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Turpin's flight through Edmonton
George Cruikshank
1836
Etching on copper
10.2 x 8.5 cm vignetted
Ninth illustration for Rookwood: A Romance.
Fourth Edition, complete in one volume, with illustrations by George Cruikshank. London: William Macrone and Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, 1836.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Turpin took advantage of this delay to breathe his mare; and, striking into a by-lane at Duckett's Green, cantered easily along in the direction of Tottenham. Little repose was allowed him. Yelling like a pack of hounds in full cry, his pursuers were again at his heels. He had now to run the gauntlet of the long straggling town of Tottenham, and various were the devices of the populace to entrap him. The whole place was up in arms, shouting, screaming, running, dancing, and hurling every possible description of missile at the horse and her rider. Dick merrily responded to their clamour as he flew past, and laughed at the brickbats that were showered thick as hail, and quite as harmlessly, around him.
A few more miles' hard riding tired the volunteers, and before the chase reached Edmonton most of them were "nowhere." Here fresh relays weregathered, and a strong field was again mustered. John Gilpin himselfcould not have excited more astonishment amongst the good folks of Edmonton, than did our highwayman as he galloped through their town. Unlike the men of Tottenham, the mob received him with acclamations, thinking, no doubt, that, like "the citizens of famous London town," he rode for a wager. Presently, however, borne on the wings of the blast, came the cries of "Turpin! Dick Turpin!" and the hurrahs were changed to hootings; but such was the rate at which our highwayman rode, that no serious opposition could be offered to him.— Book IV, "The Ride to York," Chapter 4, "The Hue and Cry," p. 268.
Thus continues one of English literature's most exciting chase sequences, in which the secondary protagonist once again eludes his pursuers through a combination of his own brilliant horsemanship, Black Bess's remarkable endurance, and the ineptitude of the minions of the law. Since Hornsey is a parish at the beginning of the Great North Road, only six miles north of London's Charing Cross, it is logical that Dick Turpin's initial obstacle should be the toll gate there, since his stopping to pay the fee would enable Coates and his fellows to catch up. The toll gate presents the first real obstacle to Turpin's ride since the horse who attempts to vault the barrier risks impaling itself on the chevaux-de-frise of spikes on the upper rail. So celebrated a moment in the ride could not be avoid by the novel's second illustrator, Sir John Gilbert, whose version of the scene is not merely different in style, but in perspective.
George Cruikshank, however, in Turpin's flight through Edmonton offers his finest illustration in the entire narrative-pictorial sequence of twelve copper engravings as he depicts Turpin's career through a major town, for whereas Tottenham, through which he has already passed, was but a market-garden village in the eighteenth century, Edmonton, almost nine miles north-north-east of London's Charing Cross, was a town with sufficient shopkeepers and apprentices to take up Constable Paterson's hue and cry, and effectively prevent or slow the valiant horseman. Moreover, both Cruikshank and Gilbert would have been aware, as Ainsworth's allusion to John Gilpin, the hapless linen draper of Paternoster Row, Cheapside, suggests, of William Cowper's using Edmonton as the chief setting of his comic ballad. Whereas Sir John Gilbert presents a closeup of Turpin's surmounting the donkey-cart in Turpin Leaping the Cart, putting the reader in the midst of the Fore Street action, and showing by the reactions of just three onlookers the town's response to Turpin's juggernaut, in the original Cruikshank realisation of this narrative moment, Turpin's flight through Edmonton (1836), a dozen bystanders convey through their facial expressions and postures a variety of reactions, ranging from shock, awe, surprise, momentary terror (down left) and exultation (signified by the waving of hats, lower right). Against a backdrop of seventeenth-century buildings, their casement windows thrown wide open, Turpin lightly vaults over the cart, whose owner, a surprisingly well-dressed bourgeois rather than the peasant of the Gilbert illustration, vainly attempts to pull the recalcitrant donkey out of the way. The dynamic nature of the scene depends upon the contrast between the agressive, self-confident horseman and the general pandaemonium his passage creates, suggesting both George Cruikshank's 1828 wood-engraving John Gilpin's Ride and an 1832 award-winning but larger-scale version of the same mad gallop by Phiz, or Hablot Knight Browne, both of which are masterful visual renditions of William Cowper's description of the inadvertent gallop in the ballad "The Diverting History of John Gilpin" (1782). Cruikshank's version, John Gilpin's Ride (3). "Stop, stop, John Gilpin, here's the house", is particularly pertinent as a model for both Cruikshank and Gilbert as the moment realised involves a startled publican's stepping into the street from the seventeenth-century Bell Inn and a dog's chasing Gilpin's horse, exactly as described by the Gilbert and Cruikshank illustrations of Turpin's dash through Edmonton.
Having studied the Cruikshank illustration, Sir John Gilbert, in contrast, moves the perspective immediately in front of Turpin and donkey-cart, involving the viewer in the action. The determined horseman is caught in the very act of vaulting over the cart, Bess's rear hoof just clearing the donkey's head, her front legs barely missing the wheel of the cart. Nothing distinguishes the peasant, whose straw hat and smock-frock are metonymies for his social station, as Gilbert subordinates every background detail to the gigantic figures of horse and rider in his composition. Turpin raises his whip and glances down at the cater, as if menacing him if he tries to block his passage.
Left: George Cruikshank's The Hornsey Gate 1836). Centre: George Cruikshank's The Last Chance (Part 22 of Oliver Twist, February 1839). Right: George Cruikshank's Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess escaping from Clerkenwell Prison (July 1839). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
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Last modified 25 February 2017