The Marriage of Randulph and Hilda
George Cruikshank
October 1842
Steel-engraving
13 cm high by 10.4 cm wide, framed
Twentieth and final illustration for the volume edition of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Miser's Daughter: A Tale, Book Three, Chapter 18, facing page 301 — second plate for the tenth instalment, October 1842, in Ainsworth's Magazine, Volume 2, encompassing Book III, Chapters 11-18.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The service was admirably performed by a venerable clergyman — an old and valued friend of Abel's, — and at its close the concourse issued from the church, dividing into two lines, so as to allow a passage for the wedding train. As soon as the happy couple were seen issuing hand in hand from the Gothic portal of the old church, a loud and joyous shout was raised by the assemblage, a couple of guns were fired on board the lighter, and the church bells rang forth a joyous peal.
It was a heart-cheering sight; and many a breast throbbed, — and many an eye grew moist at beholding it. And plenty of spectators there were. The whole of the area before the church was filled, and the windows and towers of the old archiepiscopal palace were studded with faces. The little flower-girls now stepped forward, and strewed their fragrant offerings in the path of the happy pair, who walked on amid the continued cheers of the bystanders.
A little behind Randulph, on the right, walked Trussell, who, excited by the general enthusiasm, had placed his hat on his cane, and waved it to the crowd. Near him came Abel and Miss Wilbraham, the former with a glowing smile on his countenance, such as Mr. Jukes himself never remembered to have witnessed. After them walked Sir Norfolk Salusbury and Mrs. Crew.
Next in order came Mr. and Mrs. Pokerich, the latter of whom thought it decorous to turn aside her pretty face from the ardent gaze of her enamoured little lord. Lastly came Mr. and Mrs. Rathbone, whose appearance did not seem greatly to interest the spectators. Sir Bulkeley Price had posted himself on the left of the church door, to watch the wedding train pass by, and to wait the coming forth of the clergyman. [Book III, "Abel Beechcroft," Chapter XVIII, "Detailing an Event which may possibly have been Anticipated from the Preceding Chapter," page 301]
Writers have used marriage to resolve plots since Virgil concluded the wanderings of Aeneas with the hero's marriage to the Latin princess, Lavinia. Shakespeare frequently concluded his comedies with happy endings involving wedding celebrations, as in The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and All's Well That Ends Well. In The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones Henry Fielding brings the picaresque plots to closure by marrying his heroes and heroines. In the third volume of The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), Tobias Smollett ties up the loose ends of the episodic travel plot with the marriage of the Scottish soldier, Lieutenant Lismahago, and the Welsh spinster, Tabitha Bramble, to cement the novel's discussion of Britishness. Closer to the age of Ainsworth, Sir Walter Scott resolves the cultural conflicts between Highlanders and Sassenachs in the marriage of Rose Bradwardine, fair-haired daughter of the Baron, and Edward Waverley in the 1814 historical novel. Other nineteenth-century novelists, including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy would often resort to staging a marriage to mark the conclusion of the action. During this period, Dickens used marriage as a social resolution in Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby, and Martin Chuzzlewit.
Harrison Ainsworth likewise demonstrated his fondness for this species of this plot resolution. Cruikshank and Ainsworth, working out this scene, had precedents in Mr. Haredale Bestows His Niece's Hand in Barnaby Rudge (1841) and the comic dwarf's marriage in Xit, now Sir Narcissus Le Grand, entertaining his friends on his wedding day in the December 1840 number of The Tower of London. Since for Victorian family reading the romantic closure was usually the most satisfying and least contentious ending available to popular writers, readers of the October 1842 issue of The Miser's Daughter in Ainsworth's Magazine, given the trajectory of the relationship between Hilda Scarve and Randulph Crew, would have expected nothing less than a final scene (and a complementary illustration) in which the young couple wed at a Lambeth or Westminster church. In fact, Ainsworth stage-manages a spectacular arrival as "Randulph's barge swept over the sparkling waters to the stairs near Lambeth Palace" and a societal recognition of the marriage as the couple emerge "hand in hand from the Gothic portal of the old church." Cruikshank again has his architectural setting ready-made as he merely had to visit Lambeth and sketch the red-brick Renaissance residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Palace (centre), and the Gothic bell-tower of the Church of St. Mary-at-Lambeth (right) in the background. Since the white-stone tower had undergone extensive repairs in 1834–35, the backdrop also constitutes a topical allusion in the 1842 novel.
Accompanied by the minister, the hero and heroine have just emerged from the handsome, pseudo-Gothic portal erected in 1778 at the west end of the church "for the convenience of those parishioners who kept carriages" (Survey of London: Volume 23, Lambeth: South Bank and Vauxhall). In order to avoid drawing the eye away from the couple in the foreground, Cruikshank has created an open space immediately in front of them, and has sketched in the episcopal palace less sharply; in the water-colour version of this illustration he uses a golden yellow rather than a red to describe the palace in order to avoid its overwhelming his true subject, the young couple (centre bottom). For the same reason, in that coloured version he has made the figures larger, and emphasized both the party of flower-girls (right), Trussell Beechcroft (holding his hat aloft on a cane, left), and particularly the faithful Jacob Post, stepping forward, left, to congratulate his new master.
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.
"Church of St. Mary, Lambeth." Survey of London: Volume 23, Lambeth: South Bank and Vauxhall (originally published by London County Council, London, 1951). Online version available from British History Online. Web. 4 July 2018.
Grego, Joseph (intro). Cruikshank's Water Colours. [27 Oliver Twist illustrations, including the wrapper and the 13-vignette title-page produced for F. W. Cosens; 20 plates for William Harrison Ainsworth's The Miser's Daughter: A Tale of the Year 1744; 20 plates plus the proofcover the work for W. H. Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798 and Emmett's Insurrection in 1803]. London: A. & C. Black, 1903. Book in the Rare Book Collection of the University of Toronto.
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.
Last modified 4 July 2018
