Young Farfrae repeated the last verse. It was plain that nothing so pathetic had been heard at the King of Prussia for a considerable time by Robert Barnes. Plate 4, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (Chapter VIII), which appeared in The Graphic on 23 January 1886, p. 101. 17.6 cm high by 22.7 cm wide — 6 ¾ inches high by 8 ¾ inches wide. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Passage Illustrated: A Pathetic Scottish Song
“It’s hame, and it’s hame, hame fain would I be,
O hame, hame, hame to my ain countree!
There’s an eye that ever weeps, and a fair face will be fain,
As I pass through Annan Water with my bonnie bands again;
When the flower is in the bud, and the leaf upon the tree,
The lark shall sing me hame to my ain countree!”
There was a burst of applause, and a deep silence which was even more eloquent than the applause. It was of such a kind that the snapping of a pipe-stem too long for him by old Solomon Longways, who was one of those gathered at the shady end of the room, seemed a harsh and irreverent act. Then the ventilator in the window-pane spasmodically started off for a new spin, and the pathos of Donald’s song was temporarily effaced.
“’Twas not amiss — not at all amiss!” muttered Christopher Coney, who was also present. And removing his pipe a finger’s breadth from his lips, he said aloud, “Draw on with the next verse, young gentleman, please.”
“Yes. Let’s have it again, stranger,” said the glazier, a stout, bucket-headed man, with a white apron rolled up round his waist. “Folks don’t lift up their hearts like that in this part of the world.” And turning aside, he said in undertones, “Who is the young man? —Scotch, d’ye say?”
“Yes, straight from the mountains of Scotland, I believe,” replied Coney.
Young Farfrae repeated the last verse. It was plain that nothing so pathetic had been heard at the Three Mariners for a considerable time. The difference of accent, the excitability of the singer, the intense local feeling, and the seriousness with which he worked himself up to a climax, surprised this set of worthies, who were only too prone to shut up their emotions with caustic words. [Chapter VIII, p. 102 in serial; volume, pp. 60-61]
Commentary: A Romantic Figure out of Burns's Scotland
Even if Barnes' composite woodblock illustrations for the serialisation do reveal the occasional absence of imagination and of a flair for the dramatic ("Where is the Skimmington, or Henchard's dummy floating in the weir?" one wonders), his women here do not run to the "bovine type of beauty" for which Reid criticizes Barnes. His illustrations reveal that Barnes was very much at home in the novel's rural, working-class idiom, as the fourth plate (23 January 1886), in which Farfrae sings a Scottish ballad at the King of Prussia (afterwards, in volume, The Three Mariners') indicates. Like a Sensation novelist, Barnes packs his scene with highly realistic costuming and stage properties (which Reg Terry terms "Detailism" in Victorian Popular Fiction 1860-1880, p. 55). The pub's taproom (more like a cosy parlour, with its massive stone fireplace and high-backed settle) is full of village characters, in whose individualizing peculiarities Barnes delights. All thoroughly believable (and appropriate to the period and the geographical setting) are the workmen's caps, the bourgeois beaver hats, the pewter mugs, solid glasses, top boots, and long-stemmed clay pipes. A nice touch is the face of Elizabeth-Jane glimpsed from behind the settle, turned slightly to one side, listening intently but apparently visualising moments from her own experience as well as Farfrae's Scottish Highlands.
Scanned image and text 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.]
Bibliography
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 (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.
Terry, R.C. Victorian Popular Fiction 1860-1880. London: Macmillan, 1983.
Created 28 July 2001
Last modified 18 March 2024