[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> John McLenan —> The Woman in White —> Next]
I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.
John McLenan
26 November 1859
4 ½ by 4 ½ inches (11.7 cm by 11.5 cm), framed.
Frontispiece for Collins's The Woman in White (1902 edition).
[Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text 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 it, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.
I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. — See page 23. Staff artist John McLenan's initial composite woodblock engraving for Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel, Instalment 1, published on 16 November 1859 in Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vol. III, Part One: "The Story Begun by Walter Hartright, of Clement's Inn, Teacher of Drawing," Chapter IV, page 753 [to face p. 23 in the 1902 volume, but embedded on p. 11 in the 1861 volume]. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met — the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road — idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like — when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.
I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.
There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road — there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven — stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.
I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first.
“Is that the road to London?” she said. [Part One: "The Story Begun by Walter Hartright, of Clement's Inn, Teacher of Drawing" Chapter IV, p. 23 in the 1902 volume, p. 10 in the 1861 volume.]
The strange woman spoke first. "Is that the road to London?" she said. ["Hartright's Narrative," III, 753]
The novel's serial run in Dickens's weekly journal All the Year Round began on precisely the same date as that of the American serial run, a fact which suggests that Dickens had sent Harper's advance proofs, an arrangement which Harper's asserted in its advertising. But unlike Harper's, Dickens offered the British reading public no illustrations. Typically, a weekly instalment in the New York magazine would include two composite woodblock engravings: a small-scale, uncaptioned headnote vignette, generally of a character, and a large-scale study of a scene which would occur towards the end of the serial instalment, often at the curtain.
In McLenan's dramatic realisation of the chief moment in the first number, Walter Hartright, returning after midnight to London on foot from his mother's cottage at Hampstead, encounters the eponymous Woman in White, whom we later learn is Anne Catherick. In McLennan's plate the drawing master grips his cane, as if preparing to defend himself from whomever has just tapped him on the shoulder. However, by the time that the mysterious lady has asked him about how to get to London, all danger has passed, so that the illustrator has conflated two discrete moments in Walter Hartright's narrative.
Compare the American illustrator's handling of this momentous event in the novel with that of British illustrator Frances A. Fraser. The British artist shows no more than the tip of the cane in his 1865 engraving, and focuses more on juxtaposing the principals against the park-like backdrop. The moon illuminates the right-hand third of Fraser's illustration, in which his mysterious lady (holding a full-sized leather handbag rather than a white cloth purse as in McLennan's version) wears a shadowy grey rather than a fully white dress. But the chief difference lies in how the artists have elected to costume Walter Hartright. Fraser's drawing master, sporting a moustache, wears a bowler hat and short suit jacket, in the style of the 1ate 1850s, whereas McLennan's figure seems thoroughly American: he has a broad-brimmed hat, striped trousers, white vest and cravat, long hair, and a jacket extending nearly to his knees. However, McLennan has better captured the sense of Hartright's unease as the peculiar woman, not quite looking at him, gesticulates towards the darkness.
Note that the 1902 version of this illustration, serving as the volume's frontispiece, has been reduced in width, and is therefore not the original plate from the magazine serial, but a re-engraving. The Harper & Bros. 1861 volume edition, which has no frontispiece, displays this plate exactly as it appeared in the magazine serial, with Anne Catherick's extended hand not touching the illustration's right-hand margin as she points towards distant London.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. New York: Harper & Bros., 1861 (first printing, 15 August 1860; reissued in single-column format in 1902, 548 pages).
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vols. III-IV (26 November 1859 through 8 September 1860).
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Illustrated by Sir John Gilbert. London: Minerva, 2006.
Peters, Catherine. "Chapter Twelve: The Woman in White (1859-1860)." The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London: Minerva Press, 1992. Pp. 205-225.
Vann, J. Don. "The Woman in White in All the Year Round, 26 November — 25 August 1860." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 44-46.
Created 6 July 2024
