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Prepared as he was for a dreadful shock, and with his nerves strung to endure it, Jack absolutely recoiled before the appalling object that met his gaze. Cowering in a corner upon a heap of straw sat his unfortunate mother, the complete wreck of what she had been. Her eyes glistened in the darkness — for light was only admitted through a small grated window — like flames, and, as she fixed them on him, their glances seemed to penetrate his very soul. A piece of old blanket was fastened across her shoulders, and she had no other clothing except a petticoat. Her arms and feet were uncovered, and of almost skeleton thinness. Her features were meagre, and ghastly white, and had the fixed and horrible stamp of insanity. Her head had been shaved, and around it was swathed a piece of rag, in which a few straws were stuck. Her thin fingers were armed with nails as long as the talons of a bird. A chain, riveted to an iron belt encircling her waist, bound her to the wall. The cell in which she was confined was about six feet long and four wide; the walls were scored all over with fantastic designs, snatches of poetry, short sentences and names, — the work of its former occupants, and of its present inmate.

When Jack entered the cell, she was talking to herself in the muttering unconnected way peculiar to her distracted condition; but, after her eye had rested on him some time, the fixed expression of her features relaxed, and a smile crossed them. This smile was more harrowing even than her former rigid look.

"You are an angel," she cried, with a look beaming with delight.

"Rather a devil," groaned her son, "to have done this."

"You are an angel, I say," continued the poor maniac; "and my Jack would have been like you, if he had lived. But he died when he was a child — long ago — long ago — long ago."

"Would he had done so!" cried Jack.

"Old Van told me if he grew up he would be hanged. He showed me a black mark under his ear, where the noose would be tied. And so I'll tell you what I did —"

And she burst into a laugh that froze Jack's blood in his veins.

"What did you do?" he asked, in a broken voice.

"I strangled him — ha! ha! ha! — strangled him while he was at my breast — ha! ha!" — And then with a sudden and fearful change of look, she added, "That's what has driven me mad, I killed my child to save him from the gallows — oh! oh! One man hanged in a family is enough. If I'd not gone mad, they would have hanged me."

"Poor soul!" ejaculated her son.

"I'll tell you a dream I had last night," continued the unfortunate being. "I was at Tyburn. There was a gallows erected, and a great mob round it — thousands of people, and all with white faces like corpses. In the midst of them there was a cart with a man in it — and that man was Jack — my son Jack — they were going to hang him. And opposite to him, with a book in his hand, — but it couldn't be a prayer-book, — sat Jonathan Wild, in a parson's cassock and band. I knew him in spite of his dress. And when they came to the gallows, Jack leaped out of the cart, and the hangman tied up Jonathan instead — ha! ha! How the mob shouted and huzzaed — and I shouted too — ha! ha! ha!"

"Mother!" cried Jack, unable to endure this agonizing scene longer. "Don't you know me, mother?"

"Ah!" shrieked Mrs. Sheppard. "What's that? — Jack's voice!"

"It is," replied her son.

"The ceiling is breaking! the floor is opening! he is coming to me!" cried the unhappy woman.

"He stands before you," rejoined her son.

"Where?" she cried. "I can't see him. Where is he?"

"Here," answered Jack.

"Are you his ghost, then?"

"No — no," answered Jack. "I am your most unhappy son."

"Let me touch you, then; let me feel if you are really flesh and blood," cried the poor maniac, creeping towards him on all fours.

Jack did not advance to meet her. He could not move; but stood like one stupified, with his hands clasped together, and eyes almost starting out of their sockets, fixed upon his unfortunate parent.

"Come to me!" cried the poor maniac, who had crawled as far as the chain would permit her, — "come to me!" she cried, extending her thin arm towards him.

Jack fell on his knees beside her.

"Who are you?" inquired Mrs. Sheppard, passing her hands over his face, and gazing at him with a look that made him shudder.

"Your son," replied Jack, — "your miserable, repentant son."

"It is false," cried Mrs. Sheppard. "You are not. Jack was not half your age when he died. They buried him in Willesden churchyard after the robbery."

"Oh, God!" cried Jack, "she does not know me. Mother — dear mother!" he added, clasping her in his arms, "Look at me again."

"Off!" she exclaimed, breaking from his embrace with a scream. "Don't touch me. I'll be quiet. I'll not speak of Jack or Jonathan. I won't dig their graves with my nails. Don't strip me quite. Leave me my blanket! I'm very cold at night. Or, if you must take off my clothes, don't dash cold water on my head. It throbs cruelly."

"Horror!" cried Jack.

"Don't scourge me," she cried, trying to hide herself in the farthest corner of the cell. "The lash cuts to the bone. I can't bear it. Spare me, and I'll be quiet — quiet — quiet!"

"Mother!" said Jack, advancing towards her.

"Off!" she cried with a prolonged and piercing shriek. And she buried herself beneath the straw, which she tossed above her head with the wildest gestures.

"I shall kill her if I stay longer," muttered her son, completely terrified.

While he was considering what would be best to do, the poor maniac, over whose bewildered brain another change had come, raised her head from under the straw, and peeping round the room, asked in a low voice, "If they were gone?"

"Who?" inquired Jack.

"The nurses," she answered.

"Do they treat you ill?" asked her son.

"Hush!" she said, putting her lean fingers to her lips. "Hush! — come hither, and I'll tell you."

Jack approached her.

"Sit beside me," continued Mrs. Sheppard. "And, now I'll tell you what they do. Stop! we must shut the door, or they'll catch us. See!" she added, tearing the rag from her head, — "I had beautiful black hair once. But they cut it all off."

