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Passage Illustrated: Introducing Doctor Dee

On gaining the churchyard, Guy Fawkes perceived the warden and his companion creeping stealthily beneath the shadow of a wall in the direction of a low fabric, which appeared to be a bone-house, or charnel, situated at the north-western extremity of the church. Before this building grew a black and stunted yew-tree. Arrived at it, they paused, and looked round to see whether they were observed. They did not, however, notice Guy Fawkes, who had concealed himself behind a buttress. Kelley then unlocked the door of the charnel, and brought out a pickaxe and mattock. Having divested himself of his cloak, he proceeded to shovel out the mould from a new-made grave at a little distance from the building. Doctor Dee stood by, and held the lantern for his assistant.

Determined to watch their proceedings, Guy Fawkes crept towards the yew-tree, behind which he ensconced himself. Kelley, meanwhile, continued to ply his spade with a vigour that seemed almost incomprehensible in one so far stricken in years, and of such infirm appearance. At length he paused, and kneeling within the shallow grave, endeavoured to drag something from it. Doctor Dee knelt to assist him. After some exertion, they drew forth the corpse of a female, which had been interred without coffin, and apparently in the habiliments worn during life. A horrible suspicion crossed Guy Fawkes. Resolving to satisfy his doubts at once, he rushed forward, and beheld in the ghastly lineaments of the dead the features of the unfortunate prophetess, Elizabeth Orton. [Book I, "The Plot," Chapter VI, "The Disinterment," page 50]

Commentary

Although "Guy Fawkes" became a byword for treason from the seventeenth century onward, very few people in Great Britain of the 1840s actually knew much about the leader of the infamous Gunpowder Plot, even though British children burned him in effigy every fifth of November to celebrate the preservation of King, Lords, and Commons — and the nation's Protestant establishment. Ainsworth and Cruikshank therefore had considerable latitude in how to present the ex-soldier and Catholic radical. Born about 1570 in York and thus in his early thirties at the time of the story, Fawkes had survived the Eighty Years War on the Continent, fighting on the side of the Catholic Spanish against the Protestant Dutch. Thus, Ainsworth could present him as both a man of action, a pillar of rectitude, and a staunch supporter of the Catholic religion in England, and blame the assassination plot on his associate Robert Catesby.

But the narrative necessarily would involve other historical characters with whom educated Victorian readers would have had some familiarity, notably King James I and Dr. John Dee (1527-1608 or 1609), the occult scholar, magician, mathematician, astrologer, Hermetic philosopher, and tutor of both Sir Philip Sidney and Elizabeth I. Nevertheless, Ainsworth presents him principally as a conventional necromancer and a prototype for Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Ainsworth undoubtedly found his connection with Christ's College, Manchester, interesting, although in Elizabeth's appointment of him as Warden he failed to exert effective control over the institution, and returned to his home at Mortlake near London in 1605 dispirited by James I's refusal to support him, and by the pillaging of the great house that had occurred in his absences abroad and in the north of England.

Whereas Ainsworth utilizes history to present many of the novel's characters, he makes Fawkes a brooding, romantic hero, and uses the reputation of John Dee rather than the historical Dee to create a character out of romance. Since neither the real nor the mythical Dr. Dee was an anatomist or medical researcher, when Fawkes discovers him and his colleague, Edward Kelley, by lantern light exhuming the recently buried corpse of the prophetess of Elizabeth Orton, Fawkes and the reader can be sure that the occult scholar will not use the corpse for scientific investigations. Thus, in his presentations of Dee and Kelley Ainsworth blends history and romance, a combination evident in Fawkes's accosting him at the opening of Chapter VII, "Doctor Dee":

"Suffice it you are both known to me. You, John Dee, warden of Manchester, who deserve to be burnt at the stake for your damnable practices, rather than hold the sacred office you fill; and you, Edward Kelley, his associate, who boast of familiar intercourse with demons, and, unless fame belies you, have purchased the intimacy at the price of your soul's salvation. I know you both. I know, also, whose body you have disinterred — it is that of the ill-fated prophetess, Elizabeth Orton. And if you do not instantly restore it to the grave whence you have snatched it, I will denounce you to the authorities of the town." [p. 51]

In the illustration, Fawkes, suspecting the pair have no legitimate reason for removing the body of prophetess from the cemetery, observes them but not intervene. The reader recognizes Fawkes from the previous illustration, in which he wears a feathered Spanish hat and cloak, signifiers of his foreign military experience and Catholicism. The lantern throws an eerie chiaroscuro over the bearded countenance and spindly, aged legs of Dee and his shovel, leaving the rest of the graveyard scene in comparative darkness. Of the twenty-two engravings that Cruikshank executed, he has set at least eight at night or in the darkness of a stone cell, and all effectively contribute to the eerie atmosphere of the romance. This particular nocturnal scene sets up two re-animation scenes as Dee and his assistant attempt to resuscitate Elizabeth Orton here and Fawkes later.

As John Sutherland points out in his synopsis of novel’s plot, Ainsworth, fascinated as always by the history of his native Manchester, opens the story of the Gunpowder Plot with the public execution of Catholic priests there in 1605 before introducing the fanatical ex-soldier bent on vengeance, Guy Fawkes. The scenes with the dying prophetess, Elizabeth Orton, and Dr. John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley in the cemetery remind the reader that, for all of Ainsworth’s pretentions to be an historical novelist, he consistently uses the methods of a romancer. He creates exciting incidents out of entirely baseless connections, introducing Dr. Dee into the plot despite his having no historical connection whatsoever with Fawkes, and he fashions a complicated romantic entanglement between Viviana Radcliffe, daughter of a local aristocratic (Catholic) family, the conspirator Robert Catesby, the historical young merchant Humphrey Chetham (who in later life will found a charitable institution in Manchester), and Fawkes. Cruikshank convincingly portrays the nocturnal activity of Fawkes, Dee, and the plotters in dark plates that anticipate Phiz’s innovation of the next decade in Dickens's Bleak House.

Robert L. Patten ably summarizes Ainsworth's fusing of history and the conventions of romance in Guy Fawkes in the writer's incorporation of Dr. Dee into the Gunpowder Plot:

To some extent, he was on familiar territory, setting the first part of his story around Manchester and bringing in Humphrey Chetham, whose merchant fortune endowed a library and a hospital, and the infamous conjurer Doctor Dee, warden of the Collegiate Church. For this tale Ainsworth wrote the letterpress first and then sent it to Cruikshank with suggestions for subjects. [144]

In fact, from what correspondence is extant, Ainsworth seems to have proposed two subjects for each instalment's illustration, so that in all likelihood Cruikshank provided the gothic graveyard scene at the author's prompting.

References

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Guy Fawkes, or The Gunpowder Treason: An Historical Romance. With 22 illustrations by George Cruikshank. London: Cunningham & Mortimer, 1841 (first edition). Rpt., London: George Routledge & Sons, n. d.

Patten, Robert L. Chapter 29, "The Tower! Is the Word — Forward to the Tower." George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art Vol. 2: 1835-1878. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1996. Pp. 129-152.

Sutherland, John. "Guy Fawkes" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford U. P., 19893. Pp. 267-68.

Vann, J. Don. "Guy Fawkes in Bentley's Miscellany, January 1840-Noevmber 18401." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. P. 20.

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Last modified 11 August 2018