"Pearston knocked at the door of the minute freehold. The girl herself opened it, lamp in hand" by Walter Paget (1863-1935)

Pearston knocked at the door of the minute freehold. The girl herself opened it, lamp in hand

Walter Paget (1863-1935)

1860

9 x 5.75 inches; 19 x 14 cm

Illustrated London News (29 October 1892): 545.

Scene from Chapter XIII, "She Threatens to Resume Corporeal Substance," p. 545 (last column) in Chapter IV of Thomas Hardy's The Pursuit of The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament.

Scanned image, caption, and commentary 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 the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. ]

Commentary

Jocelyn Pearston emerges from the shadows of the graveyard, mystified by a presence he has seen at the graveside: the double of the young island-girl he had known nineteen years earlier: "all of a sudden he seemed to see Avice Caro herself, standing beside her own grave in the light of the moon" (545). Has he been asleep, or is the vision real? Before returning to London, he resolves to visit the village of his (and her) youth, East Wake, where, through a lamp-lit cotage window he sees the facsimile of "the Avice he had lost, the girl he had seen at the churchyard" (545). After learning from some homeward-bound quarrymen of the Caro family's fate, Jocelyn, "deeply remorseful, knocked at the door of the minute freehold. The girl herself opened it, lamp in hand." This is the moment realised in the plate immediately below this passage. Paget infuses the scene with a mysterious stillness and solemnity, the lamp becoming the sacremental presence of Jocelyn's patron divinity and the shadows of the chiaroscuro the gloom from which he has suddenly emerged.

A touch of comedy after Avice's seeming return from the grave is the passage in which she describes the assistance afforded her by her over-eager admirers, "Carl Woollat, and Sammy Wayes, and Ted Gibsey" -- Sam attempted to display the ardour of his affection in wringing out a piece of laundry: he "twisted a linen tablecloth into two pieces, for all the world as if it had been a pipe-light" (p. 546). While Jocelyn focuses on the disparity in their ages and social conditions, he fails to acknowledge that there may have been other lovers before him.

Jocelyn returns to London, but cannot settle back into his everyday existence. By chance he meets the girl again on the London docks, where Portland stone is offloaded (Captain Kibbs and his wife, relatives of Avice, have brought her up to town for a few days), but Jocelyn is almost tongue-tied, not knowing what to say as a man of forty to a girl not yet nineteen. Obsessed by her image, however, he determines to throw over the fashionable Nicola Pine-Avon in favour of the little laundress, whom he decides to pursue by first renting rooms for the summer at an island lodging-house for tourists called "Dell-o'-th'-rock Castle."

References

Hardy, Thomas. The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved. The Illustrated London News, 8 October-17 December, 1892. Pp. 426-775.

Hardy, Thomas. The Well-Beloved with The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2000.

Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.

Last modified 25 August 2002