"Count Fosco contemplating an opera poster." — headnote vignette illustration by John McLenan for Wilkie Collins's "The Woman in White," instalment 37 in Harper's Weekly (11 August 1860) (original) (raw)

Count Fosco contemplating an opera poster.

John McLenan

11 August 1860

10.5 cm high by 5.9 cm wide (4 ⅛ by 2 ¼ inches), vignetted, p. 501; p. 239 in the 1861 volume.

The headnote vignette for the thirty-eighth number of Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel in Harper's Weekly (11 August 1860).

The American illustrator focusses on Fosco's scrutinizing a poster advertising the debut of a Donizetti opera Lucrezia Borgia(1833) to prepare readers for the scene at the opera house in which Pesca identifies The ebullient opera-lover as a traitor to the cause of the Brotherhood, a radical and clandestine Italian political organisation whose mark of membership Pesca still bears.

Scanned image and text byPhilip V. Allingham.

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