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Passage Illustrated

But despite his entreaties, and those of her aunt, who also endeavoured to detain her, she rushed forth, followed by Jacob.

On gaining the street, Hilda found Jacob's statement perfectly correct. A troop of fourteen horsemen, with Sir Bulkeley Price at their head, were drawn up in front of the house. Most of them were well mounted, though a few of the number rode stout Welch ponies. All had swords at their sides, and pistols in their holsters, as was needful from the amount of money they carried; every man having been provided with two bags, each containing five hundred pounds in gold, slung over his saddle-bow. A pile of these precious sacks lay at the door, and some of the men were now adding to the heap, while others were unslinging bags from their comrades' saddles. The whole company were in high glee, and laughing loudly. The leader of the troop. Sir Bulkeley Price, was a stout, portly gentleman, whose swollen inflamed cheeks and mulberry nose showed he was by no means indifferent to the pleasures of the table. A claret-coloured velvet riding-coat, buttoned to the throat, displayed his full chest and rather commanding figure to advantage; while a well-powdered, full-bottomed perriwig contrasted strongly with his rubicund and fiery visage. Hilda's appearance created a great sensation among the lookers-on, and especially attracted the attention of the barber, who was chattering with Mr. Deacle about the occurrence, and of the fair Thomasine, who was leaning out of an upper window, just above her father's sign of the Three Pigeons.

"There's Miss Scarve!" cried Peter, calling to Thomasine. . . . .

Heedless of what was passing around her, for she heard her father's furious voice in the passage, Hilda rushed towards Sir Bulkeley Price, and, in a tone of the most earnest entreaty, cried, "Oh, sir, I implore you to go away! My father is fearfully incensed — some mischief will happen!"

"You are Mr. Scarve's daughter, I presume?" returned Sir Bulkeley, politely taking off his hat. "I should never have suspected him of owning aught so beautiful. But why should I go away, Miss Scarve? I am merely come to pay your father a sum of money which I borrowed from him." [Chapter VII, "The Payment Of The Mortgage Money," pp. 44-5]

Commentary: The Rowdy Arrival of Sir Bulkeley Price

As was the case with the pair of January 1842 illustrations accompanying The Miser's Daughter in Ainsworth's Magazine, in the first of the February plates Cruikshank has assimilated both the novelist's descriptions of chief characters and his actual narration of the scene realised. The nobleman against whom Scarve holds the mortgage on the Welsh estate, for example, has appeared in the text ahead of Hilda's entering the street, his theatrical arrival observed by Scarve's curious neighbours, seen in the background in the illustration:

"they're all at the windows looking on. There's Mr. Deacle, the mercer, over the way, and his wife and daughter; and the inquisitive little barber next door; and the ironmonger's wife and her family at the Blackamoor's Head; and the vintner's at the Man-in-the-Moon, and​—"​ [p. 43]

The narrator does not announce the presence of these petite bourgeois denizens of Scarve's street; rather, Scarve's butler, Jacob Post, mentions these tradesmen and their signs, information that Cruikshank has incorporated to provide an appropriate sense of the context in which Hilda and her father encounter Sir Bulkeley Price as his retainers on horseback deposit the enormous bags of gold on Scarve's doorstep​ (left). The drama between the nobleman and the mortgage-holder erupts in the narrow street of Tudor shopfronts. Hilda entreats the lead horseman, doffing his hat, to leave as Jacob tries to restrain her father as he rushes out his door with sword drawn. Far more effective than Hilda's telling Sir Bulkley, "My father is fearfully incensed," is Cruikshank's depicting Scarve as so incensed that his own servant attempts to prevent a confrontation. Ainsworth begins by dramatising the situation in terms of time on the loan expiring: with only an hour to spare, the Welsh aristocrat has redeemed the mortgage and thereby thwarted the miser's foreclosure on his estate.

The level of society that Ainsworth describes in The Miser's Daughter is almost on a parr with that of his earlier novels set in the preceding century. Indeed, the street scene in Westminster resembles that plate in which Dick Turpin's prosecutes his furious ride through a bustling mercantile town in Rookwood: Turpin's flight through Edmonton. But here Cruikshank has rather more to work with in terms of a description of the situation that forms the backdrop: the curious neighbours, Sir Bulkeley Price, and especially the presence of continuing figures from the narrative (Scarve, Hilda, and Jacob), all dressed as in the previous illustration. To draw the eye forward, away from the excited observers above the shops, Cruikshank uses dense cross-hatching to define the corner of Scarve's building, with an elegantly carved mermaid supporting the second and succeeding stories, and frame the scene between Jacob and his master. Conspicuously missing here is the story's protagonist, Randulph Crewe, who, although the most significant character in Cruikshank's series, appears in only eleven illustrations. Given Cruikshank's failures to describe really beautiful young women, we should not be surprised at his depicting Hilda only seven times — less than the villain Cripps, but with the same frequency as Villiers and Firebras. The bluff aristocrat Sir Bulkley Price occurs in six of the illustrations, connecting the plot surrounding the miser's mortgage money and the subplot involving the Jacobites.

The eponymous character, John Scarve, Ainsworth's miser, was inspired by the real-life miser John Elwes, who also figured in Dickens's creating the hard-hearted skinflint Ebenezer Scrooge the next year for A Christmas Carol. Indeed, illustrator John Leech may have been influenced by Cruikshank's depiction of the gaunt Scarve in his dressing-gown and nightcap in Scrooge Extinguishes the First of The Three Spirits.

References

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.

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Rookwood, A Romance. With 12 illustrations by George Cruikshank. London: William Bentley and John Macrone, 1836. Rpt. 1882.

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.

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