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The Execution of Guy Fawkes
George Cruikshank
January 1840-November 1841
Steel-engraving
13.3 cm high by 9.6 cm wide vignetted
Frontispiece for William Harrison Ainsworth's Guy Fawkes or The Gunpowder Treason
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Serialised in Bentley's Miscellany in twenty-three monthly parts.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Your courage fails you," sneered Topcliffe, laying his hand upon his shoulder.
"My strength does," replied Fawkes, sternly regarding him. "Help me up the ladder, and you shall see whether I am afraid to die."
Seeing how matters stood, the executioner who stood by, leaning upon his chopper, tendered him his blood-stained hand. But Fawkes rejected it with disgust, and exerting all his strength, forced himself up the ladder.
As the hangman adjusted the rope, he observed a singular smile illumine the features of his victim.
"You seem happy," he said.
"I am so," replied Fawkes, earnestly, — "I see the form of her I loved beckoning me to unfading happiness."
With this, he stretched out his arms and sprang from the ladder. Before his frame was exposed to the executioner's knife, life was totally extinct. [Book the Third, "The Conspirators," Chapter XVI, "Old Palace Yard," p. 354]
Cruikshank could and did produce etchings in a hurry for stories which he had not read, by way of expressing his dislike for a contract [with Richard Bentley, dating from early 1837] which survived his approval of it; but he could also be befooled by his own solemnity. — W. H. Chesson, p. 86.
When one compares Cruikshank's treatment of the execution motif here with his handling of the same basic material in the frontispiece for The Tower of London, one detects a lack of detail, energy, an interest on Cruikshank's part in this initial illustration for the July 1841 triple-decker. However, one should bear in mind that this scene from the final chapters of the book would have been one of the last that Cruikshank drafted for the serial in Bentley’s Miscellany when the break between the magazine's chief illustrator and its proprietor had led to Cruikshank's resignation and his eventually following William Harrison Ainsworth. From February 1842 to June 1844, he served as the chief illustrator for the new monthly publication, Ainsworth's Magazine (1842-54). Anthony Burton surmises that Richard Bentley's change in policies regarding the editor's proposing material for monthly illustration resulted in Cruikshank's growing discontent and "purposely poor" (109) illustrations for the 1840-41 novel. Richard Vogler cites a letter from Cruikshank to Bentley's editor (probably written towards the end of the serial run of Guy Fawkes) in which the illustrator protests the proprietor's arbitrarily altering the terms of their agreement:
Sir:
I cannot help expressing my surprise at the contents of your letter and shall be obliged if you ill explain what it is that Mr. Bentley requires of me — the words of the agreement are plain enough and Mr.Bentley for nearly five years has acted up [to] it in the only way I apprehend it can be understood namely — that he has always furnished me with the subject for the design (through the Editor[s?], — and I beg to add that in no one instance has this practice been departed from since the comm[enceme]nt of the work — so far from my having to read for a subject the plates have been almost in every instance etched before the author had written a line — [cited in Vogler's "Cruikshank and Dickens. . . ," p. 69]
Thus, Bentley's arbitrary change in policy under the editorship of Ainsworth seems to have angered the artist, effecting a change in Cruikshank's working relationships with the authors published in Bentley's as well as his relationships with the editor and the publisher in that from the inception of his work for the magazine he had determined the subjects for illustration based on consultation rather than from a careful reading of the text. "Apparently Cruikshank so disliked settling illustrations by letters that Dickens when writing Cruikshank would refer to this dislike in a kind of private joke: 'excuse me for troubling you with a note which I know you abhor'. . ." (Vogler, p. 70). Thus, the illustration Our Table Talk strongly suggests that Cruikshank believed collaboration with a writer on a text involved a back-and-forth discussion of the instalment preliminary to his working on the illustration. Perhaps the deficiencies evident in the frontispiece for Guy Fawkes reflect Cruikshank's discomfort with having to decide upon a subject for illustration without the customary discussion with the author.
In terms of Cruikshank's other frontispieces executed in the five years between February 1837 and April 1842, the Execution of Guy Fawkes reveals a want of invention and even inspiration: one senses that Cruikshank, upset over Bentley's change in policy (which undoubtedly involved a great deal more work for the artist as he had to read the instalment in painstaking detail to decide what would work as the subject for the monthly illustration), is simply going through the motions here. However, this frontispiece, like the other three depicted below, has the virtue of directing the reader to a highly engaging and even climactic moment that encapsulates the main threads of the novel's action.
Left: Cruikshank's spirited engraving of his heroine's martyrdom on Tower Hill, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey in The Tower of London (December 1840). Centre: Cruikshank's somewhat comedic frontispiece for the next Ainsworth book he illustrated, The Miser discovering the loss of the mortgage money in The Miser's Daughter (April 1842). Right: The Cruikshank illustration that led off the serialisation of The Adventures of Oliver Twist in the opening number of Bentley's Miscellany, Oliver's Asking for More (February 1837). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
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.
Burton, Anthony. "Cruikshank as an Illustrator of Fiction." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 92-128.
Chesson, Wilfred Hugh. George Cruikshank. The Popular Library of Art. London: Duckworth, 1908.
Jerrold, Blanchard. Chapter 9, "Illustrations to Harrison Ainsworth's Romances." The Life of George Cruikshank. In Two Epochs. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chatto and Windus, 1882. Volume One.
Sutherland, John. "Guy Fawkes" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford U. P., 19893. Pp. 267-68.
Vogler, Richard A. "Cruikshank and Dickens: A Reassessment of the Role of the Artist and the Author." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 61-92.
Vann, J. Don. "Guy Fawkes in Bentley's Miscellany, January 1840-Noevmber 18401." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. P. 20.
Last modified 7 August 2018
