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Hilda's visit to Abel Beechcroft
George Cruikshank
March 1842
Steel-engraving
12.3 cm high by 10.2 cm wide, framed
Fifth illustration for the volume edition of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Miser's Daughter: A Tale, Chapter 12, facing page 75 (first plate for the March 1842 number).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Mr. Jukes said his master was at home, and she should see him; and without more ado, he led the way to the library, and entered it, followed by the others.
Abel was seated beside an old-fashioned bookcase, the door of which was open, disclosing a collection of goodly tomes, and had placed the book-stand supporting the volume he was reading, in such a position as to receive the full light of the window. So much was he engaged in his studies, that he did not hear their approach. In the hasty glance which Hilda took of the pictures on the wall, the most noticeable of which were a copy of Rembrandt's Good Samaritan, and a fine painting on the subject of Timon of Athens, she thought she could read somewhat of the character of the owner of the house. Little time, however, was allowed her for reflection, for Mr. Jukes, advancing towards his master's chair, leaned over it, and whispered a few words in his ear.
"What! — who — who did you say?" exclaimed Abel, half-closing the book he was reading, and looking sharply and anxiously round. "Who did you say, Jukes?"
"Miss Scarve, sir," replied the butler; "she has brought you a letter."
"Tell her I wont receive it — wont open it," cried Abel. "Why did you not send her away? What brings her here?"
"You had better put that question to her yourself, sir," replied Mr. Jukes, "for she is in this room."
"Here!" exclaimed Abel, starting to his feet. "Ah! I see — I see. O God! she is very like her mother." [Chapter XII, "Hilda's Interview with Abel Beechcroft," page 74]
Judging by the chapter in which this illustration is situated, the reader of the 1842 triple-decker may have sensed that, separated by thirty pages and six chapters from the previous plate, it was not a companion piece to February's group study, Sir Bulkeley Price bringing the mortgage money to Mr. Scarve in the original magazine serialisation. Rather, this private scene is the first of the March plates in an instalment encompassing chapters 9 through 14 in Book One. The protagonist, Randulph Crew, is not present, but Cruikshank uses the figures of the heroine, Hilda, and her father's butler, Jacob Post, to provide narrative continuity.
Here, in a beautifully appointed library sharply contrasting Scarve's office in Randulph Crew delivering the packet to Mr. Scarve (January 1842), Cruikshank depicts the delivery of another mysterious document from the past, a letter of contingency from Hilda's long-dead mother to Randulph's uncle, Abel Beechcroft, in this exquisite room overlooking the Thames at Lambeth. Carpets, ornaments, and artwork bespeak his taste, even if the bookcase that Ainsworth mentions is not present in the picture. Cruikshank and Ainsworth reveal the bibliophile's character through his weighty tome, bust of Aristotle or Homer (upper right), and embedded paintings of Rembrandt's New Testament illustration, a landscape, and Shakespeare's Timon. The presence in the background of the picture of the patron of the arts in the 1607 Shakespeare problem play may be intended to underscore Ainsworth's theme in The Miser's Daughter about the amoral power of money. Since Timon's hamartia, his excessive generosity, leads him into financial difficulties, Ainsworth's readers may fairly assume that the visual allusion constitutes an analogy for Beechcroft's relationship with Hilda's father, to whom he may have played the role of the Good Samaritan when both were younger. The story of the Good Samaritan seems to have fascinated later Victorian artists, notably George Frederick Watts in The Good Samaritan (1852), Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld in The Parable of the Good Samaritan (1860), and John Everett Millais in The Good Samaritan (1863). The implicit commentary in Cruikshank's embedded Samaritan painting in The Miser's Daughter complements Ainsworth's setting up the mysterious relationship between scholarly Abel Beechcroft and the miser, Mr. Scarve.
The prominence with which Cruikshank displays the Shakespeare illustration may also have suggested to Ainsworth's later readers (incorrectly, however) that this was a topical allusion. In the portrait of Timon within the March 1842 illustration Cruikshank would not have been referring to a Sadler's Wells production of the little-staged piece in 1851 by Samuel Phelps (1804-78). However, Phelps's London stage début as Shylock at the Haymarket in 1837 may have influenced both the novelist and his illustrator in this particular novel. Both the graphic artist and the writer may have been aware of Edmund Kean's celebrated impersonation of Timon in the October 1816 production at Drury Lane, when Cruikshank was already twenty-four. Beechcroft's implicit admiration of the Shakespeare figure may have stemmed not only from his reading of the play, but also plausibly from London productions of the play in 1720 and 1733, the former at Drury Lane featuring Edwin Booth as Timon, and the latter at Covent Garden.
Above: Detail of Cruikshank's embedded Rembrandt biblical illustration and the study of the protagonist of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, possibly a theatrical painting referencing an eighteenth-century production. Right: bust of Aristotle or Homer presiding over the classicist's library. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Miser's Daughter: A Tale. With 20 illustrations by George Cruikshank. First published in 3 volumes by Cunningham and Mortimer, London, 1842. London, Glasgow, and New York: George Routledge, 1892.
Vann, J. Don. "The Miser's Daughter in Ainsworth's Magazine January-October 1842." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1988. Pp. 22-23.
Last modified 19 June 2018