“Pray allow me to take your order for the tea, and to bring it with my own parcels.” Wood-engraving 11.6 cm high by 11.5 cm wide, or 4 ½ inches square, framed, for instalment twenty in the American serialisation of Wilkie Collins’s No Name in Harper’s Weekly [Vol. VI. — No. 291] Number 21, “Between the Scenes. XII. From Captain Wragge to Magdalen. North Shingles Villa. Aldborough, Suffolk, July 22” (page 477; p. 130 in volume), plus an uncaptioned vignettte of Captain Wragge, bowing (II. “From Captain Wragge to Magdalen. Birmingham, July 2, 1847” (page 477; p. 125 in volume): 11 cm high by 5.6 cm wide, or 4 ¼ inches high by 2 ¼ inches wide, vignetted. [Instalment No. 20 ends in the American serialisation on page 479, at the end of “The Third Scene, XIII.” Precisely the same number without illustration ran on 26 July 1862 in All the Year Round.]
Passage Illustrated: Captain Wragge Encounters Mrs. Lecount in the Grocery, Aldborough
“The last detail I have to communicate refers to my acquaintance with Mrs. Lecount.
“We met yesterday, in the grocer’s shop here. Keeping my ears open, I found that Mrs. Lecount wanted a particular kind of tea which the man had not got, and which he believed could not be procured any nearer than Ipswich. I instantly saw my way to beginning an acquaintance, at the trifling expense of a journey to that flourishing city. ‘I have business to-day in Ipswich,’ I said, ‘and I propose returning to Aldborough (if I can get back in time) this evening. Pray allow me to take your order for the tea, and to bring it back with my own parcels.’ Mrs. Lecount politely declined giving me the trouble — I politely insisted on taking it. We fell into conversation. [“Between the Scenes. XII. From Captain Wragge to Magdalen. North Shingles Villa. Aldborough, Suffolk, July 22,” page 477; p. 129 in volume.]
Passage Illustrated by the Vignette of Wragge, Bowing
“I embrace this opportunity to assure you once more of my unalterable fidelity to your interests. Without attempting to intrude myself into your confidence, may I inquire whether Mr. Noel Vanstone has consented to do you justice? I greatly fear he has declined — in which case I can lay my hand on my heart, and solemnly declare that his meanness revolts me. Why do I feel a foreboding that you have appealed to him in vain? [“Between the Scenes. II. From Captain Wragge to Magdalen. Birmingham, July 2, 1847,” page 477; p. 125 in volume.]
Commentary: Total Appearances in the Serial — Captain Wragge versus Magdalen
The vignette probably alludes to Wragge’s generous offer to procure her exotic tea for Mrs. Lecount in Ipswich. This plate marks Captain Wragge’s twelfth appearance, but this is the third occasion in which he appears in both the vignette and the main plate. His initial appearance was, in fact, in the opening serial number’s large-scale woodblock engraving, when Miss Garth encountered him at the gates of Combe-Raven: Captain Wragge. Post-Office, Bristol (15 March 1862). Up to the mid-point of the serial run he appeared a total of seven times, and throughout the illustrated edition of the Harper’s volume eleven times, both in the vignettes (six) and in the larger weekly illustrations (five). In only three numbers does Captain Wragge appear in both the vignette and the main illustration: 31 May, 14 June, and 26 July. Appearing in eleven of the sixty-one illustrations, Wragge is featured in roughly 18% of the plates, whereas the protagonist, Magdalen Vanstone, appears in twenty-nine plates (46%), clearly dominating the narrative-pictorial sequence.
Commentary: Wragge Makes the Social Acquaintance of Mrs. Lecount, as Magdalen Has Asked
Here, as it were by accident but in fact by Wragge’s design (as Magdalen has asked in a recent letter from London), the genial Captain encounters Mrs. Lecount, shopping at the local grocery emporium in the incipient seaside resort of Adlborough, Suffolk (now, North Yorkshire). He ingratiates him as a tourist, Mr. Bygrave, who has just rented the North Shingles Villa, very near where the housekeeper and her employer, Noel Vanstone, are staying in one of his late father's investment properties. He is only too happy, he remarks, to journey to Ipswich to get the housekeeper a special tea she favours. As instructed by his “niece,” Susan Bygrave (the latest “skin” of Magdalen Vanstone), Wragge thus ingratiates himself with the housekeeper and initiates a relationship that Magdalen plans to exploit, although Collins has not as yet revealed how.
Related Material
- Frontispiece to Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1864) by John Everett Millais
- Victorian Paratextuality: Pictorial Frontispieces and Pictorial Title-Pages
- Wilkie Collins's No Name (1862): Charles Dickens, Sheridan's The Rivals, and the Lost Franklin Expedition
- "The Law of Abduction": Marriage and Divorce in Victorian Sensation and Mission Novels
- Gordon Thomson's A Poser from Fun (5 April 1862)
- Kate Egan's Playthings to Men: Women, Power, and Money in Gaskell and Trollope
- Philip V. Allingham, The Victorian Sensation Novel, 1860-1880 — "preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment"
Image scans and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use the images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned them and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Blain, Virginia. “Introduction” and “Explanatory Notes” to Wilkie Collins's No Name. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
