Publisher's Synopsis
This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution canachieve.If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and toconduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences ofoil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention ina Court of Justice.But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and thestory is left to be told, for the first time, in this place. As the Judge might once have heard it, so theReader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of thedisclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these introductory lines (WalterHartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to berecorded, he will describe them in his own person. When his experience fails, he will retire from theposition of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he has left it off, byother persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge, just asclearly and positively as he has spoken before them.Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offenceagainst the laws is told in Court by more than one witness-with the same object, in both cases, topresent the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of onecomplete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be heard first.4IIIt was the last day of July. The long hot summer was drawing to a close; and we, the wearypilgrims of the London pavement, were beginning to think of the cloud-shadows on the corn-fields, and the autumn breezes on the sea-shore.For my own poor part, the fading summer left me out of health, out of spirits, and, if the truthmust be told, out of money as well. During the past year I had not managed my professionalresources as carefully as usual; and my extravagance now limited me to the prospect of spending theautumn economically between my mother's cottage at Hampstead and my own chambers in town.The evening, I remember, was still and cloudy; the London air was at its heaviest; the distanthum of the street-traffic was at its faintest; the small pulse of the life within me, and the great heartof the city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison, languidly and more languidly, with thesinking sun. I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and leftmy chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs. It was one of the two evenings in every weekwhich I was accustomed to spend with my mother and my sister. So I turned my steps northward inthe direction of Hampstea