"Jocelyn Sprung Up To Leave the Room" by Walter Paget (1863-1935)

Jocelyn Sprung Up To Leave the Room

Walter Paget (1863-1935)

1860

17.8 cm high by 23.5 cm wide

Illustrated London News (8 October 1892): 482.

Illustrated London News (8 October 1892): 427: Scene from Chapter VIII, "A Miscalculation" (p. 481, top of column three) 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

Marcia's seizing and hurling one of her husband's statuettes at him reflects an unconscious rebellion against Pearston's commodifying the female form. Since she has insulted his father, rather than betray further emotion in the pointless quarrel, Jocelyn determines to seek the refuge of his club. The limited omniscient narrator's terming the broken statue "his darling little work" reveals the artist's love for his creation -- a love apparently deeper than that momentary attraction he felt for Marcia! In revising the serial manusacript for publication as a novel in 1897 (a version which he refers to as "my new story" in his letters), Hardy entirely excised the following passage:

The figure missed him, but struck the wall, and fell broken to atoms. The sight of his darling little work irretrievably ruined so exasperated Pearston that he rushed back, took her by the shoulders and shook her: after which he went out of the room, put on his hat, and departed for his club. (ILN 15 Oct. 1892, p. 481)

Hardy eliminates the exact words of the quarrel entirely: "Their debates were clinched by a final letter from Macia" (p. 36). Perhaps Hardy felt that the excised passage showed an unwonted overflowing of genuine emotion in his protagonist, but it certainly contrasts his feelings for his artistic creations and those for the actual women he becomes involved with.

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