"By This Time He Had Begun To Experience A Sentimental Feeling for the Letters" by Walter Paget (1863-1935)

By This Time He Had Begun To Experience A Sentimental Feeling for the Letters

Walter Paget (1863-1935)

1860

17 cm high by 15 cm wide (vignetted on the top and left)

Illustrated London News (1 October 1892): 425

Scene from Chapter I, "Relics" (p. 425) of Thomas Hardy's The Pursuit of The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament.

Scanned image, caption, and commentary 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. ]

Commentary

Although Hardy indicates in the opening lines that the chronological setting is "Once — and that not long ago" (425), the story spans a period of approximately forty years. The opening lines imply that this will be something of an "anti-fairytale," in that the pursuit of the priness by the prince (the young sculptor, Jocelyn Pearston, the subject of the first plate and the only continuing character in the story) will not turn out happily-ever-after. Since we may assume the story concludes at the date of composition (one is tempted to say "narration," given the oral nature of the opening), the opening scene should be the artist's "temporary rooms in a London square" circa 1850. As he prepares to travel back to visit his family on "The Isle of the Slingers" (Portland) the next morning by rail, Jocelyn decides to burn "a mass of papers that he did not wish to carry with him and objected to leave behind." Among these are "several packets of love-letters," which he proceeds to burn in the grate of the fireplace. Immediately after the moment illustrated, he decides to preserve the packet "for the writer's sake," and rolls it up in his summer overcoat. Thus, Hardy and Paget draw our attention to a key aspect of Pearston's personality, a gentle, backward-looking melancholy and sentimentality.

References

Hardy, Thomas. The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved. The Illustrated London News, 8 October--17 December, 1892. Pp. 426-775.

Hardy, Thomas. The Well-Beloved with The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2000.

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

Last modified 25 August 2002