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Michael Mail
R. Knight
1878
Wood engraving
16 cm high by 10 cm wide
Fourth illustration for Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, facing page 40 (recto)
See below for passage illustrated and commentary.
Photograph, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham
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The first [of the party of musicians assembling in the wood] was a bowed and bent man, who carried a fiddle under his arm, and walked as if engaged in studying some object connected with the surface pf the road. He was Michael Mail . . . . [Part the First, "Winter," Chapter 1, "Mellstock Lane," p. 5]
Instead of electing to depict such significant characters as the second and third suitors of Fancy Day, Parson Maybold and the wealthy farmer Frederic Shinar, Robert Knight (possibly at the direction of the editor, William Tinseley) has devoted a number of "character" illustrations to the members of the Mellstock quire whom Hardy introduces in the first chapter. This selection of subject for the fourth and fifth illustrations has necessitated the insertion of plates where they have little or no relevance to the text, so that, for example, Michael Mail is situated thirty-five pages after the passage realised, and Thomas Leaf fully 138 pages later. Clearly, then, either the illustrator or the editor wished to emphasize the colourful village characters, even at the expense of the romantic plot.
Although the illustrator should attempt to emulate the narrator in showing us what the protagonist sees as he walks down Mellstock Lane on a December evening, Knight has incorrectly contextualized the figure of the old figure for, although he is in a great coat and wears gaiters to protect himself from the cold, he does not have his instrument in a case, and appears to be standing against a brick wall rather than in the woods. Knight has made a similar error in his portrait of Mr. Penny, who is indoors rather than outdoors.
Hardy, Thomas. Under The Greenwood Tree. A Rural Painting of the Dutch School (1870). Il. R. Knight. London: Chatto and Windus, 1878.
All citations from the 1878 Chatto and Windus edition have been checked against the following readily available paperback edition:
Hardy, Thomas. Under The Greenwood Tree, or, The Mellstock Quire — A Rural Painting of the Dutch School (1872). Ed. Anna Winchcombe. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and London: Macmillan Education, 1978.
Purdy, Richard Little. Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1954, rpt., 1968.
Turner, Paul. Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Last modified 24 June 2014