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[Note:

A: Sometimes a literary or historical picture creeps into the text. Such are “Swift and Bolingbroke at Backlebury” (p. 30); “Charles II. recognised by the Ostler” (p. 144), and “Barry Lyndon cracks a Bottle” (p. 116). Barry Lyndon with its picaresque note and Irish background, would seem an excellent contribution to the “Cranford” series. Why does not Mr. Thomson try his hand at it? He has illustrated Esmond, and the Great Haggarty Diamond.]

The Vicar of Wakefield –as it happens–was Mr. Thomson’s next enterprise; and it is, in many respects, a most memorable one. It came out in December, 1890, having occupied him for nearly two years. He took exceptional pains to study and realise the several types for himself, and to ensure correctness of costume. From the first introductory procession of the Primrose family at the head of chapter i. to the awkward merriment of the two Miss Flamboroughs at the close, there is scarcely a page which has not some stroke of quiet fun, some graceful attitude, or some ingenious contrivance in composition. Considering that from Wenham’s edition of 1780, nearly every illustrator of repute had tried his hand at Goldsmith’s masterpiece in fiction,–that he had been attempted without humour by Stothard, without lightness by Mulready,[B]–that he had been made comic by Cruikshank, and vulgarised by Rowiandson,–it was certainly to Mr. Thomson’s credit that he had approached his task with so much refinement, reverence and originality. If the book has a blemish, it is to be mentioned only because the artist, by his later practice, seems to have recognised it himself. For the purposes of process reproduction, the drawings were somewhat loaded and overworked.

[Note:

B: Mulready’s illustrations of 1843 are here referred to, net his pictures.]

This was not chargeable against the next volumes to be chronicled. Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, 1891, and Miss Mitford’s Our Village, 1893, are still regarded by many as the artist’s happiest efforts. I say “still,” because Mr. Thomson is only now in what Victor Hugo called the youth of old age (as opposed to the old age of youth); and it would be premature to assume that a talent so alert to multiply and diversify its efforts, had already attained the summit of its achievement. But in these two books he had certain unquestionable advantages. One obviously would be, that his audience were not already preoccupied by former illustrations; and he was consequently free to invent his own personages and follow his own fertile fancy, without recalling to that implacable and Gorgonising organ, the “Public Eye,” any earlier pictorial conceptions. Another thing in his favour was, that in either case, the very definite, and not very complex types surrendered themselves readily to artistic embodiment. “It almost illustrated itself,”–he told an interviewer concerning Cranford; “the characters were so exquisitely and distinctly realised.” Every one has known some like them; and the delightful Knutsford ladies (for “Cranford” was “Knutsford”), the “Boz”–loving Captain Brown and Mr. Holbrook, Peter and his father, and even Martha the maid, with their mise en scene of card-tables and crackle-china, and pattens and reticules, are part of the memories of our childhood. The same may be said of Our Village, except that the breath of Nature blows more freely through it than through the quiet Cheshire market-town; and there is a larger preponderance of those “charming glimpses of rural life” of which Lady Ritchie speaks admiringly in her sympathetic preface. And with regard to the “bits of scenery”–as Mr. Thomson himself calls them–it may be noted that one of the Manchester papers, speaking of Cranford, praised the artist’s intimate knowledge of the locality,–a locality he had never seen. Most of his backgrounds were from sketches made on Wimbledon Common, near which–until he moved for a space to the ancient Cinque Port of Seaford in Sussex–he lived for the first years of his London life.