A short life of the author
George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier (6 March 1834 – 8 October 1896) was a French-born British cartoonist, illustrator, and novelist whose satirical drawings for Punch magazine made him one of the most popular artists in Victorian England, and whose novel Trilby (1894) became one of the greatest publishing sensations of the nineteenth century, creating a cultural craze that gave the English language the word “Svengali” and made du Maurier, at sixty, one of the most famous authors in the world.
Early Life and Artistic Training
Du Maurier was born in Paris, the son of a French father (of possible aristocratic and émigré descent) and an English mother. He grew up between Paris and London, studied chemistry briefly at University College London, and then returned to Paris to study art, attending the atelier of Charles Gleyre (where his fellow students included James McNeill Whistler) and later working in Antwerp and Düsseldorf. In 1857, he lost the sight of his left eye — a catastrophe for an artist — and spent the rest of his career in fear of losing the other.
The Paris years — the bohemian student life, the studios, the artistic camaraderie, the poverty that was only intermittently picturesque — became the raw material for Trilby three decades later. Du Maurier never forgot the intensity of that period, and his late-life fiction is essentially an attempt to recapture and memorialise it.
Punch Magazine (1864–1896)
Du Maurier joined the staff of Punch in 1864, initially as a successor to John Leech, and remained a principal cartoonist for over thirty years. His speciality was the satirical depiction of upper-middle-class English society — its pretensions, its social anxieties, its aesthetic enthusiasms — rendered in a drawing style of elegant line and gentle mockery. His characters included Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns (a social climber of relentless ambition), Sir Gorgius Midas (a nouveau riche philistine), and the Aesthetic Movement devotees whom he lampooned with an accuracy that anticipated Oscar Wilde’s self-parody.
Du Maurier’s Punch cartoons are among the best visual records of Victorian social life, capturing the fashions, interiors, conversation patterns, and class dynamics of the 1870s and 1880s with an observational precision that makes them valuable to social historians as well as art collectors.
Peter Ibbetson (1891)
Du Maurier’s first novel, published when he was fifty-seven, tells the story of Peter Ibbetson, an Englishman raised in Paris who discovers that he can, through a technique of “dreaming true,” meet his childhood love, the Duchess of Towers, in shared dreams. The novel is part memoir (the Paris childhood is closely autobiographical), part romance, and part fantasy, and its premise — that two people can inhabit a shared dreamworld that is more real and more beautiful than waking life — anticipates surrealism and the dream logic of later fiction and cinema. It was adapted into a 1935 film starring Gary Cooper and into an opera by Deems Taylor (1931).
Trilby (1894)
Du Maurier’s second novel was a phenomenon of a kind that has few parallels in publishing history. Trilby tells the story of three English art students in the Latin Quarter of 1850s Paris and of Trilby O’Ferrall, an Irish-born artist’s model (who poses nude without shame, shocking Victorian readers) who becomes, under the hypnotic influence of the sinister musician Svengali, the greatest singer in Europe. When Svengali dies, Trilby’s voice dies with her — she can only sing while under his control.
The novel was serialised in Harper’s Monthly in 1894 and published in book form the same year. The response was extraordinary. “Trilby” became a cultural craze: there were Trilby hats (the soft felt hat that Trilby wears in du Maurier’s illustrations), Trilby shoes, Trilby songs, Trilby ice cream, and Trilby merchandise of every description. The word “Svengali” — meaning a person who exercises a sinister, controlling influence over another — entered the language permanently.
The novel’s success was partly scandalous (the nude modelling, the bohemian lifestyle, the suggestion of sexual freedom) and partly nostalgic (du Maurier’s loving recreation of the Paris of his youth). Svengali, the Hungarian-Jewish hypnotist, is the novel’s most memorable creation and its most problematic: the character draws on anti-Semitic stereotypes that were common in Victorian fiction but that modern readers find disturbing.
The Martian (1897)
Du Maurier’s third and final novel, published posthumously, is the most autobiographical. It follows Barty Josselin — a thinly veiled self-portrait — through a life that parallels du Maurier’s own, including the devastating loss of sight in one eye. The novel introduces a science-fiction element: Barty’s creative genius is attributed to the influence of a Martian spirit called Martia, who dictates his literary works through a form of telepathic connection. The book was less successful than Trilby but is of interest as an autobiography disguised as fiction.
The Du Maurier Dynasty
George du Maurier founded a literary dynasty. His son Gerald du Maurier became the most famous actor-manager in Edwardian London, and his granddaughter Daphne du Maurier became one of the most popular novelists of the twentieth century, author of Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, and The Birds. The family’s artistic and literary legacy extends across three generations and multiple art forms.
Collecting Du Maurier
Trilby (1894, Harper & Brothers) in first edition is a common but sought-after Victorian collectible, typically bringing $100–$300. The serialisation in Harper’s Monthly is also collected. Peter Ibbetson (1891, Harper & Brothers) first editions are less common and slightly more valuable. Du Maurier’s original Punch drawings, when they surface at auction, command significant prices.