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Denis Duval's Valet
Fred Walker
1864
Wood-engraving by Joseph Swain
6 inches by 4.25 inches (15 cm high by 10.5 cm wide) vignetted
W. M. Thackeray, Denis Duval, serialized in The Cornhill Magazine Vol. 9, No. 54 (June 1864), facing page 642.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham
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The letter from my good mother informed me, in her rough way, how she was waiting at the Blue Anchor Inn in Deal, and would have come to me; but my new comrades would laugh at a rough old woman coming off in a shore-boat to look after her boy. It was better that I should go to her at Deal, where I should be fitted out in a way becoming an officer in his Majesty's service. To Deal accordingly I went by the next boat; the good-natured surgeon's mate who had attended me and taken a fancy to me, lending me a clean shirt, and covering the wound on my head neatly, so that it was scarcely seen under my black hair. "Le pauvre cher enfant! comme il est pále!" How my mother's eyes kindled with kindness as she saw me!v The good soul insisted on dressing my hair with her own hands, and tied it in a smart queue with a black ribbon. [Chapter VIII, pp. 650-51]
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.
Walker, Thackeray’s protegé, probably began work on the illustrations for Denis Duval, the great author's last novel, before his sudden death on 24 December 1863, at the age of just fifty-two. Smith, Elder and Company subsequently published the novel’s initial eight chapters in the first four numbers of the 1864 Cornhill Magazine accompanied by Walker's seven illustrations — four full-page composite woodblock engravings and three initial-letter vignettes. Perhaps because they included eighteenth-century costumes and young boys rather than the novel’s military subjects, Claude Phillips finds "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" (p. 17). Although he conceded that he found Denis Duval's Valet "engaging," for him this touching scene between Denis and his mother appeals too strongly to the mid-Victorian taste for sentimentality: in its "not quite simple portraiture of the steadfast, much-suffering little hero . . . [it is] just a little too contourné, both in conception and style" (p. 17). Since Denis has just been wounded in a naval battle, Phillips may have felt that Walker missed his opportunity for a more vigorous scene, or one with more background interest, such as Denis's interview with the ship's surgeon, who recommends him as officer material to the Admiralty.
The chapter-titles and instalments 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 23 July 2018