At the Broadway production of the novel in 1895, you could even buy ice cream in the shape of Trilby’s feet, bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘put one’s foot in one’s mouth’.

Both characters’ names would enter into common use, floating free of the novel in which they originated.Īlthough the word ‘trilby’ is now synonymous with hats, the Oxford English Dictionary reveals the interesting evolution of the heroine’s name and how it was applied to other things first: originally, ‘trilby’ was used as a jocular name for, of all things, the foot, after the heroine’s feet in the stage version of du Maurier’s novel and the fact that they are objects of admiration. By the 1920s, the mesmeric Svengali had displaced Trilby as the novel’s principal character – the real heart of the story.

Du Maurier’s novel would itself be adapted for the silver screen in 1914 – or rather, the stage adaptation of the original novel would be adapted. Trilby appeared shortly before the invention of cinema, which would take the ‘ adaptation that becomes more successful than the book’ to a whole new level. No, what really made Trilby the first in a long line of modern literary phenomena was the way in which the source material itself would quickly become eclipsed by all of its associated memorabilia and by the better-known adaptations of the novel. A novel like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, published in 1860, had yielded a host of spin-off products, including hats and cloaks, a perfume, and even a type of waltz. Not just for novel tie-ins – that in itself was nothing new. In time, even when the novel was largely forgotten, its title would be immortalised in the name of a hat.Īlthough it was published in the 1890s and so was technically a Victorian novel, Trilby was, in many ways, the start of a peculiarly modern craze.

He certainly succeeded: Trilby would become the sensation of the age, not just in Britain but in the United States. But owing to failing eyesight, du Maurier had begun to complement his illustrating work with novel-writing as a way of continuing to make a living from his pen. Du Maurier had made his name as an illustrator: in 1895 he was responsible for the famous ‘ curate’s egg’ cartoon (with its complaisant curate assuring the vicar, concerning the bad egg he’d been served up, that ‘parts of it are excellent’), and he’d even been responsible for coining the phrase ‘bedside manner’ in a medical cartoon of 1884. The cartoonist’s name was George du Maurier and the novel is Trilby (1894).

Trilby by george du maurier