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Jane Imprisoned in the Brick Tower
George Cruikshank
April 1840
steel-engraving
12.2 cm high by 10.1 cm wide, framed.
Full-page illustration for the second chapter in Book II of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Tower of London, facing p. 126.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Alone! the thought struck chill to her heart. She was now a solitary captive. She heard the door of her prison bolted — she examined its stone walls, partly concealed by the tapestry — she glanced at its iron-barred windows, and her courage forsook her. She had no bosom to lean upon — no ear to which she could impart her sorrows. Her husband, though not far from her, was, like her a prisoner. She pictured him in his solitary room — and she would have given worlds to be near him — if only for a few moments. The thought occasioned her so much anguish, that she burst into tears, and for some time was a prey to despair. She then knelt down beside the chair, and burying her face in her clasped hands, prayed deeply and fervently for support through her trial. [Chapter II, "How Jane was imprisoned in the Brick Tower," pp. 126-27]
The steel engraving of the suffering Jane complements Ainsworth's analysis of her despair at being imprisoned and separated from her husband. The wood-engraving of the bare room in 1840 on the verso and the steel-engraving facing it, recto, complement each other effectively. On page 126, without the shading of any emotion Cruikshank depicts Jane's room in the Brick Tower just as he and Ainsworth saw it in 1840. It is not merely devoid of the spirit of historical romance; it is a completely bare chamber devoid of any furnishings whatsoever in the wood-engraving dropped into the dramatic text in which Jane laments her fate as an unfriended and "solitary captive." Under the emotional stress of her situation, she breaks down as she pictures her husband and former consort now, like her, a political prisoner. Since the windows in the steel-engraving are arched whereas those of the 1840 illustration are squared, we may deduce that Jane's agonising over her situation occurs in another room within the Brick Tower. Cruikshank deliberately limits the available source of light to heighten the dramatic effect of Jane's bare neck stretched out over the chair. As opposed to denuded but well-lit walls, the larger illustration contains a stained-glass window and elements of tapestries to the right and left of that window. In particular, the scene to the right appears to be of a royal family, a shadowy reminder of the lofty status that Jane only briefly enjoyed.
The atmospheric picture with its deep shading and the light falling on Jane's white, elongated neck captures the isolation of Jane's existence in the Brick Tower. Indeed, despite the fact that thousands of spectators flood the Tower and its environs to observe the execution of the Duke of Northumberland in November 1553, when she crosses to the Beauchamp Tower to be interrogated by Archbishop Gardiner two months later, she learns for the first time that he is no longer among the living. Although Ainsworth describes her apartment as comfortably furnished, Cruikshank minimizes that aspect of her quarters and focuses upon her distraught mental state.
The modern reader may discern in Jane's supine pose a repetition of her appearance in the frontispiece, in which, after months of delay, she meets her fate on Tower Green, stretched out over Mauger's block as she is stretched out over a simple chair, contrasting by implication the throne upon which she so recently sat. However, since Cruikshank composed the dramatic frontispiece for the December 1840 double-number, it is the frontispiece that repeats this pose, here connotative of anguish and despair rather than stalwart courage. Despite her tendency to give into self-doubt privately, Lady Jane Grey maintains a courageous public face, as, for example, Cruikshank and Ainsworth demonstrate in Bishop Gardiner's Conference with Jane in the Beauchamp Tower in Book II, Chapter X. In the frontispiece, she is stoic and almost inert, whereas in this illustration of how she initially responded to her incarceration in the Brick Tower she gives vent to despair, crying into her handkerchief, like her neck, startlingly white in the gloom.
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Last modified 9 October 2017