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Magog's Courtship.
George Cruikshank
April 1840
steel-engraving
12.2 cm high by 10.2 cm wide framed, facing p. 84.
Full-page illustration for the twelfth chapter of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Tower of London.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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So saying, he withdrew for a short space, during which he arrayed himself in his holiday garments. "Magog will have no chance," he observed, as he strutted into the room, and glanced at his pigmy limbs with an air of intense self-satisfaction; "the widow is already won."
"If she be as fond of apes as some of her sex, she is so," replied Og; "but widows are not so easily imposed upon."
The two giants, who, during Xit's absence had entirely cleared the board, and wound up the repast by emptying the nine-hooped pot, now expressed themselves ready to start. Accordingly, they set out, and, preceded by Xit, shaped their course along the southern ward, and passing beneath the gateway of the Bloody Tower, ascended the hill leading to the Green, on the right of which, as at the present time, stood a range of buildings inhabited by the warders and other retainers of the royal household.
Before one of these Xit stopped, and pointing to an open window about six feet from the ground, desired Gog to raise him up to it, The giant complied, when they beheld a sight that filled them with merriment. Upon a stout oak table — for there was no chair in the domicile sufficiently large to sustain him — sat Magog, his hand upon his breast, and his eyes tenderly fixed upon a comely dame, who was presenting him with a large foaming pot of ale. The languishing expression of the giant's large lumpish features was so irresistibly diverting, that it was impossible to help laughing; and the lookers-on only restrained themselves, in the hope of witnessing something still more diverting.
Dame Placida Paston had a short plump (perhaps a little too plump, and yet it is difficult to conceive how that can well be,) figure; a round rosy face, the very picture of amiability and good humour; a smooth chin, dimpling cheeks, and the brightest and merriest black eyes imaginable. Her dress was neatness itself, and her dwelling as neat as her dress. With attractions like these, no wonder she captivated many a heart, and among others that of Magog, who had long nourished a secret passion for her, but could not muster courage to declare it — for, with a bluff and burly demeanour towards his own sex, the giant was as bashful as a shamefaced stripling in the presence of any of womankind. [Book One, Chapter XII. — "How Magog Became Enamoured of a Buxom Widow, Ycleped Dame Placida Paston; How He Went a Wooing; and How He Prospered in His Suit," p. 84]
The narrative-pictorial sequence descends to a scene of comic relief in the classic narrative strategy which Charles Dickens termed the "streaky bacon" method of episodic plot construction involving alternating scenes of suspense, description, and comedy.
While Ainsworth advances Renard's plot to have Mary proclaimed Queen while Northumberland and his forces are absent in the field, he reverts in Chapter 12 to the comic strain provided by the jolly warders. In vain, Gog attempts to exhort his love-struck brother Magog to try the Renaissance delicacies placed before him by Dame Potentia. Momentarily, as his brothers dispose of the feast, he responds, but falls back into the pose of the melancholy lover. Xit, having been immersed in a pan of posset by accident, retaliates upon Magog by disclosing the source of Magog's strange lack of appetite: he is love with the wealthy widow Dame Placida Paston, a plump but comely middle-aged matron resident among the staff of the Tower. His brothers Og and Gog now take steps to prevent Magog's marrying her, and amuse themselves at his expense. With this anti-matrimonial project in mind, the two brothers and the impish Xit make their way through the gateway of the Bloody Tower to the staff accommodations on Tower Green, where, staring through a high window, the trio watch Magog pay his attentions to the widow as she presents him with an enormous flagon of foaming ale. These are precisely the sort of low comic characters and this exactly the kind of quirky romantic scene at which Cruikshank excelled, as Victorian readers would have recalled from several equally amusing courtship scenes in Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist: Gabriel Parsons courting Fanny (1839), The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce (1836), Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney taking tea (February 1838), and Mr. Claypole as he appeared when his master was out (March 1838). That the comic courtship has performance elements Cruikshank suggests by the audience at the window and and the boards forming a stage in the foreground, a strategy analogous to that which Cruikshank dramatically employed in The Burglary (January 1838) and humourously applied to the oyster scene involving Bumble's watching Noah and Charlotte through the rear window.
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Last modified 29 September 2017