"He moved back to the church wall, warm from the afternoon sun, and sat down upon a window-sill facing the grave" by Walter Paget (1863-1935)

He moved back to the church wall, warm from the afternoon sun, and sat down upon a window-sill facing the grav

Walter Paget (1863-1935)

1860

17.5 cm by 23.6 cm

Illustrated London News (22 October 1892): 515: Scene from Ch. 12, "She Becomes an Inaccessible Ghost" (last line) in Thomas Hardy's 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

This plate marks not merely the end of the October 22nd instalment, but also that of Jocelyn's protracted youth, for after the lines illustrated comes "End of Part First" (515). The next instalment begins "Part Second: A Young Man of Forty" (545). What has made all the difference, of course, is Jocelyn's new-found sense of "regret"(515) and his awareness of his own mortality; the futility of thinking he can recapture the past, however, is only beginning to dawn on him, so this is hardly a moment of Joycean epiphany.

At a distance (like Hamlet come too late for his Ophelia) Jocelyn observes the funeral procession and the burial of "his Avice, as he now began presumptiously to call her" (515). Thus Hardy employs the limited omniscient point of view to underscore his hero's incomplete understanding of himself and others, for Avice ceased to be "his" when he made his bargain with Marcia.

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 29 April 2008