[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> F. A. Fraser —> Next]
"There was Count Fosco, slowly walking backwards and forwards on the grass."
F. A. Fraser
Wood engraving by the Dalziel Brothers
6 ¼ x 4 ⅛ inches (15.9 cm high by 10.3 cm wide)
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, fifth illustration, facing p. 175.
Click on the image to enlarge it.
Scanned image by Simon Cooke 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.]
“You will sign nothing, Laura, without first looking at it?”
“Certainly not, Marian. Whatever I can harmlessly and honestly do to help him I will do — for the sake of making your life and mine, love, as easy and as happy as possible. But I will do nothing ignorantly, which we might, one day, have reason to feel ashamed of. Let us say no more about it now. You have got your hat on — suppose we go and dream away the afternoon in the grounds?”
On leaving the house we directed our steps to the nearest shade.
As we passed an open space among the trees in front of the house, there was Count Fosco, slowly walking backwards and forwards on the grass, sunning himself in the full blaze of the hot June afternoon. He had a broad straw hat on, with a violet-coloured ribbon round it. A blue blouse, with profuse white fancy-work over the bosom, covered his prodigious body, and was girt about the place where his waist might once have been with a broad scarlet leather belt. Nankeen trousers, displaying more white fancy-work over the ankles, and purple morocco slippers, adorned his lower extremities. He was singing Figaro’s famous song in the Barber of Seville, with that crisply fluent vocalisation which is never heard from any other than an Italian throat, accompanying himself on the concertina, which he played with ecstatic throwings-up of his arms, and graceful twistings and turnings of his head, like a fat St. Cecilia masquerading in male attire. “Figaro qua! Figaro la! Figaro su! Figaro giu!” sang the Count, jauntily tossing up the concertina at arm’s length, and bowing to us, on one side of the instrument, with the airy grace and elegance of Figaro himself at twenty years of age. ["Miss Halcombe's Narrative, Continued," Chapter I from serial instalment XIV; in the 1875 Chatto & Windus edition, p. 175]
After so serious a confrontation as that between Laura and her husband in the library over her refusal to sign a document indemnifying Sir Percival against his creditors' claims, Collins had inserted an apparently comic scene. This engraving, then, complements the dramatic scene in the library that John Gilbert chose as the subject of his vignette for the title-page of the 1875 Chatto and Windus edition, "Come back and sign!" cried Sir Percival from the other side of the table. Far from being Glyde's Machiavellian advisor, the Count in this garden scene appears as another Italian stereotype: the quaintly habited folk musician singing Figaro's famous solo from Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville. Written in 1815 and first staged in Rome in February 1816, the comic opera was first performed in England two years later in Italian at Covent Garden. Thus, the opera was some thirty years old when Collins, writing in 1860, set the novel (in the years 1849-50). The opera toured Britain once in that period, with the Italian Operatic Company (1849).
Here is an instance in which one may compare a realisation of the same scene in the Harper's serial, John McLenan's "Figaro Quá! Figaro Lá!" etc. (25 February 1860), which foregrounds Fosco is his peasant garb as a singer transported by his own music: neither Laura nor Marian appears in the cameo, and the garden setting is barely suggested.
. . . Figaro extols his own virtues. Because of Sir Percival's financial difficulties, it is an interesting choice by Fosco, since the plot of the Barber of Seville [sic] revolves around Figaro's attempts to spoil the older Bartolo's prospects of marrying his young and wealthy ward. [Bachman and Cox, "Note 2," p. 251]
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vols. III-IV (16 November 1859 through 8 September 1860).
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Illustrated by John McLenan. New York: Harper & Bros., 1861.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. London: Sampson Low, 1860; rpt. with illustrations by F. A. Fraser and Sir John Gilbert. London: Chatto & Windus, 1875.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Illustrated by Sir John Gilbert. London: Minerva, 2006.
Created 19 September 2024