The stakes were won by Wildeve by Arthur Hopkins. Plate 7, Vol. XXXVI, Frontispiece, to face page 493. 6.375 inches wide by 4.3125 inches high, framed; Hardy's The Return of the Native, as serialised in Belgravia, A Magazine of Fashion and Amusement (July 1878). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Text illustrated: Christian Loses All the Sovereigns Entrusted to Him
Christian put down a shilling, Wildeve another, and each threw. Christian won. They played for two. Christian won again.
'Let us try four,' said Wildeve. They played for four. This time the stakes were won by Wildeve.
'Ah, those little accidents will, of course, sometimes happen to the luckiest man,' he observed.
'And now I have no more money!' exclaimed Christian excitedly. 'And yet, if I could go on, I should get it back again, and more. I wish this was mine.' He struck his boot upon the ground, so that the guineas chinked within.
'What! you have not put Mrs. Wildeve's money there?'
'Yes. 'Tis for safety. Is it any harm to raffle with a married lady’s money, when, if I win, I shall only keep my winnings, and give her her own all the same; and if t'other man wins, her money will go to the lawful owner?'
'None at all.' [Book III, "The Fascination," Chapter VII, "The Morning and the Evening of a Day," 21]
Commentary: Wildeve cleans out Christian, only to lose thoroughly to Diggory Venn
As Martin Seymour-Smith notes in his recent biography of Hardy (1994),
The gambling scene by the light of glow-worms — so impeccably possible, so wildly improbable — is justly celebrated: although too isolated within its context, it remains one of the most stupendous, and best loved, scenes in English fiction. (236)
In the seventh (July 1878) plate, Hopkins conveys effectively the sense of the numinous that permeates the dice game between the devilish Wildeve and his dupe, Christian Cantle, the former identifiable by his middle-class tweeds and the latter by his rustic's linen smock-frock. A somewhat fanciful touch Hopkins has added out of his own imagination is Christian's tam o' shanter, perhaps to contrast Wildeve's soft cap. Despite his importance to the novel's plot, this is the only occasion in which Wildeve appears in the pictorial programme, perhaps because Hopkins found him rather uninteresting and undeveloped. As Seymour-Smith remarks, "he is simply another rather unsatisfactory version of the Hardyan 'villain', one of the line which begins with the illegitimate Aeneas Manston of Desperate Remedies [1871], continues (more robustly) in Troy [from Far from The Madding Crowd, 1874], and culminates in Alec D'Urberville" (235). The picture of Wildeve as winner is reversed when in Chapter VIII, at the curtain of the instalment, Diggory Venn cleans Wildeve out with a single dice by the fitful lights of fireflies.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. Illustrated by Arthur Hopkins.Belgravia, A Magazine of Fashion and Amusement (London), Vol. XXXVI. July 1878. 1-29
Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Towtowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.
Purdy, Richard Little, and Millgate, Michael, eds. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy . Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. Vol. 1 (1840-1892).
Seymour-Smith, Martin. Hardy. London: Bloomsbury, 1994.
Vann, J. Don. “Part Seven. Book III, "The Fascination," Chapters 5-8. July 1878. The Return of the Native in Belgravia, January-December 1878.” Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. 84.
Wright, Sarah Bird. "The Return of the Native." Thomas Hardy A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Works. New York: Facts On File, 2002. 261-270.
Created 5 December 2000
Last modified 11 June 2025