"'This, Sir,' Said Bounderby, 'Is My Wife, Mrs. Bounderby.'" by Harry French

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"'This, Sir,' Said Bounderby, 'Is My Wife, Mrs. Bounderby.'"

Harry French

Wood engraving

1870s

10.8 cm wide x 13.8 cm high

Illustration for Dickens's Hard Times for These Times in the British Household Edition, p. 36

Scan and text by Philip V. Allingham

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This illustration, which takes place in the Bounderbys' parlour, depicts Bounderby introducing his wife to ames Harthouse. (Book II, Ch. 2). Since, like Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Dickens's industrial novel may be read at one level as an examination of various types of marriages and liaisons (including that very peculiar connection between Mrs. Sparsit and Mr. Bounderby), the sequence of plates in which French graphs the relationship between Louisa, her husband, and her would-be lover should be examined carefully. The importance of this series of relationships to the novel French signals in Plate 1. Plate 9, in which Bounderby introduces his young wife to the gallant James Harthouse, comments upon the inappropriateness of such a disproportionate match through the pair of vases immediately behind the couple. In this juxtaposition, the large, wide-mouthed jar represents Bounderby, and the small, stoppered, gently rounded vase his wife--we note, too, the proprietary arm which encloses Louisa's waist. In the next significant representation of Louisa and Harthouse, plate 12, in the garden at Bounderby's country estate, only the broad trunk of an oak separates the pair. Louisa avoids meeting his gaze, while he seems to be studying her and listening intently to her. Whereas in the previous scene, dominated by her husband's boasting, placed Louisa and Harthouse in the midst of Bounderby's household gods (II: 2), in this French has depicted the couple "among the leafy shadows" of Bounderby's woods, looking for some opening for sin.

References

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times with twenty illustrations by H. French. London: Chapman and Hall [1875?].

Created 17 April 2002

Last modified 25 December 2019