There were obviously lots of hi-jinks in that high-spirited setting, boisterous students in the 1850s, and a big part of the book’s appeal for 1890s readers was its nostalgia for what was, by then, a bygone era of simpler times.

In fact Whistler recognised a blatant portrait of himself in the character named Jim Silbey when the story was published in magazine instalments, and threatened to sue, forcing Du Maurier and his publishers to remove the character, and an illustration of him, from the published book. He attended the atelier of painter Charles Gleyre where he met talented young artists such as the American James Whistler, Thomas Armstrong (later Director of Art at the South Kensington Museum) and Edward Poynter (later, President of the Royal Academy). The Paris backgroundĭu Maurier was himself an art student in 1850s Paris. In the right clothes, tall and statuesque and under his rigid control, Trilby is transformed into a singer of classical music who electrifies audiences all across Europe, making Svengali rich and famous. So he does, and turns her into a concert-level singer and performer. He discovers that as a consequence of her sweet innocent nature, Trilby is very easy to hypnotise. An uneducated but strikingly beautiful young woman, Trilby, who works as an artists’ model and also does sewing, charring and other odd jobs, is ‘discovered’, by the tall, creepy Jewish musician, Svengali. In outline the plot is simple. We are in the bohemian artistic circles of Paris a generation or so before the book’s publication, so sometime in the late 1850s. The plot inspired Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel Phantom of the Opera and innumerable other works derived from it. Trilby boots, shoes, silver scarf pins, parodies, and even sausages flooded the market, and the type of soft felt hat with an indented crown that was worn in the London stage dramatization of the novel, is known to this day as a trilby hat. Soap, songs, dances, toothpaste, and even the city of Trilby in Florida were all named after the heroine. It was the best-selling book of 1894, selling 300,000 copies by the end of the year. Trilby was a publishing and cultural phenomenon. Et puis zut! Allez toujours, mes enfants. ‘Et maintenant, le temps d’absorber une fine de fin sec et je m’la brise. ‘Y a pas d’quoi!’ said Trilby, divesting herself of her basket and putting it, with the pick and lantern, in a corner.

Trilby de george du maurier