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The cartoon’s title refers to Thomas Hardy's novel about the Napoleonic wars.

Like du Maurier’s other cartoons with a vertical format, this one depicts two people in conversation, one of whom is a rich American widow. This cartoon not only provides yet another example of du Maurier deriving humor from an artist’s relationship with a patron, but it also introduces that phenomena new to Victorian Britain of American wealth intruding upon English society. Rich American fathers, often self made men, married their daughters to impoverished English noblemen as away of establishing themselves as members of the upper crust. English novelists and other commentators looked upon such marriages as yet another example of crude elements corrupting grand old traditions and thereby lowering the tone of a supposed high culture. They certainly destroyed the exclusivity of landed classes and nobility. Of course, a good many titles went back to ancestors who were little more pirates. The Californian widow here personifies the postcolonial phenomena of “the Empire waiting back.” Having purchased an old castle, this wealthy woman wants it to come accompanied with all the history and narrative that would make possessing it a sign that she has left a raw America, a country without much of a European-related history, to England with its long history. As the architect tells her, he can't provide an actual legend that has accrued to her castle, but he's willing to make up a story, and that will suffice. Is the architect humoring his client, or is he aware of how much founding narratives of the nobility and wealthy classes are really just stories — that is, is he superciliously looking down upon this rich outsider from the position of an insider, an Englishman, or does the cartoonist see him as willingly creating a new founding story? Or is it both?

What Artists and Their Families Have to Put Up With

• "Equal to the Occasion"
• "Trials of a Painter's Wife"
• "Histrionic Egotism [an actor's self-centeredness]"
• "How Reputations of Distinguished Amateurs are Sometimes Made"
• "Precedence in Vanity Fair"
• "Two on a Tower"
• "Nature versus Art"
• Artistic Amenities
• "Distinguished Professionals"
• "Social Taradiddles"
• "What Our Artist Has to Put Up With"
• "The Mother of Invention"
• "Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy"

Looking at Works of Art

• "Professional Beauties of the Past"
• "Flunkyana"
• "A New Reading of a Famous Picture"
• At the R. A. -- Triumph of Realistic Art
• Instinctive Critical Acumen [Moses Striking the Rock]

Bibliography

du Maurier, George. English Society. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897.

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Created 1 July 2001

Last modified 26 April 2020