Main illustration Her eyes, dim with watching, weary with grief, searched the lawyer's unfathomable face. “His unhappy daughters?” she repeated to herself, vacantly. — and the accompanying headnote vignette for "The First Scene," Chapter XII (continued), which again involves the London attorney, Mr. William Pendril in Wilkie Collins's No Name, first published in All the Year Round and Harper's Weekly (Vol. VI-No. 279), the 3 May 1862 instalment; vignette: 11.4 cm high by 5.5 cm wide, or 4 ½ inches high by 2 ¼ inches wide, vignetted; with the smaller and regular illustrations both appearing on p. 282 in the serial). The main plate, also a wood-engraving, appears at the bottom of the folio page in the serial: 11.7 cm high by 11.5 cm wide, or 4 ½ inches square, framed; bottom of p. 53 in volume's Chapter XII. These two illustrations are positioned facing one another in the volume: pp. 52-53 for the vignette within Chapter XII.
Passage Realised in the Main Plate: Pendril shows Miss Garth a significant document
“I have a second reason,” he continued, “for showing you the will. If I can prevail on you to read certain clauses in it, under my superintendence, you will make your own discovery of the circumstances which I am here to disclose — circumstances so painful that I hardly know how to communicate them to you with my own lips.”
Miss Garth looked him steadfastly in the face.
“Circumstances, sir, which affect the dead parents, or the living children?”
“Which affect the dead and the living both,” answered the lawyer. “Circumstances, I grieve to say, which involve the future of Mr. Vanstone’s unhappy daughters.”
“Wait,” said Miss Garth, “wait a little.” She pushed her gray hair back from her temples, and struggled with the sickness of heart, the dreadful faintness of terror, which would have overpowered a younger or a less resolute woman. Her eyes, dim with watching, weary with grief, searched the lawyer’s unfathomable face. “His unhappy daughters?” she repeated to herself, vacantly. “He talks as if there was some worse calamity than the calamity which has made them orphans.” She paused once more; and rallied her sinking courage. “I will not make your hard duty, sir, more painful to you than I can help,” she resumed. “Show me the place in the will. Let me read it, and know the worst.”
Mr. Pendril turned back to the first page, and pointed to a certain place in the cramped lines of writing. “Begin here,” he said. [Chapter XII (continued), p. 282 in serial, p. 53 in volume]
Passage Realised in the Vignette: Pendril examines a significant document in the study
“You have some reason, Miss Garth,” he began, “to feel not quite satisfied with my past conduct toward you, in one particular. During Mrs. Vanstone’s fatal illness, you addressed a letter to me, making certain inquiries; which, while she lived, it was impossible for me to answer. Her deplorable death releases me from the restraint which I had imposed on myself, and permits — or, more properly, obliges me to speak. You shall know what serious reasons I had for waiting day and night in the hope of obtaining that interview which unhappily never took place; and in justice to Mr. Vanstone’s memory, your own eyes shall inform you that he made his will.”
He rose; unlocked a little iron safe in the corner of the room; and returned to the table with some folded sheets of paper, which he spread open under Miss Garth’s eyes. When she had read the first words, “In the name of God, Amen,” he turned the sheet, and pointed to the end of the next page. She saw the well-known signature: “Andrew Vanstone.” She saw the customary attestations of the two witnesses; and the date of the document, reverting to a period of more than five years since. [Chapter XII (continued), p. 282 in serial, p. 52 in volume]
Commentary: Setting up Serial Readers for a Shocking Revelation in the Will
Even with the novel’s having advanced as far as the seventh weekly curtain, serial readers would have had only a vague apprehension about the financial and personal implications of the title No Name for Magdalen and Norah Vanstone. They are very much on the minds of the characters depicted in this week’s illustrations, but McLenan has chosen not to present either of the sisters other than obliquely, implied as being behind the door of the main plate. And yet the illustrator facilitates Collins’s building suspense by employing both the vignettes to underscore the arrival of the family attorney from London, whose visit must have been arranged well before Andrew Vanstone’s death and his wife’s collapse.
And now something unexpected occurs in the volume, which of course does not acknowledge where the serial curtain originally fell in the middle of Chapter XII: a second vignette is positioned on the second full page of the chapter, p. 53. Although it bears no caption, clearly it involves William Pendril’s perusing a significant document that he has just abstracted from the open safe in Andrew Vanstone’s study. Collins resolves the identification of the dcuments quickly: these are a letter to the lawyer and an unsigned will. Now the lawyer and governess review how the terms of the only will available, Mrs. Vanstone's, will affect the daughters, for her husband died intestate, and she died in childbirth, with the infant (a legitimate heir, ironically) dying shortly afterward. The significant figure present in the text but only implied in the vignette is Miss Garth. However, the smaller plate more effectively establishes the setting as the study. By the lawyer’s bald pate and professional suit, McLenan makes it clear that the pivotal figure in both Chapter XII illustrations is William Pendril, the London solicitor, who has confirmed the husband’s sudden death only upon arriving recently at the Bristol railway station.
Related Material
- Frontispiece to Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1864) by John Everett Millais
- Victorian Paratextuality: Pictorial Frontispieces and Pictorial Title-Pages
- Wilkie Collins's No Name (1862): Charles Dickens, Sheridan's The Rivals, and the Lost Franklin Expedition
- "The Law of Abduction": Marriage and Divorce in Victorian Sensation and Mission Novels
- Gordon Thomson's A Poser from Fun (5 April 1862)
- Kate Egan's Playthings to Men: Women, Power, and Money in Gaskell and Trollope
- Philip V. Allingham, The Victorian Sensation Novel, 1860-1880 — "preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment"
Image scans and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the images, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Blain, Virginia. “Introduction” and “Explanatory Notes” to Wilkie Collins's No Name. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
