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Abel Beechcroft discovering the body of the Miser in the cellar
George Cruikshank
September 1842
Steel-engraving
12.3 cm high by 9.9 cm wide, framed
Eighteenth illustration for the volume edition of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Miser's Daughter: A Tale, Book Three, Chapter 12, facing page 269 (second plate for the ninth instalment, September 1842, in Ainsworth's Magazine), encompassing Book III, Chapters 6-10.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
As he entered the vault, he indistinctly perceived a ghastly object; and springing forward, held up the light, so as to reveal it more fully. His fancy had not deceived him. There in a grave, — evidently digged by his own hands, — lay his old enemy — dead — dead!
While Abel was wrapt in contemplation of this miserable spectacle, and surrendering himself to the thoughts which it inspired, heavy steps were heard behind him, and Jacob rushed into the cellar. [Book III, "Abel Beechcroft," Chapter XII, "Abel Beechcroft Finds the Body of the Miserin the Cellar — His Reflections Upon It — Jacob's Grief for His Master," page 269]
As in the earlier illustration featuring John Scarve for Chapter 15 (the fourth or April 1842 instalment in Ainsworth's Magazine), The Miser discovering the loss of the mortgage-money (plate), Cruikshank shows his subject in a melodramatic pose suggesting that he is gripped by a powerful emotion. Shocked as Abel Beechcroft may be at the discovery of the lifeless body of his quondam rival, as Anthony Burton remarks, the picture "somehow fails to inspire the macabre thrill that it was meant to" (113). As a memento mori it lacks the necessary gruesome realism, and its over-the-top emotionalism (signalled by the repetition of "dead" and the outstretched left hand in the Cruikshank plate) seems ill-fitted to Ainsworth's coolly philosophizing about the miser's death as what we might term "karma" in the previous chapter: “Thus died this unhappy man, unattended, in a cellar, half entombed in the hole digged as a hiding place for a portion of his wealth — wealth, for which he had sacrificed all his comforts, all his feelings, all his affections, and for which alone of late he had seemed to live! Thus he perished — a fearful example of the effects of the heart-searing vice, of which he was the slave and the victim!” (III, 11: 268).
Cruikshank’s illustration extends the two-sentence description of Abel Beechcroft’s discovery in the celler, organizing the illustration around four basic blocks, in sharp contrast to the myriad of details crammed into the initial September 1842 plate, Mr. Cripps detected (plate). The juxtaposition of the farcical and melodramatic juxtaposes the "streaky bacon" mode of plot construction favoured by Dickens and Ainsworth, and so ably underscored by Cruikshank's antithetical illustrations for the monthly number. Cruikshank places the scene's chief source of illumination, Beechcroft's candle, in the very centre of the composition, the flame blowing towards the body of the miser and away from the open portal (right), which serves to emphasize the diagonal line of Beechcroft's coat and leg. his white face, a mask of concern and wonder, reiterates other white elements in the composition, his extended leg, the candle flame, and the miser's shirt-front, chin, and extended arm. The gigantic, open barrel complements the lifeless body at its base, a commentary on death reinforced by the empty candelabrum, bottom centre. What unifies the comic and tragic plates for the penultimate number is the sense of frustrated designs and expectations that both "discovery" scenes convey.
Among those real-life who posed for both Ainsworth's miser and Dickens's Scrooge was John Elwes (1714-89), Member of Parliament for Berkshire, a notorious moneylender nicknamed "Elwes the Miser." Despite his fears of dying in poverty, Elwes passed away on 26 November 1789, leaving an estate of £500,000, although he had lived on just £50 a year. Edward Walford in Volume 4 of his Old and New London (1878) has repeated a description of Elwes' death that Ainsworth and Dickens may have both consulted in its original form. (Dickens had used precisely this neighbourhood as one of his settings for Nicholas Nickleby.)
