Part 2’s turbulent opening illustration therefore gives readers a glimpse of the dramatic action to come, luring them into the plot of the February 1839 installment. To contemporary readers who knew from the Newgate Calendar Jack’s trajectory to the gibbet, this illustration thus creates suspense where one might think none would exist, introducing perilous situations outside the received narrative of Jack’s life. Interestingly, the illustration is also metonymic—that is, drawing attention to a specific historical artifact—being set under Old London Bridge. In other words, the leading image for part 2 functions as a modern film trailer would do, proleptically indicating the nature and setting of the action to follow, establishing the historical and action-based genre of the narrative, and impelling readers forward by revealing tantalizing glimpses of the plot to come. Writing in June 1840, Thackeray recalled this “brilliant” image of “Old Wood’s dilemma in the midst of that tremendous storm, with the little infant at his bosom” (Essay, 54), one that stayed with him long after reading the serial of Jack Sheppard.
Very notably, in the letterpress that follows the illustration, the account of the storm is delayed. The reader moves backward in time from the dramatic image to scenes that include Mrs. Sheppard praying for Jack’s future (ironic to the reader who already knows that he ends up being hanged); the ruffian Blueskin singing a comic ditty and proposing to Mrs. Sheppard; and the discovery of Thames’s mother’s ring with her name, Aliva Trenchard, engraved upon it. Only after these elements of pathos, comedy, and mystery do readers learn from Wild that Darrell has “embarked upon the Thames, where,” if his boat does not capsize in the storm, “he stands a good chance of getting his throat cut by his pursuers” (JS, 2:118). This dialogue represents the first mention of the storm before chapter 6’s title, “The Storm,” announces to the reader that the letterpress is about to catch up to the proleptic illustration.
When the letterpress does at last provide an account of the dramatic events under the bridge, those events are focalized through Wood, the carpenter and main character in the image. Once again, the letterpress takes us backward in time, to before the storm hits and Darrell embarks on the Thames. In a lengthy prologue to the scene matching the image, the narrator describes Wood walking beneath Saint Saviour’s Church and looking up at the sky, which arouses “an undefined sense of approaching danger” and signals “prognostications of a storm” (JS, 2:119). Wood then announces his intention to cross the Thames to get home before the storm hits (an irony, since readers already know from the illustration that he will get stranded under the bridge) and is offered a lift by Ben, an old salt, who bets a fellow sailor that he can make the crossing safely (another irony, since readers have already seen the image of an empty skiff and a man being carried away by the torrential river). Readers thus approach the boat chase—in which Wood and Ben watch as Rowland (Aliva’s brother) tries to kill Darrell (Aliva’s secret husband) and Thames (Aliva’s son)—armed with considerable advance knowledge of what will happen next.
Notably, however, the letterpress does not match the image until the narrator has dilated into a protracted Romantic set piece describing “sailing on a dark night upon the Thames” (JS, 2:123):
The sounds that reach the ear, and the objects that meet the eye, are all calculated to awaken a train of sad and serious contemplation. The ripple of the water against the boat, as its keel cleaves through the stream—the darkling current hurrying by—. . . the solemn shadows cast by the bridges—the deeper gloom of the echoing arches—the lights glimmering from the banks—the red reflection thrown upon the waves by a fire kindled on some stationary barge—the tall and fantastic shapes of the houses, as discerned through the obscurity;—these, and other sights and sounds of the same character, give a somber colour to the thoughts of one who may choose to indulge in meditation at such a time and in such a place. (JS, 2:123)
This set piece exemplifies Thomas’s observation that letterpress may actually contradict an illustration’s content (Pictorial, 12–14). Here, there is no match between the narrator’s call for solemn contemplation and Cruikshank’s action-packed image. Instead, Ainsworth states baldly that “it was otherwise with the carpenter” and that “this was no night for the indulgence of dreamy musing” but rather “a night of storm and terror” (JS, 2:123) before finally narrating the dramatic boat chase, in which Rowland and Darrell have a sword fight in the heart of the gale; Darrell is run through and plunges into the torrent; Wood and Ben manage to pluck Thames from his father’s hands as he sinks; and Rowland pursues the skiff that carries the baby as it plunges over the falls at Old London Bridge. Ainsworth interweaves this action scene with vivid description that paints with intense imagery and highly figurative language the torrential storm that the reader has already seen in Cruikshank’s image:
But as Rowland sprang to the helm, and gave the signal for pursuit, . . . the stream was black as ink. It was now whitening, hissing, and seething like an enormous cauldron. . . . The blast shrieked, as if exulting in its wrathful mission. Stunning and continuous, the din seemed almost to take away the power of hearing. . . . It penetrated the skin; benumbed the flesh; paralysed the faculties. . . . The destroying angel hurried by, shrouded in his gloomiest apparel. . . . Imagination, coloured by the obscurity, peopled the air with phantoms. Ten thousand steeds appeared to be trampling aloft, charged with the work of devastation. (JS, 2:126–27)
Ainsworth’s letterpress provides a figurative tour de force, elaborating for the reader on the illustration previously viewed—and now, presumably, recalled. The chapter builds to a literal cliffhanger when Ben tells Wood that the skiff will not survive the twelve-foot waterfall at the bridge span and then shrieks, “The bridge!—the bridge!” (JS, 2:127), the final words of the chapter.
Given the cliché of Victorian serial parts ending in cliffhangers,110 one might think that the part would end here, but it does not. (Indeed, current scholarship such as that by Hughes and Lund has shown convincingly that serial parts bore complex relations to one another, not only those of suspense.) Instead, the next chapter in part 2 embarks on another protracted narrative dilation before mimetically rendering the events of the image. This dilation occurs when Ainsworth, always interested in promoting a historical sense of place through his fiction, expounds upon the history of Old London Bridge in a new chapter that bears the bridge’s name as its title. In a passage that invites readers to contemplate the old bridge as historical metonym, he describes its structure and takes readers back to the days when the spikes of the “reverend and picturesque” bridge were “garnished . . . with the heads of traitors” (JS, 2:127, 128); he also traces the presence of a chapel in its early years. Only then, with Cruikshank’s metonymic image elaborated upon with historical detail, does Ainsworth narrate the action scene that matches the illustration: the collision of the skiff with the bridge, Wood’s dramatic leap to safety, Ben’s death in the torrent, and Wood’s vague perception that a man has reached the shore behind him (a perception confirmed for readers by the visual image already seen). Interestingly, this account in the letterpress faces another illustration (fig. 0.22), titled “The Murder on the Thames”: it depicts the two boats before the collision with the bridge at the moment when Wood and Ben grab Thames from the arms of the drowning Darrell. Thackeray admired this image, complimenting Cruikshank’s skillful etching of “the gloom of the old bridge, a few lights glimmering from the houses here and there . . . a great heavy rack of clouds . . . sweeping over the bridge, and men with flaring torches, the murderers, . . . borne away” (Essay, 54). This new image, then, is analeptic: we have already read about this event, so it provides a flashback to the dramatic scene of the rescue. In a complex temporal relation, the image moves readers backward in time even as they catch up in the letterpress to part 2’s proleptic first image, in which Wood and the child perch perilously in the middle of the roaring storm with their pursuer on the ledge behind them.
FIG. 0.22 George Cruikshank, “The Murder on the Thames,” illustration
