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Passage Illustrated

One Friday afternoon, in this pleasant month, it chanced that Mr. Wood, who had been absent on business during the greater part of the day, returned (perhaps not altogether undesignedly) at an earlier hour than was expected, to his dwelling in Wych Street, Drury Lane; and was about to enter his workshop, when, not hearing any sound of labour issue from within, he began to suspect that an apprentice, of whose habits of industry he entertained some doubt, was neglecting his employment. Impressed with this idea, he paused for a moment to listen. But finding all continue silent, he cautiously lifted the latch, and crept into the room, resolved to punish the offender in case his suspicions should prove correct.

The chamber, into which he stole, like all carpenters' workshops, was crowded with the implements and materials of that ancient and honourable art. Saws, hammers, planes, axes, augers, adzes, chisels, gimblets, and an endless variety of tools were ranged, like a stand of martial weapons at an armoury, in racks against the walls. Over these hung levels, bevels, squares, and other instruments of measurement. Amid a litter of nails without heads, screws without worms, and locks without wards, lay a glue-pot and an oilstone, two articles which their owner was wont to term "his right hand and his left." On a shelf was placed a row of paint-jars; the contents of which had been daubed in rainbow streaks upon the adjacent closet and window sill. Divers plans and figures were chalked upon the walls; and the spaces between them were filled up with an almanack for the year; a godly ballad, adorned Page 77with a rude wood-cut, purporting to be "The History of Chaste Susannah;" an old print of the Seven Golden Candlesticks; an abstract of the various Acts of Parliament against drinking, swearing, and all manner of profaneness; and a view of the interior of Doctor Daniel Burgess's Presbyterian meeting-house in Russell Court, with portraits of the reverend gentleman and the principal members of his flock. The floor was thickly strewn with sawdust and shavings; and across the room ran a long and wide bench, furnished at one end with a powerful vice; next to which three nails driven into the boards served, it would appear from the lump of unconsumed tallow left in their custody, as a substitute for a candlestick. On the bench was set a quartern measure of gin, a crust of bread, and a slice of cheese. Attracted by the odour of the latter dainty, a hungry cat had contrived to scratch open the paper in which it was wrapped, displaying the following words in large characters:—"THE HISTORY OF THE FOUR KINGS, OR CHILD'S BEST GUIDE TO THE GALLOWS." And, as if to make the moral more obvious, a dirty pack of cards was scattered, underneath, upon the sawdust. Near the door stood a pile of deal planks, behind which the carpenter ensconced himself in order to reconnoitre, unobserved, the proceedings of his idle apprentice.

Standing on tiptoe, on a joint-stool, placed upon the bench, with his back to the door, and a clasp-knife in his hand, this youngster, instead of executing his appointed task, was occupied in carving his name upon a beam, overhead. Boys, at the time of which we write, were attired like men of their own day, or certain charity-children of ours; and the stripling in question was dressed in black plush breeches, and a gray drugget waistcoat, with immoderately long pockets, both of which were evidently the cast-off clothes of some one considerably his senior. Coat, on the present occasion, he had none, it being more convenient, as well as agreeable to him, to pursue his avocations in his shirtsleeves; but, when fully equipped, he wore a large-cuffed, long-skirted garment, which had once been the property of his master.

In concealing himself behind the timber, Mr. Wood could not avoid making a slight shuffling sound. The noise startled the apprentice, who instantly suspended his labour, and gazed anxiously in the direction whence he supposed it proceeded. His face was that of a quick, intelligent-looking boy, with fine hazel eyes, and a clear olive complexion. His figure was uncommonly slim even for his age, which could not be more than thirteen; and the looseness of his garb made him appear thinner than he was in reality. But if his frame was immature, his looks were not so. He seemed to possess a penetration and cunning beyond his years — to hide a man's judgment under a boy's mask. The glance, which he threw at the door, was singularly expressive of his character: it was a mixture of alarm, effrontery, and resolution. In the end, resolution triumphed, as it was sure to do, over the weaker emotions, and he laughed at his fears. The only part of his otherwise-interesting countenance, to which one could decidedly object, was the mouth; a feature that, more than any other, is conceived to betray the animal propensities of the possessor. If this is true, it must be owned that the boy's mouth showed a strong tendency on his part to coarse indulgence. The eyes, too, though large and bright, and shaded by long lashes, seemed to betoken, as hazel eyes generally do in men, a faithless and uncertain disposition. The cheek-bones were prominent: the nose slightly depressed, with rather wide nostrils; the chin narrow, but well-formed; the forehead broad and lofty; and he possessed such an extraordinary flexibility of muscle in this region, that he could elevate his eye-brows at pleasure up to the very verge of his sleek and shining black hair, which, being closely cropped, to admit of his occasionally wearing a wig, gave a singular bullet-shape to his head. Taken altogether, his physiognomy resembled one of those vagabond heads which Murillo delighted to paint, and for which Guzman d'Alfarache, Lazarillo de Tormes, or Estevanillo Gonzalez might have sat:—faces that almost make one in love with roguery, they seem so full of vivacity and enjoyment. There was all the knavery, and more than all the drollery of a Spanish picaroon in the laughing eyes of the English apprentice; and, with a little more warmth and sunniness of skin on the side of the latter, the resemblance between them would have been complete. — "Second Epoch, 1715. Thames Darrell." Chapter 1, "The Idle Apprentice," vol. 1, p. 151-153.