This street had also another distinguished inhabitant, in the person of the miser, John Elwes, who, on one occasion, had a narrow escape of his life here. The story is thus told: — It was the custom of Mr. Elwes, whenever he went to London, to occupy either of his houses that might be vacant. On one occasion when he had come to town, and, as usual, had taken up his abode in one of the empty houses, Colonel Timms (his nephew), who wished much to see him, in vain inquired at his banker's and at other places. Some days elapsed, and he at length learned from a person whom he met by chance in the street that Mr. Elwes had been seen going into an uninhabited house in Great Marlborough Street. The colonel proceeded to the house, knocked very loudly at the door, but could obtain no answer. Feeling alarmed, he sent for a person to join him, and they entered the house together. In the lower part all was shut and silent, but on ascending the stairs they heard the moans of a person seemingly in distress. They went to the chamber, and there on an old palletbed they found Mr. Elwes, apparently in the agonies of death. For some time he seemed quite insensible, but on some cordials being administered he recovered. ["Golden Street and Neighbourhood"]
A brief overview of Cruikshank's other treatments of death at the individual level (as opposed to the deaths of attackers in such group conflicts as The Europeans fire a withering volley at the charging Tartar horde in Russia in Robinson Crusoe) reveals that, to begin with, he preferred not to show death itself, and tended to present his characters' facing death as heroic. The quintessential confrontation is that of Bill Sikes as he looks over the parapet on the roof of Toby Crackit's safe-house, The Last Chance in Part 22 of The Adventures of Oliver Twist (February 1839). Despite the reader's negative feelings about the brutal housebreaker, Cruikshank presents the daring and undaunted Sikes as heroic in his final moments, rather than as deluded and terrified; he is admirable in his cool determination, just as Lady Jane Grey is heroic in her self-control as she calmly meets her fate on the scaffold in the frontispiece for The Tower of London. Rarely does Cruikshank present death as tragic or pathetic; rather, as is the case here in The Miser's daughter, it the consequence of a character's bad choices, a form of poetic justice, as in Death of Lady Rookwood (1836).
Even his most pathetic treatment of the subject, the death of the son in The Drunkard's Children, Early Dissipation Has Destroyed the Neglected Boy. — The Wretched Convict Droops and Dies (1848), is not tragic since, having embraced the teetotal agenda, Cruikshank sadly regards the boy's death as an inevitable consequence of the sins of he father being visited upon the children. Cruikshank's youth dies of some sort of fever rather than the consequences of "Early Dissipation," by which Cruikshank would have us understand "juvenile alcoholism." Since such temporary prison facilities had poor ventilation and sanitation, the Drunkard's son has likely just died of typhus or cholera, and societal neglect after his father's being institutionalized as an utter enebriate in The Bottle Has Done Its Work — It Has Destroyed the Infant and the Mother, It Has Brought the Son and the Daughter to Vice and to the Streets, and Has Left the Father a Hopeless Maniac, the concluding plate in The Bottle (1847). The teenager's death in The Drunkard's Children (1848) is far more complex morally and ethically than that of the miser in the Ainsworth novel, and is hardly a matter of simple poetic justice as the entire lower middle-class family falls victim to the disastrous effects of excessive alcohol consumption, which Cruikshank regards as a social scourge. On the other hand, John Scarve is partly culpable in his own untimely demise.
According to Cruikshank's morally rigid code of conduct, the inveterate miser has brought this terrible fate upon himself by devoting almost his entire life to cupidity. He expires erroneously believing that his treasure has been stolen when, in fact, he had earlier had the treasure-chest moved. Perhaps, as Hamlet says of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the judgmental Cruikshank and Ainsworth believe that the miser "did make love to this employment" (V, ii, 57), and that therefore his deplorable fate is mere poetic justice rather than an underserved and therefore potentially tragic death. And yet, as one studies Cruikshank's sobering image of him, one sees neither a monster nor a caricature, but a human being who has struggled in his final moments to free himself; like Bill Sikes, he has fought to preserve his life, but has lost. If the figure of Abel Beechcroft, candle raised to illuminate the sad spectacle, is melodramatic, that of the miser is natural, drawn from life rather than from the Victorian stage. Whereas the author was undoubtedly striving for "drama, horror, and excitement" (McLean, p. 32), in this visual complement Cruikshank has provided something much more authentic and effective: a true likeness of death.
Left: The nemesis of the villainess, Death of Lady Rookwood in Book V, Chapter 5 of Rookwood (1836). Centre: Cruikshank's almost comical treatment of the fatal fall of the exploitative gaoler in The Tower of London, The Fate of Nightgall (December 1840). Right: The celebrated rooftop scene in Dickens's Oliver Twist, The Last Chance (February 1839).
Above: Cruikshank's sympathetic treatment of the death of the Drunkard's son in Early Dissipation Has Destroyed the Neglected Boy. — The Wretched Convict Droops and Dies in The Drunkard's Children (1848). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Miser's Daughter: A Tale. With 20 illustrations by George Cruikshank. First published in 3 volumes by Cunningham and Mortimer, London, 1842. London, Glasgow, and New York: George Routledge, 1892.
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.
McLean, Ruari. George Cruikshank: His Life and Work as a Book Illustrator. English Masters of Black-and-White. London: Art and Technics, 1948.
Vann, J. Don. "The Miser's Daughter in Ainsworth's Magazine January-October 1842." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1988. Pp. 22-23.
Walford, Edward. "Old and New London. "Golden Street and Neighbourhood." Chapter 20. Volume 4. London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878. Online version available from British History Online. Web. 2 July 2018.
Last modified 2 July 2018