"The portraits, taken by the last fashionable photographer, were very good, and he told her so" by Walter Paget (1863-1935)

The portraits, taken by the last fashionable photographer, were very good, and he told her so

Walter Paget (1863-1935)

1860

18 cm high by 12.5 cm wide

Illustrated London News (22 October 1892): 513.

Scene from Chapter X, "The Old Phantom Becomes Distinct" (p. 513) 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

Hardy reveals himself once again a fair hand at a serial (as he told editor Sir Leslie Stephen twenty years earlier he hoped to be). Last week (15 October 1892) Jocelyn while attending a society reception at Lady Channelcliffe's in London has a "presentiment" that he is about to meet the latest incarnation of his well-beloved. As the episode ends he is "watching for a full view of the lady who had won his attention" (p. 482). As the Oct. 22nd episode opens, the reader decodes the picture incorrectly, assuming that the young lady looking at the photographs is the one Pearston had spotted earlier. The monocled gentleman behind the couple is either the "ex-cabinet minister" (surrounded by "two or three ladies") from the Oct. 15th instalment, or "the political Jove" at the beginning of that for Oct. 22nd. However, the reader who has thus hastily concluded that Jocelyn has found the well-beloved learns he has been deceived. The young lady depicted "in a sky-blue dress, which had nothing between it and the fair skin of her neck" (p. 513) is merely using th image of being interested in the opinion fashionable sculptor regarding her new photographs to make another man, "a man of thirty, of military appearance" (p. 531) jealous. The earthly vessel containing for the moment the image of the well-beloved is, as Jocelyn learns from his host, an attractive young widow named Mrs. Pine Avon, but we, like Jocelyn, have had to wait much of the episode to meet the lady in black velvets and silks. The relationship gets off to a sluggish start because Nichola Pine-Avon has heard that Jocelyn is married already, but a friend's indicating that she has read of Marcia's death in America piques her interest. However, she loses the gloss of the ideal ("the radiance which she had latterly acquired") in Jocelyn's eyes when, sitting at a formal dinner, he reads a letter from the island that announces the death of Avice Caro. Even though Somers begs Jocelyn to stay in town to attend the Academy as the country's foremost sculptor, his guilt at not having loved Avice until too late impels him to take the train at once to Portland to attend the funeral.

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