113

  • Metropolitan Railway Types

  • 1891
  • George Du Maurier (French 1834-1896)
  • Sepia ink drawing, published in Punch, or the London Charivari, 10 January 1891
  • 14.6 x 18.4 cm., 5-1/4 x 7-1/4" image
  • Lent Courtesy of Private Collection through Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts

Essay by Ann Boaden, Professor Emerita of English

George Du Maurier had spent more than three decades reading the classic Victorian novels, and illustrating other writers' works, before he embarked on his own authorial career. Yet that movement from one kind of pen stroke to another wasn't such a giant step for him. He'd been creating his own world of character and story in cartoon engravings for Punch, the British humor magazine, since his twenties. Metropolitan Railway Types, a Punch production, demonstrates this close connection between cartoon and story. The two side-by-side panels reward careful scrutiny for their visual details. Such details define character. And because, as his friend Henry James contended, you can't have character without story, and you can't have story without character, the result is an invitation to explore the stories it expresses.

In this cartoon two contrasting women travelers are pictured on a railway platform. Both are wealthy, dressed in rich furs and fabrics. Both sport flat hats crowned with a small bow and carry similar traveling accoutrements: umbrella and muff. But the party on the left is cumbered with her gear: high-shouldered cape with thick fur lining, muff like an overgrown dandelion gone to seed, square heavy purse, large umbrella with hooked handle. She occupies-commandeers, rather-most of her space. Does she fear losing a privileged position long held or newly gained? In contrast, the fit of the other woman's clothing, her slender figure, the turn of her head, the contours of her face, the shapely delicacy of her hand, all suggest an inborn gentility, a gracefulness bred in the bone, a grace that expresses itself in appreciation for courtesies received. There's a visual harmony about the way she's rendered, yet her expression may call into question this external poise. Does the wistfulness, almost the sadness, with which she gazes past the present moment, suggest sorrow? Regret? Yearning? Has she, also, lost something in the rush and roil of the changing Victorian world?

Many of the novelists Du Maurier loved were posing questions about those seismic changes. As wealth and political power shifted from agrarian to industrial centers, traditional social markers lost their authority. Thoughtful writers like Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, and Trollope were asking what constitutes true gentility. Is it an innate quality, conferred at birth by long generations of breeding, or can it be practiced and learned? To what degree do social behaviors reflect or even shape who we are? What, finally, do we mean by the terms lady and gentleman?

It may be no accident that Du Maurier chose a railway station as his venue for examining two modes of behavior-for the railway both created and expressed the swift movement of a culture from rural to urban. Social mobility, both literal and metaphoric, whizzed along like the landscapes outside a train window, ever shifting. In this unstable world the ultimate question may be: where does real power lie? In assertion or surrender? In standing fast or discovering how to move with grace? Indeed, such an illustration continues to "haunt the memory" (Du Maurier) with both the chuckle and the questions it raises. Maybe even more than some novels.