James Abbott Pasquier's Illustrations for Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes

Philip V. Allingham, Contributing Editor, Victorian Web; Faculty of Education, Lakehead University (Canada)

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Of Hardy's fourteen novels of character and environment, only the first two — Desperate Remedies (three volumes, 1872) and Under The Greenwood Tree (1872) — were first published in volume form. For the most part, Hardy first brought out his novels in monthly instalments in British literary magazines; the first of these was A Pair of Blue Eyes, published serially in Tinsley's Magazine in eleven monthly instalments between September 1872 through July 1873. Although Hardy Hardy already published Desperate Remedies with the house of Tinsley, he had no experience with either illustration or serial publication — other than that, of course, as a youth he had read Dickens, Ainsworth, and a host of other Victorian authors in illustrated monthly parts. On the strength of Hardy's opening, Tinsleys accepted the new novel in July, and had the first five chapters that would comprise the first number (actually published on 15 August) by the beginning of August. Time was short, then, for the artist appointed by the Tinsley Brothers to produce the first illustration. Neither of Hardy's biographies nor his correspondence indicate that he even knew the artist, let alone was involved in his selection.

James Abbott Pasquier, the artist whom the publishers chose to illustrate Hardy's third novel (discounting the rejected The Poor Man and the Lady, which Hardy apparently mined for A Pair of Blue Eyes). In the world of magazine illustration, Pasquier was a veteran, having already worked for Tinsley's Magazine, The Illustrated London News, The Sunday Magazine, The Quiver, and London Society. Of Pasquier, Pamela Dalziel remarks,

Little is known about him, although by the time he began work on Hardy's novel he had already exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy and the Society of British Artists and contributed drawings to a variety of books and periodicals. . . . [381]

Arlene M. Jackson adds the titles of several books illustrated by Pasquier: an edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs and another of Richardson's Clarissa (1863).

His technical expertise became clear in his Picturesque Groups, a collection of drawings of the human form, to be used as instruction for students of the graphic arts. [Jackson 31]

Although his style is akin to that of Fred Walker, George Du Maurier and other illustrators of the 1860s in his solid, three-dimensionalism and focus on small groups of characters, he lacks their sense of iconography and humour, and does not emulate their patient detailism, instead generalizing the background to emphasize the figures in the foreground. Moreover, whereas many sixties illustrators, intending each scene to be a species of stage tableau, would telegraph to the reader/viewer the moment realized through a direct quotation from the letter-press, Pasquier usually summarizes a textual passage for which he provides a visual analogue. Although the first plate in this series, "A Perplexing Sight" is based on a direct quotation from Volume One, Chapter Five, the remaining eleven plates have captions of the artist's own invention.

In each monthly instalment of Tinsley's Magazine, volumes XI and XII, the first page of text which the plate faces (except for the February number, whose illustration does not face the opening page) is unnumbered. Page numbers in brackets refer to the Penguin edition. Eight of the eleven monthly illustrations in Tinsley's Magazine (namely those for September, October, December, 1872; and for January, February, March, April, and July, 1873) refer to incidents that occur in the final chapters of the monthly instalments, suggesting that the illustrator tended to choose as his subjects those scenes which would keep the reader engaged with the text and generate the maximum of suspense by making the reader wait until almost the end of an instalment for the textual moment telegraphed at the opening of a monthly part.

Related Materials

Reference List

The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol. One: 1840-1892. Ed. Richard L. Purdy and Michael Millgate. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.

Hardy, Thomas. A Pair of Blue Eyes. Tinsley's Magazine, vols. XI and XII.September 1872 through July 1873.

_____.A Pair of Blue Eyes. Ed. Pamela Dalziel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.

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

Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist. London: Bodley Head, and New York: Random House, 1971.

Purdy, Richard L. Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study. Oxford: Clarendon, 1954.

Wright, Sarah Bird. Thomas Hardy A to Z. New York: Facts on File, 2002.

Victorian Web Victorian Book Illustration James Abbott Pasquier Thomas Hardy

Last modified June 4, 2003