Dora and Miss Mills
Sol Eytinge
Wood engraving
10.1 high x 7.7 cm wide
Thirteenth full-page illustration for Dickens's David Copperfield in the Ticknor and Fields (Boston), 1867, Diamond Edition.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The thirteenth illustration — "Dora and Miss Mills" — describes the relationship between the spoiled child of a socially prominent "proctor" in Doctors' Commons and her older friend and confident, Julia Mills. With her guitar and Jip sitting on the table, his "pagoda" on the floor in the foreground, the illustration cannot actually refer to David's clandestine meeting at Julia Mills' home in Chapter 37, "A Little Cold Water" (in which David reveals that his inheritance has evaporated), since David and Dora do not purchase the "Chinese house for Jip, with little bells on the top" (354) until Chapter 43, "Another Retrospect." Since, however, Julia boards an East-Indiaman and sails from Gravesend in the previous chapter, the scene as Eytinge has composed it, including the two articles that epitomize Dora's cheerful impracticality (the guitar and pagoda), is an utter impossibility. Thus, Eytinge obviously did not feel bound to be literally truthful to the text he was illustrating.
Eytinge's version of Dora departs somewhat from the dark-haired, demure beauty of Phiz's in "I Fall into Captivity" and "Our Housekeeping", the guitar and a rather different pagoda appearing in Phiz's "My child-wife's old companion", in which Dora has becoming a presiding spirit via the medium of an oil portrait on the wall above the recently-widowed David.
Reference
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: U. Ohio Press, 1980.
Dickens, Charles. The Personal History of David Copperfield. Il. Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867.
Vann, J. Don. Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985.
Last modified 24 January 2011