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The Gate Tower
George Cruikshank
January 1840
wood-engraving
7.5 cm high by 8.4 cm wide, framed, p. 1
"The Gate Tower," half-page wood-engraving for the "Preface" of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Tower of London. A Historical Romance. London: Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, 1840.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
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.]
Desirous of exhibiting the Tower in its triple light of a palace, a prison, and a fortress, the Author has shaped his story with reference to that end; and he has also endeavoured to contrive such a series of incidents as should naturally introduce every relic of the old pile, — its towers, chapels, halls, chambers, gateways, arches, and drawbridges — so that no part of it should remain un-illustrated.
How far this design has been accomplished — what interest has been given to particular buildings — and what mouldering walls have been informed with life — is now to be determined: — unless, indeed, it may be considered determined by the numbers who have visited the different buildings, as they have been successively depicted by pen and pencil, during the periodical appearance of the work. ["Preface," p. iii.]
Critic Anthony Burton has criticized the numerous wood-engravings of the "various features of the Tower, as they looked in the nineteenth century" (p. 115) as failing to make an impact, but concedes that these small-scale illustrations "neatly dropped into the text at appropriate points . . . make the intended effect." The logical question, then, is, "What was Cruikshank's intention in providing so many wood-engravings of the Tower and its environs?" Probably Ainsworth's intention in commissioning these was at least as much antiquarian as it was literary, for his passages describing the physical setting are often accompanied by Cruikshank's architectural wood-engravings. The highly realistic illustrations of the actual places which the artist and illustrator visited lend some of the more outlandish aspects of Ainsworth's "historical romance" a certain verisimilitude, like the sixteenth-century costumes worn by the characters in Cruikshank's forty steel-engravings. But the essential difference between the etchings on the facing pages and the wood-engravings dropped into the text and read simultaneously with the text is inner life. Even though the Yeoman Warders, for example, are caricatures, they are lively, whereas the architectural scenes, with the exception of the title-page vignette, are entirely lacking in figures. They are, as it were, promotional pictures for London tourism utterly devoid of tourists. The wood-engravings generally represent the "historical" aspect of the story which the subtitle asserts. This particular engraving serves as an induction as the open portal bids the reader enter the mid-sixteenth century on Tower Hill.
Ainsworth seems constantly to be trying to remind his readers, living in an age of urbanization and industrialization in which historic old landmarks were being swept away or defaced or 'restored' beyond recognition, that they had a heritage, one very large vested in physical structures of one kind or another, and that the heritage [...] might soon be gone beyond recall. [Worth, pp. 71–73]
William Parrott's 1840 grand oil canvas View of the Tower of London from the River Thames at Custom House shows the venerable White Tower surrounded by commercial buildings and marine commerce, as if the past is becoming submerged by the powerful forces of modernity. The Tower is a vestige of the late mediaeval era, when London's population was perhaps 70,000, as opposed to several million by 1840, when urbanization began to swallow up such surrounding villages as Shepherd's Bush. Immigration from the counties and Wales in particular resulted in a growing urban population; by 1841 less than two-thirds of the capital's inhabitants had been born there.
Ironically, despite his intention to see his novel heavily illustrated, Ainsworth has not supported the initial illustration of the text proper with an appropriate description of the physical setting, so that the architectural wood-engraving, with a notable absence of any figures, effects a transition between the "Preface" and Chapter I, "Of the Manner in which Queen Jane entered the Tower of London" on 10 July 1553:
On the following morning, [Lady Jane Grey] was conveyed, as has been just stated, with great pomp to Durham House, in the Strand, where she received the homage of her subjects, partook of a magnificent banquet, and tarried sufficiently long to enable the duke to collect his retinue to conduct her in state to the Tower: it being then the custom for the monarchs of England to spend the first few days of their reign within this ancient fortress. It is with the moment of her departure for this palace and prison of crowned heads, that this chronicle commences. [Book One, Chapter I. — "Of the Manner in which Queen Jane Entered The Tower of London," pp. 3-4]
"Ainsworth, William Harrison." http://biography.com
Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Tower of London. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Richard Bentley, 1840.
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.
Carver, Stephen. Ainsworth and Friends: Essays on 19th Century Literature & The Gothic. 11 September 2017.
Golden, Catherine J. "Ainsworth, William Harrison (1805-1882." Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell. New York and London: Garland, 1988. Page 14.
Kelly, Patrick. "William Harrison Ainsworth." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 21, "Victorian Novelists Before 1885," ed. Ira Bruce Nadel and William E. Fredeman. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. Pp. 3-9.
McLean, Ruari. George Cruikshank: His Life and Work as a Book Illustrator. English Masters of Black-and-White. London: Art and Technics, 1948.
Sutherland, John. "The Tower of London" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19893. P. 633.
Steig, Michael. "George Cruikshank and the Grotesque: A Psychodynamic Approach." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 189-212.
Vogler, Richard A. Graphic Works of George Cruikshank. Dover Pictorial Archive Series. New York: Dover, 1979.
Worth, George J. William Harrison Ainsworth. New York: Twayne, 1972.
Vann, J. Don. "The Tower of London, thirteen parts in twelve monthly instalments, January-December 1840." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 19-20.
Last modified 28 September 2017