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Passage Illustrated

"Can I have a word with you, master?" said Sheppard, approaching Wood.

"Not a syllable!" answered the carpenter, angrily. "Get about your business!"

"Thames!" cried Jack, beckoning to his friend.

But Darrell averted his head.

"Mistress!" said the apprentice, making a final appeal to Mrs. Wood.

"Leave the room instantly, sirrah!" rejoined the lady, bouncing up, and giving him a slap on the cheek that made his eyes flash fire.

"May I be cursed," muttered Sheppard, as he slunk away with (as the woollen-draper pleasantly observed) 'a couple of boxes in charge,' "if ever I try to be honest again!"

"Take a little toasted cheese with the swig, Mr. Smith," observed Wood. "That's an incorrigible rascal," he added, as Sheppard closed the door; "it's only to-day that I discovered —"

"What?" asked Jackson, pricking up his ears.

"Don't speak ill of him behind his back, father," interposed Thames.

"If I were your father, young gentleman," returned Jackson, enraged at the interruption, "I'd teach you not to speak till you were spoken to."

Thames was about to reply, but a glance from Wood checked him.

"The rebuke is just," said the carpenter; "at the same time, I'm not sorry to find you're a friend to fair play, which, as you seem to know, is a jewel. Open that bottle with a blue seal, my dear. Gentlemen! a glass of brandy will be no bad finish to our meal."

This proposal giving general satisfaction, the bottle circulated swiftly; and Smith found the liquor so much to his taste, that he made it pay double toll on its passage.

"Your son is a lad of spirit, Mr. Wood," observed Jackson, in a slightly-sarcastic tone.

"He's not my son," rejoined the carpenter. — "Second Epoch, 1715. Thames Darrell." Chapter 5, "Hawk and Buzzard," p. 209-210.

Commentary

Mrs. Wood's chief caller is a cloth merchant ('draper') with Jacobite leanings and martial aspirations — already anticipating a rising in favour of the "Chevalier de Saint George" (p. 200), in his own mind he is "Captain" Kneebone. His dissolute and disreptable companions, bibulous visitors supposedly from Manchester (then a hotbed of Jacobite sentiment), show themselves members of the lower middle class in their tastes and behaviour: the drunken Jeremiah Jackson and Solomon Smith, travelling salesmen or "bagmen" for a Manchester cloth manufacturer, are veritable vacuum cleaners at the dinner. Their presence is highly unsatisfactory to the Woods, especially the Presbyterian carpenter, who refuses to drink a toast to the "King across the Water." Jack glady accepts a glass of brandy, and tosses it off with the requisite pledge, but Thames (like his stepfather) proclaims himself a loyal subject of King George the First, the Hanoverian and Protestant claimant.

Unbeknownst to either of the Woods, these scurrilous guests whose acquaintance the fatuous Mrs. Wood cultivates are not at all what they seem. First they reveal themselves as associates of the notorious thief-taker Jonathan Wild — and then as agents of the government, bent on catching Kneebone out as a Jacobite sympathizer. Thames denounces "Jackson" as Jonathan Wild himself, "Smith" being Wild's confederate, Blueskin. The discomfort that the younger members (the long-haired Thames, under the clock; the close-cropped ack, right, carrying the travelling box intended for Sir Rowland Trenchard's sister; and, right, Winifred ("Winny") Woods, the daughter of the house who is apparently in love with Thames) feel as a result of the supercilious demeanour of the guests whose value the lady of the house grossly overestimates anticipates the scene early in Great Expectations (1861) in which the youthful protagonist, Pip, unofficially Joe's apprentice blacksmith, is chivvied and criticized by his sister's guests, "Uncle" Pumblechook and the Hubbles, at the Christmas dinner. The illustration underscores the difference in temperament of the young apprentices: departing with an angry expression, the hot-headed Jack stands upon his honour, whereas Thames, seated among his seniors, is a compromiser who knows when to exercise discretion. Clearly, of the two adopted sons, the handsome, even-tempered Thames (although an inferior craftsman) is Owen Wood's favourite.

Cruikshank's Debt to Hogarth's Midnight, Modern Conversation

While the cloth was laid, the host and Thames descended to the cellar, whence they returned, laden with a number of flasks of the same form, and apparently destined to the same use as those depicted in Hogarth's delectable print — the A Modern, Midnight Conversation. — p. 204.

Ainsworth himself compares the raucous scene to that in William Hogarth's satirical print A Midnight, Modern Conversation, in which, as in the Cruikshank etching, the company is drinking heavily. Ainsworth's describing the gathering in the parlour of the Woods' home in terms of William Hogarth's engraving A Midnight Modern Conversation, circa 1734, is almost a direction to his illustrator, and certainly George Cruikshank took up the challenge with zest, underscoring the affinities between Hogarth's narrative-pictorial and highly satirical series The Rake's Progress, The Harlot's Progress, and Ainsworth's evocation of the early eighteenth century in Jack Sheppard. In the Hogarth etching, eleven men of the middle class, most of them in wigs, are engaged in a drunken debauch, so that the title, reiterated by the clock's showing twenty minutes past midnight, is highly ironic in that the scene hardly constitutes a serious drawing-room conversation characteristic of the Enlightenment. Providing a source of light to the right not available to Hogarth, George Cruikshank has positioned Thames Darrell immediately in front of a similar clock, but marginalised the two Manchester bagmen, mirror images of one another, their eyepatches suggesting not merely their monocular perception of things but betokening their devious characters. William Kneebone, immediately to the right of the indignant Mrs. Wood, smirks at the discomfitted Jack, while Winny Wood observes the scene with mild trepidation (perhaps because she has witnessed such family dynamics on numerous occasions). Given a central position, and not merely standing but seeming to lunge forward, Mrs. Wood, symbolic of Owen's uxoriousness, dominates the composition in a way that none of Hogarth's eleven inebriates do. Cruikshank has shrunk the oval table to accommodate the eight figures in so small an illustration which lacks the panoramic width of the Hogarthian original. Whereas the most significant embedded detail in the 1733 illustration is the covered chamberpot (down right), Cruikshank draws the reader's eye across the diagonal of heads that begins with Jack's hat (down right) towards the three embedded illustrations above the narrow mantelpiece. In the centre over the chimney-piece is the Wood crest ("the arms of the Carpenter's Company"), a piece of presumption for a mere carpenter and his wife, and implying Mrs. Wood's aspiring to a higher social station, as reflected in her excessive ornamentation of dress. The portraits to either side are those of "two eminent masters of the rule and plane, William Portington, and John Scott" (p. 197), and the "open japan closet" displays Mrs. Wood's "fine service of old blue china," exactly as described in the text. The two carpenters in the portraits, however, are hardly bourgeoisie, for the figure to the left, although engaged in woodworking, is dressed in the manner of an Elizabethan gentleman (the caption being "W. Portington, Master Carpenter of His Majesty's Buildings"), while the bearded, long-haired personage to the right resembles King Charles the First, although the subscript reads "John Scott, Master to the Ordnance, 1696." The cuckoo peering out above the face of the clock may well portend some affair going forward between Mrs. Wood and Mr. Kneebone.

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 10 December 2016