[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> George Du Maurier —> Illustrations for Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta —> Next]
Decorative Initial "T" with Vignette of Lord Mountclere
George du Maurier
January 1876
Composite woodblock engraving
Designed for Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta, Chapter 31.
6.6 cm high by 6 cm wide (2 ½ by 2 ¼ inches), vignetted.
The Cornhill Magazine, Vol. XXXIII, p. 1.
[Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image, caption 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 it and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Picotee recollected herself, and hastily drew in her impulses. ‘My dear mistress,’ she said blandly. ‘That is she on Mr. Doncastle’s arm. And look, who is that funny old man the elderly lady is helping downstairs?’
‘He is our honoured guest, Lord Mountclere. Mrs. Doncastle will have him all through the dinner, and after that he will devote himself to Mrs. Petherwin, your “dear mistress.” He keeps looking towards her now, and no doubt thinks it a nuisance that she is not with him. Well, it is useless to stay here. Come a little further — we’ll follow them.’ Menlove began to lead the way downstairs, but Picotee held back.
‘Won’t they see us?’ she said.
‘No. And if they do, it doesn’t matter. Mrs. Doncastle would not object in the least to the daughter of her respected head man being accidentally seen in the hall.’
They descended to the bottom and stood in the hall. ‘O, there’s father!’ whispered Picotee, with childlike gladness, as Chickerel became visible to her by the door. The butler nodded to his daughter, and became again engrossed in his duties. [Chapter XXIX, "Ethelberta's Dressing-room — Mr. Doncastle's House," 3]
The seventh instalment, comprising thirty-one pages, contains four chapters, with the major illustration realizing an incident in the instalment's third chapter. The vignette of Mountclere, on the other hand, refers to no one passage or incident. Rather, it establishes the aging roue as the mainspring of the resolution of Ethelberta's romantic complications. The vignette, then, both serves to introduce the sixty-five-year-old peer and to prepare readers for Hardy's verbal portrait of Viscount Mountclere in advance of his interview with her:
By this time Lord Mountclere had noticed Ethelberta’s presence, and straightening himself to ten years younger, he lifted his hat in answer to her smile, and came up jauntily. It was a good time now to see what the viscount was really like. He appeared to be about sixty-five, and the dignified aspect which he wore to a gazer at a distance became depreciated to jocund slyness upon nearer view, when the small type could be read between the leading lines. Then it could be seen that his upper lip dropped to a point in the middle, as if impressing silence upon his too demonstrative lower one. His right and left profiles were different, one corner of his mouth being more compressed than the other, producing a deep line thence downwards to the side of his chin. Each eyebrow rose obliquely outwards and upwards, and was thus far above the little eye, shining with the clearness of a pond that has just been able to weather the heats of summer. Below this was a preternaturally fat jowl, which, by thrusting against cheeks and chin, caused the arch old mouth to be almost buried at the corners.
Allingham, Philip V. "Part Two: Du Maurier's Twenty-Two Illustrations for the Cornhill Magazine's Serialisation of Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta, July, 1875-May, 1876." The Thomas Hardy Year Book No. 40: Hardy's Artists by Philip Allingham. Guernsey: Toucan Press, 2012. 58-66.
Hardy, Thomas. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. The Cornhill Magazine. Vol. XXXIII (1876).
Hardy, Thomas. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. Intro. Robert Gittings. London: Macmillan, 1975.
Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.
Page, Norman. "Thomas Hardy's Forgotten Illustrators." Bulletin of the New York Public Library 77, 4 (Summer, 1974): 454-463.
Sutherland, John. "The Cornhill Magazine." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989. 150.
Vann, J. Don. "Thomas Hardy (1840-1928. The Hand of Ethelberta in the Cornhill Magazine, July 1875-May 1876." in Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985. 83.
Created 16 January 2008
Last updated 16 January 2025