Augustus Egg – The Travelling Companions

Probably best known for his narrative triptych Past and Present, a work which narrates, as Hogarth had done in the century before, the fateful consequences of immorality, Augustus Egg embodies that mid-Victorian sensibility by which artists and writers felt free to characterise the habits of virtue or delinquency from a Protestant Christian viewpoint, exhorting adoption of the former and cautioning against the latter. His friend Charles Dickens did much the same in his novels, pretty overtly, while Thackeray did so satirically and Elizabeth Gaskell from a proto-feminist / socialist angle. Victorian sermonising, which occasionally drifted towards sanctimony, informed the spirit of the age. But while there are aspects of The Travelling Companions that can be interpreted moralistically, it has a more subtle and multi-layered complexity than some of Egg’s other work, an ambiguity that I find intriguing.

Augustus Leopold Egg, The Travelling Companions (1862), oil on canvas, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

We are shown two almost identically dressed young women sitting opposite one another, viewed in profile in a railway carriage, travelling along a mediterranean coastline. But although they appear at first to be mirror-images of one another, the differences between them are what counts. One is shown sleeping, her hands clasped on her lap, her hair loosely hanging behind her back while the other is shown reading, her book held by her blue-gloved hands and with her hair tied back. So straightforwardly, we could see this as a contrast between indolence and application, between luxuriance and self-improvement. The sleeping girl has a basket of fruit by her side to indicate an anticipated satisfaction of an indulgent appetite while her companion has a bouquet of roses beside her, perhaps to symbolise not passion but the reward for virtue (the devotional Rosary takes its name from the flower and serves to glorify the primary attribute of the eponymic Virgin Mary). Their hats rest on top of their voluminous dresses and appear to be identical but a closer look shows the red feather of one to be fully intact, tidy and smooth, the other to be a little bedraggled. To put it more directly, one feather would sit appropriately on the head of one who is similarly upstanding and the other would be worn by one more negligent of herself. This is all relative of course. The extremely minor dishevelment is hardly indicative of wanton sluttishness – both women are demurely dressed for travelling, their grey satin gowns gleaming immaculately yet soberly, their shared class status apparent – but the artist clearly wants us to distinguish between these two women (who may be sisters), to see behind their face-value parallelism in order to highlight that small divergences of dress detail are indicative of the forks in the way ahead that the women must choose between.

Although sleeping, possibly dreaming, and certainly vulnerable, the figure on the left has her head slightly inclined to the view out of the window where the hedonistic refulgence of the sun, sea and sand of the Riviera seems to draw on her with a magnetic pull,  while the one on the right shuns its seduction and remains studiously concentrated on her book, partially shielded from it by the curtain on her side. We can’t see its title but can imagine it to be an improving work of literature, a volume of poetry perhaps (Christina Rosetti’s Goblin market was published in 1862), a travel guide, or possibly a book of prayers such as the popular The Christian Year by John Keble.

The other way to look at these subjects, as some have done, is to see them dualistically, as two sides to a single divided self, presented schismatically. I don’t quite buy this myself – the work was made long before Freud or more pertinently R.D. Laing, the psychiatrist who wrote about the idea that we all have two aspects to our personas, the private and authentic mode and the public-facing but false self that we present to the world. But there is perhaps something to be said about the idea of the painting as an exploration of interiority, the difference between differing mental states, with the confined interior of the carriage standing as a simulacrum for the interior world of the psyche.

The interior world of the dreamscape is often random, uninhibited, manifesting submerged urges and longings. The interior world of the reading mind is more rational, logical and although we may surrender and suspend disbelief when reading literature, we remain nevertheless under self-control.

Augustus Leopold Egg, Past and Present No. 1: Misfortune (1858). Oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London

So, could this painting prefigure dualistic ideas portrayed in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) for instance or Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)? Well for one thing, Companions has nothing of the gothic horror about it – nothing tragic or gruesome is likely to happen here. But like others of his generation, Egg does seem to concern himself with the idea of the fallen woman (see Misfortune from Past and Present), and the painting may be a warning about what constitutes the right and the wrong way for women to occupy their minds or be occupied by them.

This could seem a very patriarchal way to depict women. The ungloved hands of the left-hand figure and the untied hair, together with the availability of the oranges in the basket, symbolic of fecundity, all suggest a certain sensuality, a buttoned-up Victorian apprehension of licentiousness in contrast to the purity and probity of her companion, as if all women might fall into one category or the other, either sinners or saints. The painting plays with the idea of equilibrium disturbed. The carriage windows are as symmetrical as the figures sat beside them, but the view through each of them also bear differences – broadly, they show seascape, town and countryside in turn. The motion of the carriage, from left to right, is indicated by the swing of the central window blind tassel, suggesting the train has jolted inland – we know that these young women are journeying and therefore not settled, travelling between places, undergoing feelings of momentum, but we are not sure where they are headed, geographically or introspectively. It can feel as if the artist is demonstrating paternalistic concern for the safety and virtue of these susceptible women travelling without a male escort or older female chaperone. What might possibly befall them without such masculine protection?

The directly opposite way to look at it is as a celebration of female independence and autonomy. These are young women relatively free to think and behave as they choose, delighting in the availability (to the upper middle classes at least) of travel on the continent to destinations undreamt of before the coming of the railways. They have choices; they have agency. We might think of them as more in line with George Elliot’s idea of women characters than Dickens’; more like Dorothea than Esther Summerson.

I think the ambiguity in Egg’s mature art (he died a year after this painting was made at just forty-seven) is more subtle than the parable-like narratives of his early work, and suggests that the lives of these women will be subject to contingency, preference, judgement and volition, whatever their ultimate destination