Decorative Initial Vignette "H" by George du Maurier for Thomas Hardy's "The Hand of Ethelberta" in "The Cornhill Magazine," Vol. XXXIII (March 1876)

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Decorative Initial "H" with Vignette of Atmospheric Setting

George du Maurier

Joseph Swain

March 1876

Composite woodblock engraving

Designed for Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta, Chapter 39.

6.6 cm high by 6 cm wide (2 ½ by 2 ¼ inches), vignetted.

The Cornhill Magazine, Vol. XXXIII, p. 358.

[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.]

Passage Illustrated: The End of Summer

The year was now moving on apace, but Ethelberta and Picotee chose to remain at Knollsea, in the brilliant variegated brick and stone villa to which they had removed in order to be in keeping with their ascending fortunes. Autumn had begun to make itself felt and seen in bolder and less subtle ways than at first. In the morning now, on coming downstairs, in place of a yellowish-green leaf or two lying in a corner of the lowest step, which had been the only previous symptoms around the house, she saw dozens of them playing at corkscrews in the wind, directly the door was opened. Beyond, towards the sea, the slopes and scarps that had been muffled with a thick robe of cliff herbage, were showing their chill grey substance through the withered verdure, like the background of velvet whence the pile has been fretted away. Unexpected breezes broomed and rasped the smooth bay in evanescent patches of stippled shade, and, besides the small boats, the ponderous lighters used in shipping stone were hauled up the beach in anticipation of the equinoctial attack. [Chapter XLI, "Kollsea — Melchester," 369]

Commentary

Autumn comes to Knollsea as Ethelberta approaches her May-December marriage to the wealthy Viscount Mountlere. Breaking off her relationship with Christopher Julian is motivated by her giving the artistic young man to her sister, Picotee. However, the reader naturally wonders whether she will commit herself to Mountclere and give up Julian for good. The vignette, then, signals not only the end of summer, but the conclusion of Ethelberta’s romances.

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.

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Illustration

George
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The Hand of
Ethelberta

Created 16 January 2008

Last modified 17 January 2025