In the case study that follows, we offer an in-depth analysis of this illustration from Jack Sheppard, showing how proleptic and analeptic reading strategies function powerfully in this popular but now little-read early nineteenth-century novel.103
First, some background: Ainsworth based his popular hero on one of the best-known figures in the Newgate Calendar, the thief and jail breaker Jack Sheppard, who was executed at age twenty-one at Tyburn in November 1724 (Hollingsworth, Newgate, 132–34).104 In addition, as already mentioned, Ainsworth owed a considerable debt to Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness, which provided the model for his contrasting narratives of two carpenter’s apprentices, Jack and his counterpart, Thames Darrell. The serial owes a debt to Oliver Twist, likewise a novel about thieves and the London underworld; however, Ainsworth’s narrative follows the infamous Jack Sheppard to the gallows, whereas Dickens’s redeems Oliver and endows him with a cozy family, leaving him safely ensconced in a middle-class home. At this stage in the late 1830s, Ainsworth, Cruikshank, and Dickens were close collaborators, with Dickens having recruited Ainsworth to Bentley’s Miscellany, which Dickens had edited from its inception, and Cruikshank having illustrated Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836) and Oliver Twist before Jack Sheppard and being scheduled to illustrate Barnaby Rudge (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:102).105 All three men were ambitious and overworked, with Dickens and Ainsworth vying for position as the period’s most popular author; Ainsworth and Cruikshank setting their sights on being the era’s leading historical fiction writer and illustrator, respectively; Cruikshank illustrating two major serials in Bentley’s as well as other commissions, including the Comic Almanack; Dickens writing two major serials, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby (April 1838 to October 1839), and trying unsuccessfully to start Barnaby Rudge; and Ainsworth taking over the editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany in January 1839 from an overloaded Dickens. Moreover, all three were frustrated that Richard Bentley was enjoying what they saw as undue profits from their very considerable labors.106 Out of this stormy professional relationship among publisher, star editors, leading authors, and the outstanding illustrator of the period, the serial of Jack Sheppard was born, assuming the position of lead serial in Bentley’s ahead of Oliver Twist—and prompting sales of the magazine to increase by 10 percent (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:130).
The serial opens on the night of 26–27 November 1703, the actual date of a great storm that devastated southern Britain, drowning a thousand seamen off the Downs, felling trees, collapsing chimneys, and destroying the grounds of St. James’s Palace.107 Ainsworth’s two opening installments use the night of the storm as a backdrop for a dramatic boat chase, gunshots, several drownings, a death from a falling chimney, and the narrow escape of the infant Thames, who is named after the river that nearly claims his life. The novel then skips forward twelve years, reopening with a teenaged Jack surrounded by Hogarthian signs of immorality (gin and cards), and Thames, an apprentice at the same carpenter’s shop, who evinces signs of moral uprightness that will guide him on a more virtuous course of life. The serial eventually reveals the two as cousins, both related to a noble Lancashire family; Jack is hanged at Tyburn,108 whereas Thames, revealed to be a marquis, marries the carpenter’s daughter.
Ainsworth had completed the first epoch of three in Jack Sheppard by the time Cruikshank began illustrating the serial in March 1838, meaning that the illustrator had an ample manuscript on which to base his designs. Moreover, Ainsworth’s letterpress describes the scenes to be illustrated—including costumes, architecture, lighting, furniture, and decor—with greater visual specificity than that of Dickens, indeed packing them with antiquarian detail, some of which was cut by Bentley (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:98). Ainsworth’s and Cruikshank’s collaboration was close. Although no records exist of their exchanges concerning the early illustrations of Jack Sheppard, we know that for the later ones, Ainsworth sent Cruikshank antiquarian material on which to base his designs; Cruikshank sent Ainsworth notes on particular details that he thought the author should insert into the letterpress to ensure a close match of text and image; and Ainsworth enquired of Cruikshank as to details of the illustrations to insert in the letterpress when, later in the serial, the artist worked ahead of the author in their pressure-filled publication schedule (see Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:112–13). As Patten summarizes, in the Jack Sheppard illustrations, “the fit between text and picture is so explicit that neither could have been produced without [author and artist] consulting the other” (Cruikshank’s Life, 2:99).
FIG. 0.21 George Cruikshank, “The Storm,” illustration for William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard, part 2. Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1839, 113 facing. Courtesy of W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University.
The illustration on which we focus here faced the first page of part 2 in the February 1839 issue of Bentley’s Miscellany. It is proleptic, showing the great storm of November 1703 before the letterpress describes it. The steel etching depicts a dramatic scene of death and survival in the heart of the tempest and in the heart of London, demonstrating a still image’s capacity to convey extreme movement and turmoil. The illustration, like all the others for Jack Sheppard, is rectangular and bordered with a dark margin, conveying a gravitas that had largely been missing from the borderless, oval-shaped vignettes of Oliver Twist (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:100). Cruikshank sets his scene under an arch of Old London Bridge, a noteworthy location that had recently passed into history with its 1832 demolition after the 1831 opening of New London Bridge; Ainsworth had sent the artist a book, Richard Thomson’s Chronicles of London Bridge (1827), from which to copy the architectural details, thereby ensuring historical accuracy. The bridge’s representation thus functions as a historical metonym, pointing readers to the story’s association with the newly vanished and iconic architectural monument.
The etching’s lines impressively convey the force and movement of the storm, with water flooding by, wind driving, and rain beating down. A dark arch of Old London Bridge frames the action. Nothing else remains stable: in the illustration’s center, a man balances precariously on a narrow ledge below the bridge, clutching a baby in one arm. Behind him, another man clings to the rock, poised on the edge of the roaring torrent; before him, an empty skiff tears past in the current, while in the foreground, a third man grasps desperately for a ledge even as the Thames River bears him away over a raging waterfall. As befits this dark scene of terror, the illustration contains almost no white space, with the bridge’s dark arch deeply crosshatched and the gray sky and dark water differentiated deftly by Cruikshank’s etching needle, which juxtaposes the deep lineations of the torrential water, pouring over the waterfall in a convex curve to the left, with the barely moonlit rain pelting in torrents in a reverse curve. The spume from the waterfall provides the image’s only white space, spraying upward to the left in a dramatic countermovement to the falls and the rain.109 As William Blanchard Jerrold, a journalist and later the author of London: A Pilgrimage (1872; illustrated by Doré), wrote of Cruikshank’s early plates for the series, they are “absolutely astonishing . . . for the technical skill in rendering infinite varieties in light and shade, of emotion, of scenery” (qtd. in Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:114).
Narratologically, this proleptic illustration opening part 2 anticipates a point of peak dramatic action and suspense, prompting readers to embark on the installment’s letterpress with specific questions: Who is the man under the bridge with the baby? Who is the baby? Who is the pursuer clinging to the rock ledge? Who will live and who will die? Notably, both Jack and Thames are infants, and part 1 features scenes in which they are switched, so readers opening part 2 would not know which baby might end up in this perilous position. Part 1’s action scenes, which portray a chase through the London slums, have revealed that Thames is the son of a beautiful, possibly aristocratic, woman. She is pursued by her brother Rowland, who, assisted by Jonathan Wild (another actual historical figure, a famous
