Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Blaðsíða 30

PHILIP V. ALLINGHAM

Milli mála 7/2015

34
Gentlefolks, I’ve lived many a year in this place. You may see the
cottage from the sunk fence over yonder. I’ve seen the ladies
draw it in their books, a hundred times. It looks well in a picter,
I’ve heerd say; but there an’t weather in picters, and maybe 'tis fit-
ter for that, than for a place to live in. Well! I lived there. How
hard –how bitter hard, I lived there, I won’t say. Any day in the
year, and every day, you can judge for your own selves.8
Will Fern’s diatribe about the insensitivity of the “gentle-
folks” who make his cottage the object of their sketching
expeditions occurs within the context of Lady Bowley’s
birthday party. Thus, Stanfield’s wood-engraving does not
realise a moment within the narrative; moreover, although
entitled “Will Fern’s Cottage,” the significant figure is not
the hapless peasant sitting in front of his cottage, but the
liveried servant holding the sunshade for the genteel
sketcher, left in the foreground. The shifting of emphasis
establishes the perspective of the cottage that Fern feels is
unrealistic because it is based on a panorama rather than a
close-up study of the sufferings of the Dorset labourer
who resides in the quaint building.
In Clarkson Stanfield’s elegant landscape realisation of
Fern’s cottage and its situation, the aristocratic sketching
party has set up its equipment with a good vista of the
building, and a liveried servant holds a large parasol to
guard the “gentlefolks” from the heat of the Dorset sun,
ironically the source of this wheat-producing region’s fer-
tility. The disconsolate owner, the Dorset peasant Will Fern
himself, sits on a log before his home, completing the
Constable-esque scene. In fact, Fern has crashed Lady Bow-
ley’s birthday celebration to deconstruct the Romantic idyll
of the rustic cottage: what the upper-class lady-sketchers
observe of the scene at a distance is very different from his

8 Charles Dickens, “Third Quarter,” The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That
Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In, il. John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Clarkson
Stanfield (London: Bradbury and Evans, 16 December 1844), page 119 – prior to
the illustration.