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Death of Black Bess
George Cruikshank
1836
Etching on copper
10.7 x 8 cm vignetted
Eleventh 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.
Contrary to all expectation, however, Bess held on, and set pursuit at defiance. Her pace was swift as when she started. But it was unconscious and mechanical action. It wanted the ease, the lightness, the life of her former riding. She seemed screwed up to a task which she must execute. There was no flogging, no gory heel; but the heart was throbbing, tugging at the sides within. Her spirit spurred her onwards. Her eye was glazing; her chest heaving; her flank quivering; her crest again fallen. Yet she held on. "She is dying!" said Dick. "I feel it——" No, she held on.
Fulford is past. The towers and pinnacles of York burst upon him in all the freshness, the beauty, and the glory of a bright, clear, autumnal morn. The ancient city seemed to smile a welcome — a greeting. The noble Minster and its serene and massive pinnacles, crocketed, lantern-like, and beautiful; St. Mary's lofty spire, All-Hallows Tower, the massive mouldering walls of the adjacent postern, the grim castle, and Clifford's neighboring keep — all beamed upon him, like a bright-eyed face, that laughs out openly.
"It is done — it is won," cried Dick. "Hurrah! hurrah!" And the sunny air was cleft with his shouts.
Bess was not insensible to her master's exultation. She neighed feebly in answer to his call, and reeled forwards. It was a piteous sight to see her, — to mark her staring, protruding eyeball, — her shaking flanks; but, while life and limb held together, she held on.
Another mile is past. York is near.
"Hurrah!" shouted Dick; but his voice was hushed. Bess tottered — fell. There was a dreadful gasp — a parting moan — a snort; her eye gazed, for an instant, upon her master, with a dying glare; then grew glassy, rayless, fixed. A shiver ran through her frame. Her heart had burst.
Dick's eyes were blinded, as with rain. His triumph, though achieved, was forgotten — his own safety was disregarded. He stood weeping and swearing, like one beside himself.
"And art thou gone, Bess?" cried he, in a voice of agony, lifting up his courser's head, and kissing her lips, covered with blood-flecked foam. "Gone, gone! and I have killed the best steed that was ever crossed! And for what?" added Dick, beating his brow with his clenched hand — "for what? for what?"
At this moment the deep bell of the Minster clock tolled out the hour of six. — Book IV, "The Hue and Cry," Chapter 12, Cawood Ferry," p. 295-296.
YORK, FOUR DAYS! — Stage Coach begins on Friday, the 18th of April, 1706.All that are desirous to pass from London to York, or from York to London, or any other place on that road, let them repair to the Black Swan, in Holborn, in London, or to the Black Swan, in Coney Street, in York. At both which places they may be received in a Stage Coach, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which performs the journey in four days — if God permits! — and sets forth at five in the morning. And returns from York to Stamford in two days, and from Stamford, by Huntingdon, in two days more. And the like stages in their return. Allowing each passenger fourteen pounds' weight, and all above, three pence per pound. Performed by Benjamin Kingman, Henry Harrison, and Waller Baynes. — Placard, preserved in the coffee-room, of the Black Swan Inn at York.— Book IV, "The Ride to York," Chapter VII, "The York Stage," p. 278 [1878 edition].
In these chapters leading up to the death of valiant mare, there is more than a little nostalgia for the coaching era, during which the run from London to York took four days, for coincidentally the novel in its illustrated form was published during the same year that saw the first great boom in English railway construction, 1836, initiating a decade of "railway mania." In the serialised Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, written shortly after Rookwood, Charles Dickens recalls a world only just vanishing, the largely rural England of the stagecoach and toll-road, about to be transformed by the "Iron Horse" and the Industrial Revolution. When Ainsworth wrote this prose paean to eighteenth-century's England's greatest horseman, regular rail service between York and the capital was still five years away; nevertheless, in 1834 it must have been apparent to everybody in England that rail travel would shortly connect all the major cities of the United Kingdom. In the decade preceding Ainsworth's writing Rookwood railway pioneer George Stephenson was successful in establishing regular freight service, and, in 1825, completed the Stockton to Darlington Railway to move coal in quantity. By 15 September 1830 Stephenson had inaugurated the first passenger railway service to the industrial towns of Manchester and Liverpool with a new locomotive designed by his son, Robert. Called "The Rocket," this new design, even pulling carriages on the Manchester-Liverpool run, managed the then-astounding top speed of thirty miles per hour, in contrast to the 20-mile-per-hour pace that Dick Turpin and Black Bess set from Kilburn to Edmonton. The speed of technological development was so rapid that, by 1833, "The Rocket" was already obsolete, and had to have its engine redesigned. The death of the gallant mare, Black Bess, therefore marks the end of "The Romance of the Road," and begins a new chapter in English literature.
In the Cruikshank illustration, the spire of a York church (barely evident, in contradiction of the textual description of "towers and pinnacles") reveals Dick Turpin's destination as at least a mile away. The gate in the background perhaps implies a final barrier between Dick Turpin and his goal, his inconsolable grief that will prevent him from leaving the fallen steed to complete his journey. Certainly, the wind-blown trees fit the elegiac mood of this dire conclusion to Dick Turpin's heroic ride to York. Turpin now stands, immobilized and grief-stricken, in the middle of the road in Cruikshank, and (more fittingly) in Gilbert kneels beside his dead companion, more than a mere beast of burden, rather a fallen champion. The rider's shadow reveals that it is now broad day (the Minster of York has just struck the hour of six), and therefore that valiant Black Bess has delivered her rider to his destination in under twelve hours, as opposed to the four days advertised by the 1706 poster for the York-to-London coach service.
Compare Sir John Gilbert's handling of this tragic scene of parting in Death of Black Bess, in which the inconsolable Dick Turpin, hat and crop at his feet, kneels at the head of his dead mount, now at peace, seemingly asleep. As Balthazar, Patrico of the Gypsies, disguised as a peddler, attempts to console him, Dick raises his hand in farewell. The distant roofs of cottages suggest that Bess had been able to deliver her rider to the suburbs of York. Hearing the shouting of the party of pursuers and the tramp of horses, Dick with difficulty tears himself away from Bess's side, heeding Balthazar's upbraiding in the rhetorical question, "And what did Bess die for, but to save you?" (296, facing the Gilbert illustration in the 1882 edition, and just the page following the illustration in the 1878 edition). Gilbert's illustration, again, a closeup, seems more effective in communicating the highwayman's grief, and heightens the suspense as the reader wonders whether Dick will have the emotional control necessary to leave his beloved companion to escape Coates, Paterson, and Major Mowbray, none of whom is evident in either illustration. By the close of the chapter, the valiant highwayman is still at large, for Bess's final effort fording the River Ouse has robbed them of their prey.
Left: George Cruikshank's initial plate illustrating the ride to York, The Hornsey Gate (1836). Centre: Cruikshank's second plate in the sequence, Turpin's flight through Edmonton (1836). Right: Cruikshank's third plate in the sequence, "I'll let 'em see what I think of 'em!" — Turpin's comfortably taking a pipe even as his pursuers seem to be gaining on him, although Ainsworth suggests not. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
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Last modified 25 February 2017