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Passage Illustrated: Viviana's Tragic Death

"Saved! saved!" cried Viviana, raising herself in the bed. Opening her arms, she strained him to her bosom; and for a few moments they mingled their tears together.

"And now," she said, sinking backwards, "kneel by me — pray for forgiveness — pray audibly, and I will join in your prayer."

Guy Fawkes knelt by the bedside, and addressed the most earnest supplications to Heaven for forgiveness. For a while he heard Viviana's gentle accents accompany him. They grew fainter and fainter, until at last they totally ceased. Filled with a dreadful apprehension, he sprang to his feet. An angelic smile illumined her countenance; her gaze was fixed on him for one moment — it then grew dim and dimmer, until it was extinguished.

Guy Fawkes uttered a cry of the wildest despair, and fell to the ground. Alarmed by the sound, Forsett and Ipgreve, who were standing outside, rushed into the cell, and instantly raised him. [Book the Third, "The Conspirators," Chapter XIV, "The Last Meeting of Fawkes and Viviana" page 347]

Commentary: Ainsworth kills off another virtuous heroine

[Viviana] was twice interrogated by the Privy-Council, but having confessed all she knew of the conspiracy, excepting what might implicate Garnet and Oldcorne, neither of whom she was aware had been apprehended, she was not again subjected to the torture. Her health, however, rapidly sank under her confinement, and she was soon reduced to such an extreme state of debility that she could not leave her bed. [Opening of Book III, Chapter XIV, pp. 344-45]

Just as the virtuous Lady Jane Grey goes to the block to become a Protestant martyr in Ainsworth's companion historical novel, The Tower of London (January-December 1840), so the faultless Viviana Radcliffe dies a prisoner in the Tower after being detained as a suspect in the Gunpowder Plot. The pathetic image of her death is one of two illustrations in the November 1841 instalment of the novel. In Volume 10 of Bentley's Miscellany, the melodramatic illustration faces the scene of her death in the text, page 531, at the end of Chapter XIV and the beginning of Chapter XV. Her death — the death of an innocent — satisfies the Victorian reader's taste for sentimentality such as Dickens famously provided with the death of the angelic Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (30 January 1841).

Vivianna is equally interesting in this context, and just as equally doomed. Edgar Allan Poe famously wrote that ‘the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’ (Poe: 1984, 19), and this connection between femininity, art and death is similarly present in much of Ainsworth’s writing in a line that can be traced directly back to his early short story "The Spectre Bride." His principal tragic heroines, the Protestant Lady Jane and the Catholic Viviana Radcliffe, thus conform to a bourgeois aesthetic of virtuous femininity. They are therefore almost totally submissive to patriarchal authority in the form of their fathers, their husbands and their gods, before being eventually sacrificed upon the altar of history. This is the complete opposite of the independent, sexually aggressive and godless women of Jack Sheppard (who survive their narratives), and may be ascribed either to Ainsworth’s return to the Victorian fold or to an inevitable consequence of the tragic role. Both Lady Jane and Viviana are the victims of the political machinations of their husbands and fathers. Their dilemma is that they know, even if the men choose to ignore all the obvious signs, that they are doomed, but that they cannot break their marriage vows. Viviana constantly argues against the Gunpowder Plot, for example, and certainly knows enough to stop it, but the inevitable process of Ainsworth’s vision of history again renders her powerless. [Carver]

Since Cruikshank had often visited the Tower of London in working with Harrison Ainsworth already throughout 1840, he would have familiarized himself with the various cells, hallways, mess-rooms, guardrooms, armouries, apartments, and chapels that make up the complex. Consequently, although Viviana is a strictly fictional heroine, Cruikshank accurately depicts the actual subterranean cell below the Devereux Tower in which Ainsworth has her incarcerated. Three chapters earlier, Ainsworth specifies what he wants Cruikshank to use as a backdrop: "Viviana shuddered as she surveyed the narrow dungeon in which she was placed. Roof, walls, and floor were of stone; and the aspect of the place was so dismal and tomb-like, that she felt as if she were buried alive" (Book III, Chapter XI, "The Subterranean Dungeon," p. 333).

Fawkes occupies another subterranean cell nearby, although it takes his jailers, Jasper Ipgreve (with the keys, far left) and the gentlemanly Forsett (here restraining Fawkes as he discovers his wife dead) about half-an-hour to return with the state prisoner. As Ainsworth indicates, after they have given the couple some privacy, the jailers rush into the cell to find Fawkes distracted and Viviana dead on her pallet. With particular effectiveness Cruikshank describes the hewn stone walls of the cell. He composes the scene as a triangle, with the jailors forming one side, the bedclothes the base, the arms of Forsett another side, all culminating in Viviana's pale, expressionless face.

The Order of the Illustrations: A Bibliographical Note

The Bentley triple-decker of July 1841 has correctly positioned the Death of Viviana, facing the relevant text on page 347. The other late illustration, The Discovery of Garnet and Oldcorne at Hendlip, occupies the penultimate position, again facing the relevant passage on page 327. Thus, the error in their order crept into the single-volume Routledge edition published in 1842. The Cruikshank frontispiece for the July 1841 Bentley triple-decker was not Execution of Guy Fawkes, from Book III, Chapter XVI, but Guy Fawkes and Humphrey Chetham rescuing Father Oldcorne & Viviana Radcliffe from the Pursuivant, so that the scene of Fawkes's execution would have been the visual climax of the pictorial series prior to the Routledge publication of the novel.

The final illustration from the triple-decker, The Execution of Guy Fawkes, which would appear as the frontispiece of the George Routledge single-volume edition of 1842, occurs in the same instalment in the magazine serialisation, facing p. 536 in Chapter XVI. Neither plate, then, in the three separate Routledge volumes follows the pattern which Bentley's established over the course of serialisation, in which the monthly illustration led off the monthly number of the instalment and the magazine. In fact, the Routledge printer probably misjudged the order of the last three illustrations from the periodical and triple-decker because Routledge had decided to use the execution scene as the frontispiece. If the twenty-second illustration in the volume, The Discovery of Garnet and Oldcorne at Hendlip, facing page 347, were transposed with the plate showing Viviana's final moments, the order in Routledge (1842, reprinted in 1857 and 1878), the order of these final plates in the single-volume edition would be correct. Clearly the textual material on page 347 relates to the Hendlip plate. The picture of the two Jesuits at Hendlip faces page 347 in the 1842 Routledge edition, but pertains to the text adjacent to Viviana's death, on page 326. The order of the two plates has been reversed, since Chapter VIII, "Hendlip," should not be illustrated by the Death of Viviana, which ought to be the visual climax of the novel in single-volume edition, if the execution scene is exempted because it is the frontispiece.

References

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Guy Fawkes, or The Gunpowder Treason: An Historical Romance. With 22 illustrations by George Cruikshank. London: Cunningham & Mortimer, 1841 (first edition). Rpt., London: George Routledge & Sons, 1842, rpt. 1857 and 1878. [See the text and images of the novel posted in May 2013 at Project Gutenberg Australia's website: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1302021h.html.]

Carver, Stephen. "Ainsworth’s Guy Fawkes: Tragic Hero, Catholic Martyr." Online version available from Harrison Ainsworth and Friends. Web. 5 November 2016.

Vann, J. Don. "Guy Fawkes in Bentley's Miscellany, January 1840-November 1841." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. P. 20.

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Last modified 1 September 2018