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"Jump!" cried Ben, in a voice of thunder.

Wood obeyed. His fears supplied him with unwonted vigour. Though the starling was more than two feet above the level of the water, he alighted with his little charge — which he had never for an instant quitted — in safety upon it. Poor Ben was not so fortunate. Just as he was preparing to follow, the wherry containing Rowland and his men, which had drifted in their wake, was dashed against his boat. The violence of the collision nearly threw him backwards, and caused him to swerve as he sprang. His foot touched the rounded edge of the starling, and glanced off, precipitating him into the water. As he fell, he caught at the projecting masonry. But the stone was slippery; and the tide, which here began to feel the influence of the fall, was running with frightful velocity. He could not make good his hold. But, uttering a loud cry, he was swept away by the headlong torrent.

Mr. Wood heard the cry. But his own situation was too perilous to admit of his rendering any assistance to the ill-fated waterman. He fancied, indeed, that he beheld a figure spring upon the starling at the moment when the boats came in contact; but, as he could perceive no one near him, he concluded he must have been mistaken.

In order to make Mr. Wood's present position, and subsequent proceedings fully intelligible, it may be necessary to give some notion of the shape and structure of the platform on which he had taken refuge. It has been said, that the pier of each arch, or lock of Old London Bridge, was defended from the force of the tide by a huge projecting spur called a starling. These starlings varied in width, according to the bulk of the pier they surrounded. But they were all pretty nearly of the same length, and built somewhat after the model of a boat, having extremities as sharp and pointed as the keel of a canoe. Cased and ribbed with stone, and braced with horizontal beams of timber, the piles, which formed the foundation of these jetties, had resisted the strong encroachments of the current for centuries. Some of them are now buried at the bottom of the Thames. The starling, on which the carpenter stood, was the fourth from the Surrey shore. It might be three yards in width, and a few more in length; but it was covered with ooze and slime, and the waves continually broke over it. The transverse spars before mentioned were as slippery as ice; and the hollows between them were filled ankle-deep with water.

The carpenter threw himself flat upon the starling to avoid the fury of the wind. But in this posture he fared worse than ever. If he ran less risk of being blown over, he stood a much greater chance of being washed off, or stifled. As he lay on his back, he fancied himself gradually slipping off the platform. Springing to his feet in an ecstasy of terror, he stumbled, and had well nigh realized his worst apprehensions. He, next, tried to clamber up the flying buttresses and soffits of the pier, in the hope of reaching some of the windows and other apertures with which, as a man-of-war is studded with port-holes, the sides of the bridge were pierced. But this wild scheme was speedily abandoned; and, nerved by despair, the carpenter resolved to hazard an attempt, from the execution, almost from the contemplation, of which he had hitherto shrunk. This was to pass under the arch, along the narrow ledge of the starling, and, if possible, attain the eastern platform, where, protected by the bridge, he would suffer less from the excessive violence of the gale. — "Epoch the First, 1703: Jonathan Wild," Chapter VII, "Old London Bridge," Volume One, p. 130-132.

Commentary

Although the etching contains two principal figures, the ferryman and his passenger, Cruikshank draws the viewer's eye immediately to the cloaked figure of Owen Wood (centre), who at this point is still trying to maintain his footing on the starling as a great wave threatens him and the infant he is holding. The artist's handling of the wave about to engulf the good Samaritan is highly effective thanks to the chiaroscuro of the water against the darkness of the arch. The roaring waters have already engulfed both wherries as the stalwart waterman tries to grab ahold of the side of the starling. The drama here is all the more engaging because many of Cruikshank's readers would have recalled the starlings of Old London Bridge, demolished just seven years previous to the novel's serialisation, so that the world of the readers and that of Ainsworth's novel, set a hundred and twenty years earlier, seem to overlap, although not as palpably as the world of Oliver Twist and the present seem to elide in Cruikshank's illustration set on the water-stairs of New London Bridge in The Meeting (Part 20, December 1838). There, the familiar but mundane reality, the pier and steps, accentuated by the presence of a rowboat, enforce belief; here, however, Cruikshank's deft handling of the raging, white waters against the darkness of the bridge's archway makes the scene compellingly real and effective through heightened chiaroscuro.

In Bentley's, Jack Sheppard did not merely overlap Oliver Twist, it eclipsed it in terms of sales. Before the end of the month in which Ainsworth's novel appeared in volume form (October 1839), numerous dramatic adaptations appeared in London, inaugurating a "Jack Sheppard Craze." J. B. Buckstone emphasized the scenes in "Epoch the First" (with which Haines, for example, at the Surrey dispensed for the sake of economy) by a sensational realisation of the storm on the Thames, with St. Paul's and the houses on the Middlesex shore in the backdrop, which, according to a positive review in the Times, was "introduced with a very surprising mechanical effect" (29 October 1839; cited in Meisel, p. 273). As the storm rises, "WOOD clings to the starling, holding the child firmly in his arms — the water almost covers him" in Buckstone's adaptations, a scene taken directly from Cruikshank's February 1839 illustration The Storm. Providentially, just as Sir Rowland is about to throw the infant into the churning waters as he and Wood struggle on the starling, a shower of bricks from a collapsing chimney precipitates the wicked uncle into the river, and Wood is preserved through the kindness of householders living on London Bridge. In Cruikshank's turbulent illustration, Wood is struggling to gain his footing while holding the infant tightly, and Ben (just below him) is about to be swept away by the great wave that cuts diagonally across the picture from lower right to upper left. Presumably Sir Rowland is the figure trying to keep his hold on the starling (right).

The Thames Darrell plot, with its concealed parentage, proud and wicked uncle, and struggle in the dark over an inheritance, is staple melodrama; and the mode is underlined by Ainsworth's pervasive use of a melodramatic Providence. In melodrama, the more patent and blatant the providential coincidence, the better, the more believable. Coincidence in this mode is evidence of truth, as it is of coherence in the nature of things; and coincidence creates "effect," the effect of melodrama. — Martin Meisel, Realizations, p. 267.

References

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 22 December 2016