[This
is an adapted version of an assignment written for a course on the
nineteenth-century novel]
At
this remove it is easy to overlook the volume and range of late-nineteenth
century periodical literature: ‘Once newspapers and magazines were finally and
fully liberated from fiscal restraints [with the abolition of stamp duty on
print] after 1861, their rate of growth was remarkable’ (Simon Eliot, 2012,
p.47). Technological advances in
printing through the century also increased quantities and decreased costs
(Eliot, 2001, pp.331ff). That quantity
was startling: ‘the Victorians published not only over 25,000 journals of all
kinds including newspapers but also a few hundred reviews, magazines, and
weeklies that could claim to be “literature”’ (Walter E. Houghton, 1979,
p.389).
Magazines
catered to a wide range of interests, both non-fiction and fiction. Houghton makes a distinction between those
that were concerned with the formation of opinion, and many of those launched
in the 1860s, including the Cornhill,
that ‘were often so firmly committed to amusement as to banish politics and
religion altogether’ (ibid., p.407). The
latter included a significant proportion of fiction in their content, and
magazine publication was a significant revenue stream for authors prior to republication
in book form. While modern readers
associate classic Victorian literature with books, particularly the
three-decker, for the first readers consumption was achieved in more diverse
forms: ‘What must have been obvious to any aspiring novelist by mid-century was
that Victoria’s reign was not, in publishing terms at least, going to be
characterised by the book, but rather by the newspaper and the magazine’
(Eliot, 2012, p.48).
The
Cornhill Magazine was a mass-circulation monthly magazine founded by George
Smith (owner of the publishing firm Smith, Elder & Co.), which was first
published in 1860 (Spencer L. Eddy, 1970, p.1).
It was priced at a shilling per issue, which meant it was comfortably
affordable for a middle class readership.
From 1871 the magazine was edited by Leslie Stephen, and the following
year he invited Hardy to contribute a new novel for serialisation (Linda M. Shires,
2002, p.xi). The novel was Far From the Madding Crowd, which
appeared in twelve instalments between January and December 1874, in volumes 29
(January to June) and 30 (July to December).
Smith offered Hardy £400 for the serial and first book-edition rights, a
significant advance on the sums he had achieved for his previous novels (Eliot,
2000, p.212).
Stephen
collaborated closely with Hardy on the editing to shape his story into a form suitable
both for the constraints of serial publication and for the readership at which
the magazine was aimed. According to Linda
M. Shires The Cornhill was
‘prestigious’ (Shires, 2002, p.xi) and an ‘upper-middle-brow family magazine’
(ibid., p.xix), and the narrative had to be tailored to that audience’s
sensibilities. In practice, Shires
continues (p.xix), this took the form of ‘conservative editorial censorship’ by
Stephen, to which Hardy acquiesced; this was not the case later in his career,
however, and The Return of the Native
(1878) was sold elsewhere after Stephen declared that it was ‘“dangerous” for a
family magazine’ (quoted by Dale Kramer, 1999, p.168).
The
extent of Hardy’s openness to editorial intervention can be seen by comparing The Cornhill
version with the restorations incorporated into the Oxford World Classics
edition, as indicated in the ‘Note on the Text’ (Suzanne B. Falck-Yi, 2002,
pp.xxxiff.) Some changes related to
practical issues of serialisation, for example the length of each instalment
and issues of pacing, which led to requests to shorten or reorder certain
scenes. Where the unmarried Fanny’s
pregnancy was concerned, this had to be dealt with cautiously, and Stephen
asked Hardy to ‘soften or even eliminate references’ to this (ibid., p.xxxi). However, he indicated that Liddy’s ‘there’s two of ‘em in there!’ (Hardy, 2002, p.285)
when telling Bathsheba about the occupants of the coffin, altered to Liddy
whispering into Bathsheba’s ear for The
Cornhill (Hardy, 1874b, p.491), could be restored for the book version
(Eliot, 2000, p.212). As Eliot points
out, price acted as a form of censorship related to class prejudice, the more
expensive, and therefore exclusive, book being the preserve of those of a
higher class considered less likely to be corrupted than a mass magazine
readership.
Each
instalment was accompanied by a large engraved illustration and a small initial-letter
vignette by Helen Allingham, the former signed and the latter initialled by
her. None of the instalments though bore
Hardy’s name, despite the fact that the serialisation was considered
significant enough to begin every issue in Volume 29 and three in Volume 30 (see
Allingham, 2002, for a brief discussion of the content of Volume 29). The supplementary vignettes, Philip V. Allingham
suggests, imparted ‘an old-fashioned literary’ quality (Allingham, 2002). Illustrations added to the cost of production
so Stephen must have felt that their presence justified the expense by attracting
additional purchasers. Smith, Elder
& Co. produced a triple-decker edition of the novel in late November 1874,
thus slightly preceding the final instalment in the magazine, which included
all twelve of the full-page plates, but none of the vignettes (Jackson, 1982,
p.87; Allingham, 2001).
