"Lord Gordon in The Tower" — Harry Furniss's twenty-fifth illustration for Dickens's "Barnaby Rudge" (1910)

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Lord Gordon in The Tower

Of all his forty thousand men, not one remained to bear him company. Friends, dependents, followers, — none were there. His fawning secretary had played the traitor; and he whose weakness had been goaded and urged on by so many for their own purposes, was desolate and alone.

Harry Furniss

1910

13.8 cm x 9 cm (5 ½ by 3 ½ inches), vignetted

Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing VI, 577.

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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Context of the Illustration: Retreating into His Own Thoughts

And in the Tower, in a dreary room whose thick stone walls shut out the hum of life, and made a stillness which the records left by former prisoners with those silent witnesses seemed to deepen and intensify; remorseful for every act that had been done by every man among the cruel crowd; feeling for the time their guilt his own, and their lives put in peril by himself; and finding, amidst such reflections, little comfort in fanaticism, or in his fancied call; sat the unhappy author of all — Lord George Gordon.

He had been made prisoner that evening. "If you are sure it’s me you want," he said to the officers, who waited outside with the warrant for his arrest on a charge of High Treason, "I am ready to accompany you —" which he did without resistance. He was conducted first before the Privy Council, and afterwards to the Horse Guards, and then was taken by way of Westminster Bridge, and back over London Bridge (for the purpose of avoiding the main streets), to the Tower, under the strongest guard ever known to enter its gates with a single prisoner.

Commentary

Furniss follows the precedent of Cattermole in the original serial by presenting a portrait of the solitary prisoner of The Tower. However, Furniss includes no background details, just the stones of the wall behind the brooding Lord Gordon.

Relevant illustration from the 1841 Edition

Above: Cattermole's atmospheric illustration of the aristocratic prisoner held on a charge of high treason: Lord George Gordon in The Tower (30 October 1841).

Related Material including Other Illustrated Editions of Barnaby Rudge

Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (homepage)
Cattermole and Phiz — First illustrators: A Team Effort by "The Clock Works" (1841)
Cattermole's Seventeen Illustrations (13 Feb.-27 Nov. 1841)
Phiz's Original Serial Illustrations (13 Feb.-27 Nov. 1841)
F. O. C. Darley's frontispieces and extra illustrations for the novel (1862 and 1888)
Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Diamond Edition Illustrations (1867)
Fred Barnard's 46 illustrations for the Household Edition (1874)
A. H. Buckland's illustrations for The Collins' Clear-type Press Pocket Edition (1900)

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge in Master Humphrey's Clock. Illustrated by Phiz and George Cattermole. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1841; rpt., Bradbury and Evans, 1849.

________. Barnaby Rudge. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. VI.

Created 24 July 2020

Last modified 16 December 2020