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Her mother whispered as she drew near, "Tis he."
Robert Barnes
16 January 1886 (Part Three)
Composite Woodblock Engraving
22.9 cm high by 17.7 cm wide — 8 ¾ by 6 ¾ inches
Dickens's The Mayor of Casterbridge, Chapter VII, p. 69.
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See below for passage illustrated and commentary.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Elizabeth fetched their simple provisions, as she had fetched the Scotchman’s, and went up to the little chamber where she had left her mother, noiselessly pushing open the door with the edge of the tray. To her surprise her mother, instead of being reclined on the bed where she had left her was in an erect position, with lips parted. At Elizabeth’s entry she lifted her finger.
The meaning of this was soon apparent. The room allotted to the two women had at one time served as a dressing-room to the Scotchman’s chamber, as was evidenced by signs of a door of communication between them — now screwed up and pasted over with the wall paper. But, as is frequently the case with hotels of far higher pretensions than the Three Mariners, every word spoken in either of these rooms was distinctly audible in the other. Such sounds came through now.
Thus silently conjured Elizabeth deposited the tray, and her mother whispered as she drew near, “’Tis he.”
“Who?” said the girl.
“The Mayor.” [Chapter VII, p. 69 in serial; volume, 53]
In their small room at The King of Prussia Inn (afterwards, The Three Mariners), Casterbridge, where they have been waiting tables to pay for their stay, Susan and her adolescent daughter overhear the conversation in the adjoining room between the young Scot and Henchard — apparently Susan instantly recognizes his voice. Barnes has charged the moment with emotion and bathed the room in mysterious shadows, for this reunion of Susan and Michael will be crucial to the well-being of the wayfaring women, thrown out upon the world by the reported death at sea of the genial sailor, Newsome. The artist makes the scene in the restricted space at the seventeenth-century utterly convincing by deploying such details a the table-legs, the guttering candle, the chair, plain flooring, and canopied bed; however, his realism is chiefly dependant upon the earnest looks on the faces of the women and their sensible but not ostentatious mourning dresses.
The third instalment begins with "Chapter V (continued)," but, since the moment realised occurs in Chapter VII, the reader must decode the plate proleptically, and then turn back to it when the textual moment arrives. Barnes has signed the plate lower left with his name and "1885," which suggests that he had several weeks at least prior to publication to read and react the third instalment of the novel in proof.
Allingham, Philip V. "A Consideration of Robert Barnes' Illustrations for Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge as Serialised in the London Graphic: 2 January-15 May, 1886." Victorian Periodicals Review 28, 1 (Spring 1995): pp. 27-39
Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. The Graphic 33 (2 January-15 May 1886).
Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character. London: Osgood McIlvaine, 1895.
Jackson, Arlene. "The Mayor of Casterbridge: Realism and Metaphor."Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981. Pp. 96-104.
Created 28 July 2001
Last modified 21 March 2024