"Jocelyn began his narrative" by Walter Paget (1863-1935)

Jocelyn began his narrative

Walter Paget (1863-1935)

1860

219 cm high by 23 wide.

Illustrated London News (8 October 1892): 459

Scene in Somers's studio at Mellstock Gardens, London, illustrating Chapter VI 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

As Jocelyn remarks to his friend Somers over a stiff drink, "This is to be a sort of Apologia pro vita sua" (alluding to Cardinal Newman's best-selling autobiography) about his pursuit of the spirit of the feminine ideal, which in Chapter IV Hardy dubbed "Juno." "Each shape, or embodiment, has been a temporary residence only, into which she has entered, lived in a while, and made her exit from, leaving the substance, so far as I have been concerned, a corpse" (VII: 459). The moment illustrated occurs on page 459, just below the left-hand side of the plate. If the reader later reviews the illustrations as significant moments in the action, he or she will notice that this plate refers to Pearston's only male friend, that with George Somers, who, as a fellow artist (and a physically similar type--the pair might be brothers) serves as something of a touchstone for our assessment of Hardy's protagonist.

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