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Passage Illustrated

"Well, my dear, I've a proposal to make in regard to this babby of yours, which may, or may not, be agreeable. All I can say is, it's well meant; and I may add, I'd have made it five minutes ago, if you'd given me the opportunity."

"Pray come to the point, Sir," said Mrs. Sheppard, somewhat alarmed by this preamble.

"I am​coming to the point, Joan. The more haste, the worse speed — better the feet slip than the tongue. However, to cut a long matter short, my proposal's this: — I've taken a fancy to your bantling, and, as I've no son of my own, if it meets with your concurrence and that of Mrs. Wood, (for I never do anything without consulting my better half,) I'll take the boy, educate him, and bring him up to my own business of a carpenter."

The poor widow hung her head, and pressed her child closer to her breast.

"Well, Joan," said the benevolent mechanic, after he had looked at her steadfastly for a few moments, "what say you? — silence gives consent, eh?"

Mrs. Sheppard made an effort to speak, but her voice was choked by emotion.

"Shall I take the babby home with me!" persisted Wood, in a tone between jest and earnest.

"I cannot part with him," replied the widow, bursting into tears; "indeed, indeed, I cannot."

"So I've found out the way to move her," thought the carpenter; "those tears will do her some good, at all events. Not part with him!" added he aloud. "Why you wouldn't stand in the way of his good fortune surely? I'll be a second father to him, I tell you. Remember what the conjuror said."

"I do remember it, Sir," replied Mrs. Sheppard, "and am most grateful for your offer. But I dare not accept it."

"Dare not!" echoed the carpenter; "I don't understand you, Joan."

"I mean to say, Sir," answered Mrs. Sheppard in a troubled voice, "that if I lost my child, I should lose all I have left in the world. I have neither father, mother, brother, sister, nor husband — I have only him."

"If I ask you to part with him, my good woman, it's to better his condition, I suppose, ain't it?" rejoined Wood angrily; for, though he had no serious intention of carrying his proposal into effect, he was rather offended at having it declined. "It's not an offer," continued he, "that I'm likely to make, or you're likely to receive every day in the year." — Vol. 1, "Epoch the First. 1703. Jonathan Wild," Chapter One, "The Widow and Her Child," p. 15-17.

Commentary

After the February 1837-April 1839 serial run of The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress in the Dickens-edited Bentley's Miscellany, the young Editor, having squabbled with the overly intrusive publisher over editorial prerogatives that Richard Bentley insisted upon exercising, resigned as editor. That first serial novel in Bentley's Miscellany had appeared in twenty-four monthly instalments, each with a single-page steel engraving by caricaturist George Cruikshank. The practice continued with the new novel by the incoming editor, William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882), but, unlike the previous series, Cruikshank begins not with his protagonist as a child, but as an infant tended by his young mother in a run-down house in the Old Mint, in a cottage once occupied by a cobbler who committed suicide. Cruikshank, in fact, privided two monthly engravings over the fourteen monthly instalments, for a total of twenty-eight plates.

The modern reader may suspect Owen Wood's motives in befriending the young widow, but there is no suggestion of an amorous intention in George Cruikshank's interpretation of the scene. Indeed, Cruikshank's widow, although indeed "pale," "poverty-stricken," "forlorn," and dressed in tattered black weeds (2), is hardly young or beautiful, and there is no suggestion that this is the countenance of an alcoholic. However, Cruikshank's rendering of both the respectable, fashionably dressed, be-wigged carpenter in three-cornered hat, breeches, hose, silver-buckled, high-heeled shoes, the aptly named Mr. Wood, and the interior of the room, with multiple posters on the wall, rotten flooring and damaged ceiling, suggests that Cruikshank had studied the text carefully, even if he failed to make Mrs. Sheppard physically attractive.

The room in which this interview took place had a sordid and miserable look. Rotten, and covered with a thick coat of dirt, the boards of the floor presented a very insecure footing; the bare walls were scored all over with grotesque designs, the chief of which represented the punishment of Nebuchadnezzar. The rest were hieroglyphic characters, executed in red chalk and charcoal. The ceiling had, in many places, given way; the laths had been removed; and, where any plaster remained, it was either mapped and blistered with damps, or festooned with dusty cobwebs. Over an old crazy bedstead was thrown a squalid, patchwork counterpane; and upon the counterpane lay a black hood and scarf, a pair of bodice of the cumbrous form in vogue at the beginning of the last century, and some other articles of female attire. On a small shelf near the foot of the bed stood a couple of empty phials, a cracked ewer and basin, a brown jug without a handle, a small tin coffee-pot without a spout, a saucer of rouge, a fragment of looking-glass, and a flask, labelled "Rosa Solis." Broken pipes littered the floor, if that can be said to be littered, which, in the first instance, was a mass of squalor and filth.

Over the chimney-piece was pasted a handbill, purporting to be "The last Dying Speech and Confession of TOM SHEPPARD, the Notorious Housebreaker, who suffered at Tyburn on the 25th of February, 1703." This placard was adorned with a rude wood-cut, representing the unhappy malefactor at the place of execution. On one side of the handbill a print of the reigning sovereign, Anne, had been pinned over the portrait of William the Third, whose aquiline nose, keen eyes, and luxuriant wig, were just visible above the diadem of the queen. On the other a wretched engraving of the Chevalier de Saint George, or, as he was styled in the label attached to the portrait, James the Third, raised a suspicion that the inmate of the house was not altogether free from some tincture of Jacobitism.

Beneath these prints, a cluster of hobnails, driven into the wall, formed certain letters, which, if properly deciphered, produced the words, "Paul Groves, cobler;" and under the name, traced in charcoal, appeared the following record of the poor fellow's fate, "Hung himsel' in this rum for luv off licker;" accompanied by a graphic sketch of the unhappy suicide dangling from a beam. &mdaash; Part the First, Chapter One, "The Widow and Her Child," p. 6-7.

The novel (in addition to being an historical novel and developing into a "Rogue" or "Newgate Novel," begins as a species of Bildungsroman by introducing the eponymous character and his good twin, Thames Darrell, in the opening chapters and continuing their stories right up to early adulthood. Enjoying the same advantages as the apprentices of the kindly carpenter, Owen Wood, in Wych Street, London, the two boys (who it turns out are cousins) develop very differently; the "lazy" apprentice dies on the Tyburn tree, whereas the virtuous apprentice marries his former employer's daughter.

References

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. A Romance. With 28 illustrations by George Cruikshank. In three volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1839.

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. Edited by Edward Jacobs and Manuela Mourao. With 31 illustrations. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007.

Carver, Stephen. Ainsworth and Friends: Essays on 19th Century Literature & The Gothic. Accessed 1 November 2016. https://ainsworthandfriends.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/william-harrison-ainsworth-the-life-and-adventures-of-the-lancashire-novelist/

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans; Chapman and Hall, 1846.

Meisel, Martin. Chapter 13, "Novels in Epitome." Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Pp. 247-282.

Sutherland, John. "Jack Sheppard" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19893. Pp. 323-324.

Vann, J. Don. "Jack Sheppard in Bentley's Miscellany, January 1839 — February 1840." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Page 19.

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Last modified 22 December 2016