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Initial letter "I" for Chapter VIII
Fred Walker
1864
Wood-engraving by Joseph Swain
3.5 inches by 2 inches (8.5 cm high by 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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Shall I make a clean breast of it? We young hypocrites used to write each other little notes, and pop them in certain cunning corners known to us two. Juliet used to write in a great round hand in French; Romeo replied, I dare say, with doubtful spelling.
We devised sundry queer receptacles where our letters lay poste restante. There was the China pot-pourri jar on the Japan cabinet in the drawing-room. There, into the midst of roses and spices, two cunning young people used to thrust their hands, and stir about the spice and rose leaves, until they lighted on a little piece of folded paper more fragrant and more precious than all your flowers and cloves. [Chapter VIII, page 647]
The young lady, who has grown considerably since the opening chapter, Agnes Saverne, daughter of the Count killed in a duel with De la Motte all those years before, will (if Thackeray's design is predictable) marry Dennis towards the end of the story. This was the last of the three ornamental vignettes for initial letters that Walker executed for the second, third, and fourth instalments of Thackeray's unfinished bildungsroman,the engraverbeing Walker's usual interpreter, Joseph Swain.
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 3 August 2018