Helen
Allingham (née Paterson, she married while working on the illustrations) was chosen
by Stephen to illustrate Hardy’s work without Hardy’s knowledge (Allingham,
2007a). Eventually she became the ‘most
famous and prolific of the many … artists of idyllic rural scenes …’ (Julian Treuherz,
1993, p.188). She was primarily a water
colourist (a member of the Royal Watercolour Society: see Allingham, 2007a for
details of her career) but despite being well known for bucolic country scenes,
as Treuherz continues, ‘Even at the time, her work had a nostalgic charm;
though she lived for a period in Surrey, she was essentially a town dweller...’
(ibid., pp.188-9) This restricted
understanding of country life may partly account for the paucity of
agricultural activity, in particular the lack of animals (with the notable
exceptions of Bathsheba with a pony in plates 2 and 4), in the twelve plates.
 |
| Vignette 5 |
The
vignettes focus more on country life more than the plates do, but even here animals
tend to be obscured, such as in vignette 5 which shows Gabriel astride a sheep
while shearing it, and vignette 7, a scene taken from chapter 32, ‘Night:
Horses Tramping’, showing Gabriel and Jan examining tracks when following
Bathsheba’s gig as she travels to Bath (Hardy, 1874b, pp.13-14). In general, the illustrations focus on the
characters, isolated or interacting, rather than on the natural world that
permeates the novel. Despite these technical
limitations, Hardy rated Allingham highly: writing to James Osgood on 6 December
1888, and to Edmund Gosse on 25 July 1906, he declared her ‘the best
illustrator I ever had’ (quoted in Allingham, 2007a), and it is true that her
illustrations for Far from the Madding
Crowd possess a more robust quality than can be found in her later chocolate-box
watercolours of picturesque thatched cottages (the Helen Allingham Society’s
website contains numerous examples of her bland rural aesthetic).
 |
| Vignette 7 |
The
start of the novel is the opening item in the January 1874 issue of The Cornhill,, and prefacing this is the
first of the twelve plates, captioned ‘Hands were loosening his
neckerchief.’ As becomes clear from the
text, the individuals depicted are Gabriel and Bathsheba, so introducing the
two most significant figures in the novel.
The caption is taken from page 14 of the Cornhill instalment (Hardy, 1874a), a scene in which Bathsheba
rescues Gabriel from suffocation in his mobile hut. As a scene-setter it is dramatic and piques
the reader’s interest to know how that circumstance arose. However, it misleadingly suggests a romantic
closeness between the protagonists which is not the case until the novel’s
conclusion, but that would have guided readers to expect a significant
relationship to develop. The text states
that Gabriel’s head is in her lap, but in the illustration it is perched more
decorously on her knee, and the interior of the hut has been rendered for
dramatic purposes as rather larger than a wheeled hut would likely have been. The two figures are shown in a symbolic configuration,
with Bathsheba dominant in the composition, as her social position compared to
Gabriel’s is for much of the novel (though not at this point, when Gabriel is
still an independent farmer rather than a shepherd for hire). Perhaps unconsciously Allingham has posed
them as a Pietà, a subject in Christian iconography that shows Mary cradling
Jesus after the Crucifixion; the best-known example is by Michelangelo (Alessandro
Parronchi, 1969, pp.37-41). In 1874 this
configuration may have had considerable resonance for some readers, most of whom
would have had a Christian (albeit largely Protestant) background.
 |
| Plate 1 |
The
accompanying vignette shows a woman carrying a pail who is later revealed to be
Bathsheba, but while vignette and plate are linked by the pail that she is
carrying in the vignette and one overturned in the plate, there is a
significant difference between her working clothes in the former and her dress in
the latter, which has a middle-class appearance (Allingham, 2007b), even though
at this stage she has not come into the tenancy of her uncle’s farm. Allingham has followed Hardy in depicting
Bathsheba’s left arm extended in the vignette (Hardy, 2002, p.22), but her counterbalancing
posture is somewhat exaggerated for such a small pail and there is less bare
arm on display than one might infer from the text, which suggests that Gabriel
finds the sight erotic. The vignette’s effect
is to reinforce the physical nature of her labour, and it acts as a general
comment on the rural setting of the novel which the enclosed space of the main
image does not provide. The milkmaid
with churn was a common subject in Victorian sentimental painting, but in
particular Allingham’s figure and setting are similar to Jean-François Millet’s
1874 painting ‘Laitière Normande de Gréville’ in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Arlene M. Jackson detects the influence of
John Everett Millais’ ‘school’ in the series (Jackson, 1982, p.88), and such high
art associations would have resonated with many of The Cornhill’s readers,
lending the story extra gravitas and memorability.
