"Can You Tell Us the Way, Sir, to the Hotel Bold Soldier?" by George Du Maurier. The Cornhill Magazine, XXXIII (February 1876), facing page 230 — eighth full-page illustration for Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta. 10.4 cm high by 15.6 cm wide (4 ¼ by 6 ⅜ inches wide), framed. Engraver Joseph Swain. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Passage Illustrated: Ethelberta's Brothers by Chance meet Neigh and Ladywell
‘There’s for you, my fair one,’ said Neigh, closing and directing his letter.
‘Yours is for Mrs. Petherwin? So is mine,’ said Ladywell, grasping the bell-pull. ‘Shall I direct it to be put on her table with this one?’
‘Thanks.’ And the two letters went off to Ethelberta’s sitting-room, which she had vacated to receive Lord Mountclere in an empty one beneath. Neigh’s letter was simply a pleading of a sudden call away which prevented his waiting till she should return; Ladywell’s, though stating the same reason for leaving, was more of an upbraiding nature, and might almost have told its reader, were she to take the trouble to guess, that he knew of the business of Lord Mountclere with her to-day.
‘Now, let us get out of this place,’ said Neigh. He proceeded at once down the stairs, followed by Ladywell, who — settling his account at the bureau without calling for a bill, and directing his portmanteau to be sent to the Right-bank railway station — went with Neigh into the street.
They had not walked fifty yards up the quay when two British workmen, in holiday costume, who had just turned the corner of the Rue Jeanne d’Arc, approached them. Seeing him to be an Englishman, one of the two addressed Neigh, saying, ‘Can you tell us the way, sir, to the Hotel Bold Soldier?’
Neigh pointed out the place he had just come from to the tall young men, and continued his walk with Ladywell. [Chapter XXXVII, "The Hotel (continued) and the Quay in Front," 238]
Commentary
This eighth full-page illustration constitutes something of a red herring: although Etheleberta's aristocratic lovers meet her "workmen" brothers in the Rue Jeanne d'Arc by chance in the port of Rouen, neither pair is aware of the others' identities. Neigh gives the brothers directions to their aunt's hotel without making any connection between them and Ethelberta. Although the scene in text has no importance in the advancing of the marriage plot, the illustration seems to imply the inevitability of her society friends' discovering her plebeian origins.
Related Material
Image scan, caption, and commentary 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.]
Bibliography
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 2006
Last modified 17 January 2025