"He advanced to their elbow, genially stole a gaze at them and said, "Emily, you don't know me?" for Thomas Hardy's "To Please His Wife" by W. Hennessey

[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Illustrations for Hardy's Short Fiction —> Next]

He advanced to their elbow. . .

W. Hennessey

1891

woodcut

16 cm high by 18.5 cm wide

Thomas Hardy's "To Please His Wife"

Black and White: A Weekly Illustrated Record and Review 1.21 (27 June 1891): 679

[See commentary below]

Scanned image, 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 the image and (2) link to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. ]

Commentary

Young Captain Shadrach Joliffe accompanies the two young friends, Emily (left) and Joanna, home from church after interrupting the regular Sunday service to give thanks for having just survived a shipwreck near his home port of Havenpool, Wessex (Poole, Dorset). By his choice of Regency dress for the young women Hennessey's illustration clearly dates the action of the story to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, making it in terms of chronological setting the earliest of the stories collected in Life's Little Ironies (1894). Kristin Brady in The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy (1982) mentions H. F. V. Johnstone's contending that the story is set about the time of Hardy's birth (1840), but she also notes that the golden guineas which Shadrach produces as his profit from his sailing venture to Newfoundland were not minted after 1813, and that the vaguely stated "rumours of war" (p. 681) point to a date during the period of the Napoleonic wars. Certainly Hennessey's illustrations seem to have been inspired by the women's fashions in the illustrations of Hardy's 1880-81 novel set against the backdrop of the early nineteenth century wars with France, The Trumpet Major

Last modified 27 December 2007