Commentary

The weight of the background realia, from the embedded texts and illustrations to the cat purloining the cheese from the chapbook cover, does not overwhelm the essential drama of the scene, as the "idle" apprentice, adolescent Jack Sheppard, carves his name on the beam in his master's workshop while singing a drinking song he has picked up at the The Black Lion in Wych Street, where, incidentally, Jack has by chance met the notorious Jonathan Wild. The master who has seen to his apprentice's education, as signalled by Jack's being able to read and write, is hiding behind some boards, overhearing Jack contemplating taking up the "roaring trade" of a highwayman. However, whereas in the illustrations of the previous "epoch" Owen Wood was the focal point of the series, here he is marginalized literally, almost pushed out of the frame by the protagonist and eponymous character, who will now occupy most of the frames of the narrative-pictorial sequence. Although he appears in five of the first volume's nine full-page engravings, Owen Wood is prominent in only four. Jack occupies positions of prominence in the last four illustrations of volume one, and all but three in the two remaining volumes. Pictorially, then, Jack the idle apprentice and career criminal eclipses the virtuous apprentice and eventual aristocrat Thames. Here, Jack's inevitable journey to Tyburn Tree begins with insubordination (disregarding the task his master has set him), petty vandalism(carving his name on the beam as an assertion of his identity), and lack of application (putting off what he is supposed to be doing). The idle apprentice, Jack, of course, believes that he can be merry, eating cheese and drinking gin, and still complete his assigned task by the end of business in this celebrated illustration, which was as well known at the time as the initial illustration in Bentley's Miscellany, Cruikshank's iconic Oliver Asks for More (February 1837).

The sheer detailism afforded by the multiple saws and other carpentry tools, the posters, embedded texts, and pictures, and even the thieving cat enforce the reader to believe that this is the precise equivalent of Ainsworth's June 1715 scene set in the carpenter's workshop on Wych Street. These carefully described details, one suspects, were directed not just to Ainsworth's talented illustrator, but also to the theatrical adaptors who would treat Ainsworth's text as a theatrical scenario, and would, moreover, attempt to incorporate as many of the Cruikshank illustrations as possible into their plays which dominated the London stages for two years as the most palpable symptom of the "Jack Sheppard Craze."

The weight placed upon precise external description and verifiable external detail in the text promoted the disposition to take their pictorial version as the truer, fuller, more authentic representation. Despite the melodramatic psychomachia, the chief events of the novel are visible and concrete, not internal or abstract. Indicative of the hierarchy that results is the facsmile representation in the midst of the text of the rough letters of Jack's name, carved on the beam in the days of his apprenticeship "(of which, as it has been carefully preserved by the subsequent owners of Mr. Wood's habitation in Wych Street, we are luckily enabled to furnish a facsimile)." The same carving appears in Cruikshank's plate, that "famous drawing of 'Jack carving the name on the beam,'" Thackeray calls it, "which has been transferred to half the play-bills in town." — Martin Meisel, Realizations, p. 268. This is the first of twenty-one illustrations in which the mature figure of the eponymous character appears, with multiple appearances in three of the volume three multi-scene engravings.

Although the morality of the novel is ostensibly drawn from George Lillo's domestic tragedy The London Merchant (1731) and William Hogarth's twelve-part pictorial narrative Industry and Idleness (1747), apparently the apprentices in the audiences who flocked to stage adaptations of the novel found the embodiment of "idleness," the "flash" Jack Sheppard, far more appealing than the dutiful stepchild, Thames Darrell. Clearly, the traditional moral intended to point for children the rewards of diligent application of skill embodied in Thames and the dangers of indolence embodied in Jack were not the story's most attractive feature. The Penny Satirist for 15 December 1839 (shortly after Jack Sheppard's stage début at the Adelphi, Surrey, Victoria, Garrick, and Sadler's Wells in London) ran a cartoon involving five "juveniles" of about Jack's age in the present illustration, extolling the "robber-piece" that they have just attended and deploring moralistic melodrama as "so precious dull" (reproduced in Meisel, p. 266). Part of the charm of the production at the Adelphi for these clones of the Artful Dodger must have been Mary Anne Keeley's making the role of Jack Sheppard a "breeches" part in the pantomime tradition — and three of these playhouses (the Adelphi, Surrey, and Sadler's Wells) had recently staged productions of that other "Newgate drama," Oliver Twist, whose "Jack" (Dawkins) and Charley Bates Ainsworth's dissolute apprentice resembles in his self-confidence and swaggering demeanour. Thus, the present illustration reflects precisely the kind of appeal that the story as a play held for at least one generation of early Victorian theatre-goers.

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.

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 9 November 2016