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". . . there, motionless, beside a gnarled fantastic thorn-tree, stood Lilian."
Sir John Gilbert
Wood engraving by the Dalziel Brothers
5 by 3 ⅜ inches (12.9 cm high by 8.7 cm wide), framed.
Edward Bulwer Lytton's A Strange Story, frontispiece.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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I took the way up the open ground towards which Margrave had pointed the wand, and there, motionless, beside a gnarled fantastic thorn-tree, stood Lilian. Her arms were folded across her breast; her face, seen by the moonlight, looked so innocent and so infantine, that I needed no other evidence to tell me how unconscious she was of the peril to which her steps had been drawn. I took her gently by the hand. “Come with me,” I said in a whisper, and she obeyed me silently, and with a placid smile.
Rough though the way, she seemed unconscious of fatigue. I placed her arm in mine, but she did not lean on it. We got back to the town. I obtained there an old chaise and a pair of horses. At morning Lilian was under her mother’s roof. About the noon of that day fever seized her; she became rapidly worse, and, to all appearance, in imminent danger. Delirium set in; I watched beside her night and day, supported by an inward conviction of her recovery, but tortured by the sight of her sufferings. On the third day a change for the better became visible; her sleep was calm, her breathing regular. [Chapter LV, p. 159.]
The wood-engraved Gilbert frontispiece draws the attention of the reader of Volume 20 in the Knebworth series (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1875) in advance to the central role the psychically suggestive Lillian Ashleigh plays in the plot of the novel. The remarkably handsome villain, Margrave (in fact, Louis Grayle under the effects of the Elixir of Life), had intended to spirit her away from England to assist him in producing another batch of the life-giving potion. His yacht is waiting by the shore of the river, ready to take the pair abroad next morning, but the policeman, Waby, and Dr. Allen Fenwick have tracked Lillian to the smugglers' hut, and have intervened to rescue her. This is precisely what Gilbert shows in his frontispiece: Lillian under the thorn tree in the foreground, Margrave's yacht (upper right), and the two figures on horseback (Fenwick and Waby), coming to the heroine's rescue, upper left. The hat abandoned on the ground reinforces the fact that Lillian is in some sort of psychic trance induced by the manipulative Margrave, the Gothic novel's diabolical antagonist.
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G. D. A Strange Story. Illustrated by John McLenan. Harper's Weekly V, 10 August — 8 March 1862.
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G. D. A Strange Story. Illustrated by F. O. Freeman and J. N. Hyde. Boston: Gardner A. Fuller, 1862.
Bulwer Lytton, Edward (Lord Lytton). A Strange Story. The Works of Edward Bulwer Lytton, Vol. VII. New York: P. F. Collier, n. d. Pp. 7-242.
Christensen, Allan Conrad. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1976.
Lytton, Victor A. (Lord Lytton). The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton. Vol. II. London: Macmillan, 1913.
Created 2 August 2026