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Little Denis Dances for the Naval Gentlemen
Frederick Walker
Wood engraving by Joseph Swain
5.75 x 4.5 inches (14.5 cm high by 11.3 cm wide)
W. M. Thackeray, Denis Duval, serialized in The Cornhill Magazine (March 1864), facing page 261.
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Scanned image by Simon Cooke and text by Philip V. Allingham
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Walker’s interpretation of Thackeray’s text was the foundation stone of his career, and he went on to provide distinguished work for a number of novels and gift-books. — Illustrating Thackeray: Frederick Walker and Philip — Simon Cooke.
Fred Walker, having assumed the dual roles of graphic protege andvisual collaborator for William MakepeaceThackeray, had the opportunity to design the programs of illustration forthe great novelist's daughter, The Story of Elizabeth and The Village on the Cliff. He also began work on the great author's last novel, which Thackeray had just begun writing when he died on 24 December 1863. He succumbed at the age of just fifty-two to a stroke. He had compromised his digestion for years by his near-addiction to spicy peppers and alcohol, Thackeray died, leaving the novel Denis Duval incomplete. Although he was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, his memorial bust by Baron Carlo Marochetti occupies a prominent space in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Denis Duval would have been Thackeray's seventh full-length novel, and his fourth historical novel set in the eighteenth century, after The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), The History of Henry Esmond (1852), and The Virginians: A Tale of the Last Century (1857-59). Thackeray also failed to complete A Shabby Genteel Story. Smith, Elder, and Company subsequently published the first seven chapters of the novel in four monthly numbers in the Cornhill Magazine, accompanied by Walker's four full-page composite woodblock engravings, March through June 1864, with three initial-letter vignettes of the kind that were a specialty of the magazine. On account, perhaps, of the eighteenth-century costumes,
There is something forced, something approaching mannerism and sentimentality even in the prettiest of these drawings, though they are in a style more calculated to secure popular appreciation than the previous ones. Among the most notable is Denis Duval's Valet, with its engaging but not quite simple portraiture of the steadfast, much-suffering little hero — just a little too contourné, both in conception and style. The same criticism may fairly be applied to the animated composition, Little Denis Dances and Sings before the Navy Gentlemen. . . . [Phillips, p. 17]
The first-person retrospective ("autobiography") begins on 13 August 1863 with Denis's birth. At the Winchelsea Grammar School, Captain Denis presses the boy's schoolmaster to grant the class a half-holiday so that he can take little Denis to dine with him and his two officers at a local public house called The Star. In the initial illustration, Walker depicts Denis as a child, dancing a hornpipe for a group of naval officers who will serve as the boy's personal and professional models: "they made me sing them a song in French," recalls the narrator, "and a song in German, and they seemed amused at my antics and capers" (Chapter 1, "The Family Time").
Walker also executed three initial-letter vignettes for three of the instalments, with the exception of the March number. The engraver for the whole series was Walker's usual interpreter, Joseph Swain. The chapter-titles are as follows:
Marks, John George. Life and Letters of Frederick Walker, A. R. A.. London and New York: Macmillan, 1896.
Phillips, Claude. Denis Duval's Valet by Walker. Frederick Walker and His Works. London: Seeley & Co., 1905 [re-issue of the 1894 edition], facing page 21.
Reid, Forrest. Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties: An Illustrated Survey of the Work of 58 British Artists. New York: Dover, 1975. Originally published by Faber and Gwyer in London, 1928, as Illustrators of the Sixties.
Sutherland, John. "The Genesis of Thackeray's Denis Duval." The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXVII, Issue 146 (1 May 1986): Pp. 226–233.
Thackeray, W. M. Denis Duval, serialized in The Cornhill Magazine. London: Smith Elder, March-June 1864.
Vann,J. Don. "Denis Duval in the Cornhill Magazine, March–June 1864." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. P. 140.
Last modified 27 July 2018