[Victorian Web Home —> Illustration —> George Cruikshank —> Guy Fawkes, or The Gunpowder Treason —> W. H. Ainsworth —> Next]
Guy Fawkes in Ordsall Cave
George Cruikshank
January 1840-November 1841
Steel-engraving
12.5 cm high by 9.3 cm wide vignetted, facing p. 33
January 1840 engraving for William Harrison Ainsworth's Guy Fawkes, or The Gunpowder Treason
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Serialised in Bentley's Miscellany, vols. 7-10, in twenty-three monthly parts.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Descending the eminence, and again entering the lane, which here made a turn, the soldier approached a grassy space, walled in on either side by steep sandstone rocks. At the further extremity of the enclosure, after a moment's search, by the direction of his companion, he found, artfully concealed by overhanging brushwood, the mouth of a small cave. He crept into the excavation, and found it about six feet high, and of considerable depth. The roof was ornamented with Runic characters and other grotesque and half-effaced inscriptions, while the sides were embellished with Gothic tracery, amid which the letters I. H. S., carved in ancient church text, could be easily distinguished. Tradition assigned the cell to the priests of Odin, but it was evident that worshippers at other and holier altars had more recently made it their retreat. Its present occupant had furnished it with a straw pallet, and a small wooden crucifix fixed in a recess in the wall. Gently depositing her upon the pallet, the soldier took a seat beside her on a stone slab at the foot of the bed. He next, at her request, as the cave was rendered almost wholly dark by the overhanging trees, struck a light, and set fire to a candle placed within a lantern. [Book I, "The Plot," Chapter I, "Ordsall Cave," page 11]
Cruikshank now entered in to a phase of his career in which he aspired to become an historical illustrator, striving for period authenticity in Ainsworth's sixteenth-century pieces The Tower of London and Windsor Castle (1842-43) and realising scenes and characters from eighteenth-century London in The Miser's Daughter (1842) and Jack Sheppard (1839), all of which nonetheless provide numerous opportunities for Cruikshankian caricature. Unfortunately this new seriousness of purpose has impinged upon Cruikshank's tendency towards physical humour and the grotesque, so evident in his non-textual series Mr. Lambkin (1844). He seems temporarily in Guy Fawkes to have abandoned his forté, satirical social commentary, in his attempt to bring momentous historical scenes and characters to life for Victorian readers.
Whereas conventional thinking would have cast Fawkes as a radical Catholic and a political extremist, Cruikshank depicts Fawkes as something of a philosopher in Ordsall Cave, which Cruikshank fills with the petroglyphs that Ainsworth describes: “The roof was ornamented with Runic characters and other grotesque and half-effaced inscriptions, while the sides were embellished with Gothic tracery, amid which the letters I.H.S., carved in ancient church text, could be easily distinguished.” In choosing this setting and the figure of Fawkes for his first illustration (January 1840) in Bentley's Miscellany Cruikshank emphasizes the clandestine and forbidden nature of the enterprise the tragic protagonist will undertake. Fawkes, whom Ainsworth introduced as the "soldier in the Spanish dress" in the previous chapter, has just rescued the prophetess of doom, Elizabeth Orton, from a watery grave, and has taken her beyond the reach of the Protestant authorities. However, she dies in her cave retreat shortly after foretelling Fawkes's failure to blow up the Houses of Parliament, his apprehension, interrogation, and execution:
"I see him before them!" she cried. "They examine him — they adjudge him! Ah! he is now in a dungeon! See, the torturers advance! He is placed on the rack — once — twice — thrice — they turn the levers! His joints snap in their sockets — his sinews crack! Mercy! he confesses! He is led to execution. I see him ascend the scaffold!"
Cruikshank's Fawkes reflects both Ainsworth's description of him as a soldier in a Spanish cape and hat, and as a thoughtful but isolated man of action whose grand scheme to destroy the Protestant Lords and Commons, along with King James the First, seems doomed to failure, if he credits the dying words of the prophetess.
Although the pensive pose is reminiscent of Fagin in the Condemned Cell in The Adventures of Oliver Twist (Part 23, March 1839), in the January 1840 illustration Fawkes in the prophetess's cell strikes the reader as more thoughtful and intellectual, rather than a prisoner in the grip of terror, but George Cruikshank may well have sat for both portraits of Fawkes here and Fagin. One may discern an even more pronounced similarity between the face of Fawkes in the cave and that of Fagin in the condemned cell in the 1846 serial wrapper.
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 10 August 2018
