations to his editors, who then passed Hardy’s notions along to those artists whom they had commissioned. Such was the case, for example, when Good Words published The Trumpet-Major in 1880 with illustrations by John Collier. Although the degree to which artist and author collaborated on the plates is difficult to assess, since Hardy had sent Collier a sketch of the Mill kitchen, we may assume that such details as the flagstone floor, the free-standing cupboard, the grandfather clock, the bed-warming pan, and the cartoon of "Bony" on the wall in "Welcome, Master Derriman" (February 1880) all have authorial sanction. One may also assume that the Robert Barnes serial illustrations for The Mayor of Casterbridge in the London Graphic (1886) enjoyed authorial approval as Barnes, like Parsons in 1891, visited Hardy in Dorchester prior to completing the commission in order to give his large-scale magazine drawings on-the-ground authenticity.
Although the periodical illustrations for Hardy's short stories and novels rarely appeared in the subsequent volumes, Harper's did utilize the Parsons and Reinhart plates for "The First Countess of Wessex" from the series Harper's New Monthly Magazine (December 1889) in its volume edition of A Group of Noble Dames in 1891.
In revising the text of the "Introduction" for the 1894 Osgood, McIlvaine edition, Hardy altered the position of the clock from the church tower to the turret. "Simon Gatrell correctly speculates that this revision 'may well have been in response to Alfred Parsons' headpiece-illustration in Harper's, which showed High East Street in Dorchester. . . . It also showed quite clearly that the clock visible from that point is in the thin-spired tower of the town hall and not the solid, square church-tower of St. Peters'" (Ray 234). This adjustment of the description to match the illustration also makes the volume's description correspond to the actual view at the foot of the High Street. Consequently, Parsons was working from reality rather than Hardy's description in the magazine manuscript when he drew the headpiece. Since the first instalment of the framed-tale series appeared in March 1891, the logical year of Hardy's January 24th letter to Parsons regarding his impending visit is 1891. Because the 1894 British edition of stories in Life's Little Ironies did not contain the Parsons headpiece, Gatrell and Ray contend that Hardy's motivation to alter the position of the clock was a result of the author's "anxiety to secure accuracy of topographical description wherever possible" (cited in Ray, 234). Indeed, Ray speculates that Hardy made the change in 1894 when he had the printed serial text right in front him, and would have quickly realised the discrepancy between the headpiece and the text.
Left: Henry Macbeth-Raeburn's architectural study of the main street in Dorchester, Dorset, in High Street Casterbridge for the 1896 Wessex edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge (1895). Right: A 1920 photograph looking up the High Street from above the White Hart, The King's Arms, Dorchester.
Mortimer Menpes's tranquil watercolour of the same scene in White Hart Hotel (1906).
Brady, Kristin. The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy: Tales of Past and Present. London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984.
Gatrell, Simon. "The Early Stages of Hardy's Fiction." Thomas Hardy Annual, No. 2. Ed. Norman Page. London: Macmillan, 1984. 3-29.
Hardy, Thomas. "Alfred Parsons Letter [to illustrator Parsons]: A description of his letter at Syracuse University." ["Thursday Jan 24."] . Syracuse Library 08 December 2009.
_____. Life's Little Ironies: A Set of Tales with Some Colloquial Sketches Entitled "A Few Crusted Characters." [March 1891] London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1894. 219-301.
_____. Wessex Folk (subsequently renamed A Few Crusted Characters) in Harper's New Monthly Magazine 81 (March-May 1891): 594, 701, 703, 891, 894; 82 (June 1891): 123.
James, Henry. "Our artists in Europe." Harper's Magazine, 79 (June 1889).
Ray, Martin. Chapter 25, "A Few Crusted Characters." Thomas Hardy: A Textual Study of the Short Stories. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. 228-258.
Created 1 June 2008
Last modified 3 May 2020