"I shall go mad myself if I listen to her longer," said Jack, attempting to rise. "I must go."

"Don't stir, or they'll chain you to the wall," said his mother detaining him. "Now, tell me why they brought you here?"

"I came to see you, dear mother!" answered Jack.

"Mother!" she echoed, — "mother! why do you call me by that name?"

"Because you are my mother."

"What!" she exclaimed, staring eagerly in his face. "Are you my son? Are you Jack?"

"I am," replied Jack. "Heaven be praised she knows me at last."

"Oh, Jack!" cried his mother, falling upon his neck, and covering him with kisses.

"Mother — dear mother!" said Jack, bursting into tears.

"You will never leave me," sobbed the poor woman, straining him to her breast.

"Never — never!"

The words were scarcely pronounced, when the door was violently thrown open, and two men appeared at it. They were Jonathan Wild and Quilt Arnold. — "Epoch the Second, The Prison Breaker, 1715," Chapter 8, "Old Bedlam," p. 238-246.

Commentary

A far less cluttered composition than Cruikshank's earlier illustrations for Jack Sheppard, the pathetic scene of Jack's visit to see his demented mother in Bedlam, the infamous lunatic asylum, complements the text admirably as Jack in the picture appears to be judging his mother, but Jack in the text is highly sympathetic to her plight and greatly distressed at her mental deterioration — particularly since her condition may well have been caused by her anguish at her son's criminal misdeeds. Initially, in her dementia she does not even recognise him, thinking him to be another inmate or angel. After Wild's arrival, her unfortunate intervention prevents Jack from defending himself, and once again he is taken prisoner. Having momentarily recovered her wits, she attacks Wild, who then strikes her unconscious. The emotional scene ends with Wild's vowing to conduct Jack to the condemned cell at Newgate, depicted in its full psychological horror by Cruikshank just months previously for Oliver Twist in Fagin in the Condemned Cell (Part 23, March 1839).

In terms of antiquarian interest, as in Ainsworth's handling of Bedlam, the novel is a blend of historical accuracy and fictional necessity; nevertheless, as with the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott, the thoughtful reader of 1839 must have felt that he or she was momentarily back in the previous century. London then was a series of villages and neighbourhoods divided by open fields rather than the Victorian "World City," and everyday life was both more elemental and more dangerous. In graphic detail at the beginning of the chapter entitled "Old Bedlam," Ainsworth sets the scene from an architectural and historical perspective, and then introduced Jack talking to the matron, who is quite unaware that she is talking to Mrs. Sheppard's son, the notorious housebreaker.

Old Bethlehem, or Bedlam, — every trace of which has been swept away, and the hospital for lunatics removed to Saint George's Field, — was a vast and magnificent structure. Erected in Moorfields in 1675, upon the model of the Tuileries, it is said that Louis the Fourteenth was so incensed at the insult offered to his palace, that he had a counterpart of St. James's built for offices of the meanest description. The size and grandeur of the edifice, indeed, drew down the ridicule of several of the wits of the age: by one of whom—the facetious Tom Brown — it was said, "Bedlam is a pleasant place, and abounds with amusements; — the first of which is the building, so stately a fabric for persons wholly insensible of the beauty and use of it: the outside being a perfect mockery of the inside, and admitting of two amusing queries, — Whether the persons that ordered the building of it, or those that inhabit it, were the maddest? and, whether the name and thing be not as disagreeable as harp and harrow." By another — the no less facetious Ned Ward — it was termed, "A costly college for a crack-brained society, raised in a mad age, when the chiefs of the city were in a great danger of losing their senses, and so contrived it the more noble for their own reception; or they would never have flung away so much money to so foolish a purpose." The cost of the building exceeded seventeen thousand pounds. However the taste of the architecture may be questioned, which was the formal French style of the period, the general effect was imposing. Including the wings, it presented a frontage of five hundred and forty feet. Each wing had a small cupola; and, in the centre of the pile rose a larger dome, surmounted by a gilded ball and vane. The asylum was approached by a broad gravel walk, leading through a garden edged on either side by a stone balustrade, and shaded by tufted trees. ​— Ch. 7, "Old ​Bedlam," p. 232-233.

Having established that Jack is the scion of a noble house, the Trenchards, Ainsworth makes Jack noble in both utterance and behaviour, giving him an emotional, self-critical nature when he considers how his criminal career has resulted in his mother's confinement to a filthy cell in Bedlam. The straw, the rag on his mother's head, her long nails and skeletal hands, and the iron chain binding her to the wall are all textual details that Cruikshank has fully realised, as is the small, barred window. The cell, however, seems bigger in the illustration that in the novelist's description, and no graffiti decorate the cracked plaster of the two walls in Cruikshank's illustration, so that the artist has divided his focus between the opposite figures: standing, youthful Jack, and prostrate, animalistic Mrs. Sheppard, chained like a dog, her face a mask of misery. Remarkably, she recovers from this deplorable mental and physical state, only to suffer a relapse when abducted by Jonathan Wild, who hopes to force her to marry him.

Bibliography

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. A Romance. With 28 illustrations by George Cruikshank. In three volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1839.

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. Edited by Edward Jacobs and Manuela Mourao. With 31 illustrations. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007.

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans; Chapman and Hall, 1846.

Meisel, Martin. Chapter 13, "Novels in Epitome." Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Pp. 247-282.

Sutherland, John. "Jack Sheppard" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19893. Pp. 323-324.

Vann, J. Don. "Jack Sheppard in Bentley's Miscellany, January 1839 — February 1840." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Page 19.

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Last modified 24 December 2016