 |
| Vignette 1 |
Allingham’s
skilful use of light and shade to focus attention on part of the scene for
dramatic effect is seen to good effect in plate 10, captioned ‘Her Tears Fell Fast
Beside the Unconscious Pair.’ Troy is shown kneeling beside the coffin
containing Fanny and her baby, with Bathsheba looking on. The whole forms a tableau with the chiaroscuro
highlighting Bathsheba and linking Troy to Fanny by heavy shadows and his dark
jacket (Jackson, 1982, p.81). The
composition appears melodramatic, but Jackson argues that where melodrama is
present in the series, it is always kept in check by Allingham’s control which
emphasises psychology rather than heightened dramatic emotion. Lawrence Jones notes that Stephen’s desire to
soften references to Fanny’s baby in order not to offend the magazine’s
respectable readership resulted in a ‘ludicrous misunderstanding’ by
Allingham. Whereas the book version
reads ‘Her tears fell fast beside the unconscious pair in the coffin…’ (Hardy,
2002, p290), in the serialisation the final phrase was omitted (Hardy, 1874b,
p.494), and Allingham assumed that the ‘pair’ were Fanny and Troy, not Fanny
and her baby (Jones, 1978, pp.322-3).
 |
| Plate 10 |
The
caption would have puzzled the reader because at this point in the narrative
Troy is not present, and Bathsheba is alone with the coffin. Allingham’s scene relates to the later moment
when Troy ‘sank upon his knees … and, bending over Fanny Robin, gently kissed
her’ (Hardy, 1874b, p.496). It is possible
that Allingham chose obfuscation in order to draw attention away from the true
meaning of ‘the unconscious pair’, that is, one of the pair was an illegitimate
baby. The confusing mismatch between
image and text, however, suggests that Jones is probably right in his surmise. The accompanying vignette shows Troy at a
later point, when he is planting flowers on Fanny’s grave at night and appears
opposite the plate, at the start of chapter 43 (‘Fanny’s Revenge’). Readers linking the vignette to the coffin in
the plate might assume that Tory is interfering with the grave since he appears
to be about to start digging with a shovel, giving the scene a Gothic feel
absent from the text, in which he is merely planting flowers.
 |
| Vignette 10 |
It
is impossible to know with certainty the extent to which the pictures modified the
narrative’s reception for The Cornhill’s
readers. Philip Allingham argues that illustrated
magazines assisted understanding among working-class and rural (i.e. labouring)
readers with their lower literacy rates (Allingham, 2001). This would have been less of an issue for The Cornhill’s target market, but even
highly literate readers would be cued to the meaning of the words by an initial
perusal of the images, setting up questions that they expected to be answered
as they read. But as Jackson points out,
ignoring the natural turmoil and concentrating on that of the humans carries a
cost:
By omitting
Hardy’s view of changing, unpredictable nature, the illustrations shift her
reading of his text: the cosmic dimension inherent in the text gives way, in
the illustrations, to the human realities of Wessex. (Jackson, 1982, p.88)
By
ignoring its most dramatic scenes – the fire and the storm, for example – Allingham
fails to do the novel full justice. More
than that, far from faithfully depicting Hardy’s story, her interpretations of his
words often betray a lack of congruence between text and image. However, despite Allingham’s inability to
exploit the narrative’s potential, the serialisation was ‘an instant popular
success’ (John Halperin, 1980, p.740), and the pictures would have helped to
make the story more memorable in a competitive market.
References
Allingham,
P.V. (2001) ‘Why do Hardy's Novels Often Have Illustrations in Periodical but
not Book Form?’ The Victorian Web. 11
August. Available at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardy/pva151.html
(Accessed 16 February 2014).
Allingham,
P. V. (2002) ‘The Physical Make-up of "The Cornhill Magazine," Volume
29’ The Victorian Web. 15
November. Available at http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/allingham/pva159.html
(Accessed 18 February 2014).
Allingham,
P. V. (2007a) ‘Brief Biographical Introduction’ The Victorian Web. 22 February.
Available at http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/art/illustration/allingham/pva154.html
(Accessed 16 February 2014).
Allingham,
P. V. (2007b) ‘Plate 1: ‘Hands Were Loosening His Neckerchief’ and Initial Letter
Vignette "W" (Bathsheba carrying a milk pail)’ The Victorian Web. 22 August.
Available at http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/allingham/1.html
(Accessed 18 February 2014).
Eddy,
S. L., Jr. (1970) The Founding of The
Cornhill Magazine, Ball State Monograph Number Nineteen, Muncie, Indiana,
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Eliot,
S. (2000) ‘Books and their Readers, part 2’, in Correa, D. S. (ed.) The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Realisms,
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W. E. (1979) ‘Victorian Periodical Literature and the Articulate Classes’, Victorian Studies, pp.389-412.
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A. M. (1982). Illustration and the Novels
of Thomas Hardy. London, MacMillan Press.
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L. (1978) ‘“A Good Hand at a Serial”: Thomas Hardy and the Serialization of Far from the Madding Crowd’, Studies in the Novel, Vol. 10, No. 3,
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Kramer,
D. ‘Hardy and Readers: Jude the Obscure’,
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Parronchi,
A. (1969) Michelangelo: Sculpture,
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