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Commentary on W. Hatherell's illustration for Hardy's "Enter a Dragoon. A Story."

Hatherell’s illustration, which appears at the story’s very end, depicts its climax when the widows and children of Sergeant-Major Clark meet by accident at his grave in the military cemetery at Casterbridge. The protagonist, Mrs. Selina Clark of Wessex, encounters her mirror-image and doppelganger, the other "respectable widow, . . . with a little boy by her side, bending over [Sergeant] Clark's turf, and spudding up with the point of her umbrella some ivy roots that Selina had reverently planted there to form an evergreen mantle over the mound" (closing lines, left-hand column, p. 35). Hatherell has chosen to realise the moment at which Selina cries out: "What are you digging up my ivy for?" The recently arrived Yorkshire widow and her child in the foreground dominate the scene; the mirror image, the Dorset widow and her child, appear in perspective much smaller, a look of desperation on Selina's face. The symmetry of the illustration underscores the bizarre coincidence whereby the two women meet over the sergeant-major's grave, each trying to assert possession of his name and his remains.

"Men are as the time is." — King Lear — serves as Hardy's headnote for this final movement of the Wessex Tale. The graveyard scene is certainly ironic in that the jolly sergeant-major is now outside time and that his luck (as well as his time) has run out as his two wives confront each other over his grave. Although the Dorset widow and her child make only "fortnightly journeys" (34) to tend the grave "whenever weather did not hinder them" (34), Selina has just lost a good catch, a Chalk-Newton farmer named Bartholomew Miller, who has just married "a thriving dairyman's daughter" — and now loses her identity as the Widow Clark.

Like his illustration to "The Fiddler of the Reels," which appeared in the May 1893 Scribner's Magazine, William Hatherell sets the story's keynote with a single image, but here the incident realised comes from the end rather than the beginning of the narrative. The style of this full-page illustration of "The Fiddler of the Reels" is painterly, the mood tranquil, the intention analytical as well as descriptive. In contrast, here Hatherell's single illustration, a "half-tone plate engraved by A. Hayman," is highly dramatic, because it depicts the climax of the story a second wife and son a revealed. Whereas Hatherell foregrounds Car'line in the 1893 Scribner's illustration for "The Fiddler of the Reels," relegating the supernaturally-endowed musician of the title to the upstage area, in this later illustration he presents the two widows as roughly equal in size, the child and the grave significantly occupying the centre-stage area between them. Perhaps Hatherell thought that neither woman had a superior claim to the jolly Dragoon and his name.

In their discussion of mid-Victorian illustrated serial fiction, Mary Leighton and Lisa Surridge point out that “visual representations of plot elements often preceded verbal representations because illustrations were usually placed before or on the first page of the serial” (211). Therefore, they conclude, “Victorian serial illustrations are therefore almost always proleptic,” because the illustrations anticipate what appears later in the text. Much the same applies to illustrated magazine fiction in the last decades of the century, since journals such as the Cornhill often feature an illustration immediately ahead of the text. The illustration thus establishes expectations and introduces key characters, often pointing to a moment of maximum tension within the narrative. However, such is not the case in the sole Hatherell illustration for Hardy's bigamy narrative "Enter a Dragoon." Rather, analyzing the illustration analeptically, the alert reader can review the trajectory of the story as the two wives of the soldier meet over his grave, each trying to claim a man who can no longer serve as bread-winner, protector, and parent, leaving both women bitter, frustrated, and in a legal limbo since neither can lay unfettered claim to being the amorous dragoon's widow. The presence of the two children further complicates the scene, suggesting future acrimony between the two women. Thus, Hatherell draws the reader's attention to the story's climax immediately before the reader reaches the contents of the final page (Part VI), thereby shifting the source of suspense from "What will happen?" to "How will this outcome occur?" The modern reader, encountering this story in an anthology or collection, can hardly appreciate, then, how the story was originally received in periodical publication.

In this single illustration which completes the Hardy tale visually as Part VI does textually, Hatherell has reversed the story's focus by placing Selina Paddock in the background and the Yorkshire Mrs. Clark and her boy (identically dressed to Selina's son, upper right) in the foreground. Both of John Clark's widows wear full mourning, in essence laying claim to him as a deceased husband and father of her child; the reader has the impression upon turning the page that they are doppelgangers until he or she notes the umbrella in the right hand of the widow in the foreground, an object that clarifies the holder's identity when taken in conjunction with the text. The moment realised is highly significant because it refers to the sudden and utter destruction of Selina's assertion of legitimate, bourgeois status, to respectable widowhood and maternity.

Again, as in "On the Western Circuit" and "To Please His Wife" (among other Hardy stories) two women lay claim to the same man, but here the claim is posthumous and made with respect to propriety and social standing rather than with affection and companionship. The late Sergeant-Major, although physically present (as the occupant of the grave) in this tug-of-war as in those other stories, nevertheless continues to exert an influence upon his two widows from beyond the grave, which occupies the space between the northern and southern Mrs. Clarks. From a modern reader's perspective, in that both women have had a child with the genial soldier, each has an equally viable claim upon him; who is the legitimate claimant, like the issue of whether the ivy a plant or a weed (and therefore whether or not it adorns the grave-site) is a matter of individual perspective. In point of law, however, Selina's claim is without merit because the state has officially sanctioned his union with the other woman.

In Hatherell's illustration as in the scene in the letterpress, Selina loses her husband a third time when she has to acknowledge the other woman's claim to being his widow. Selina has appropriated a name, a costume, and a function that, as the situation depicted indicates, are not solely or properly hers. In fact, she will have no identity or social standing: "The ivy symbolizes attachment, fidelity, constancy, all translated into forms of self-deception by the disclosure of another narrative in which Clark has played a central part" (Gilmartin and Mengham, 128). The other woman's umbrella stands for the respectability at which Selina has desperately grasped but in a moment has lost; no longer "Mrs. Clark," she is left with nothing but an illegitimate child, a marker of her youthful gullibility and of her lack of middle-class respectability. Both widows and children have been abandoned yet again by the jovial dragoon whose profession and concomitant mobility have enabled him to violate traditional village norms, the former enforcers of which, the previous generations, now surround him impotently in the vividly realised Casterbridge churchyard.

Two other points worth mentioning: First, other writers represented in this volume — Mark Twain, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Sara S. Stilwell, W. W. Jacobs, Henry B. Fuller, and Marie Van Vorst — place Hardy in the context of contemporary commercial fiction rather than in the ranks of the Victorian novelists. Second, the story subsequently appeared without any illustration except the Macbeth-Raeburn frontispiece in the uniform anthology "A Changed Man" and Other Tales (Macmillan, 1913).

Bibliography

Hardy, Thomas. "Enter a Dragoon. A Story." Harper's Magazine. Illustrated by W. Hatherell. No. 102. December 1900. Pp. 25-35.

Hardy, Thomas. "The Fiddler of the Reels." Illustrated by William Hatherell. Scribner's Magazine (New York) 13 (May, 1893): 597-609.

Gilmartin, Sophie, and Rod Mengham. Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction: A Critical Study. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Surridge, Lisa. "The Transatlantic Moonstone: A Study of the Illustrated Serial in Harper's Weekly." Victorian Periodicals Review 42:3 Fall 2009, pp. 207-243.

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Last modified 3 September 2017