Gwendolen at the Gaming Table

Gwendolen at the Gaming Table by H. Winthrop Pierce (American, 1850-1835/6), engraved by George T. Andrew. c.1880. Frontispiece, Daniel Deronda, Vol. 1 of 2.

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Commentary

Gwendolen Harleth is first seen at a casino in Germany, where she is staying at a hotel in a resort town. In this insalubrious context, the disconcerting gaze of a young gentleman puts the inexperienced gambler completely off her stride, and brings a dramatic end to her winning streak. The young gentleman assessing her is none other than Daniel Deronda himself. But there is more to this first encounter than a hint of the profound effect that Daniel will have on her.

Of special interest here is the costumed boy in the foreground. He draws our attention simply by being there. Elaborately garbed in Highland regalia, bare-legged, seeming sad or bored or both, he stands looking away from the roulette-table to which the eyes of participants and onlookers alike are glued:

The one exception was a melancholy little boy, with his knees and calves simply in their natural clothing of epidermis, but for the rest of his person in a fancy dress. He alone had his face turned towards the doorway, and fixing on it the blank gaze of a bedizened child stationed as a masquerading advertisement on the platform of an itinerant show, stood close behind a lady deeply engaged at the roulette-table. [1: 4]

The pretty mascot of a gambling parent, perhaps, or indeed part of a little advertising tableau with the serious-looking, formally attired elderly man beside him, this child is far from insignificant. His presence prepares us for Gwendolen's discovery that in marrying Henleigh Grandcourt for money, she will be depriving another unconsidered child, one of her future husband's illegitimate children by his mistress, Lydia Glasher, of the inheritance due to him. Although she feels bound to go ahead with the wedding, she suffers greatly, later on, when she notes Grandcourt’s failure even to acknowledge Lydia, "along with the children she has borne him" (2: 218), on a ride in Rotten Row. This brings home to Gwendolen the kind of man he is, and raises desperate fantasies in her, of deliverance from such a marriage to such a man, to the extent that she thinks, “What release, but death?” (2: 218).

Despite the Evangelicals' belief in the fallen nature of man, the innocent child had a special place in Victorian culture. In literature, Charles Dickens in particular championed this vulnerable figure; but not all young characters, even in Dickens's own oeuvre, are heros or heroines, or even need to have a speaking part, in order to contribute to the novels in which they appear. The child, even the unhappy child with her night terrors inside Gwendolen herself, must always be answered for, cannot be set aside or ignored. Daniel Deronda’s mother, who deprived her own son of maternal affection by committing him to another’s care, will make the same shattering discovery in an interview with him of great intensity much further on in the novel (Book VII, "The Mother and the Son"). It is not too much to suggest that the unhappy little boy whose presence is disregarded by the gamblers and their audience at the beginning of the novel, but is brought out by the illustrator in the frontispiece itself, is a pointer to all this.

Related Material

Bibliography

Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda Vol. 1. Boston: Dana Estes, (?)1880. Internet Archive, from a copy in the University of California Libraries. Web. 2 May 2025.

_____. Daniel Deronda Vol. 2. Boston: Dana Estes, (?)1880. Internet Archive, from a copy in the University of California Libraries. Web. 2 May 2025.

Created 2 May 2025