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Arched Door in the Salt Tower Communicating with Secret Staircase
George Cruikshank
July 1840
Wood-engraving
10.1 cm high by 6.8 cm wide, vignetted
Illustration for Book II, Ch. XVI, of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Tower of London, p. 220.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Quitting this chamber, Nightgall ascended a winding stone staircase which brought him to an arched door, leading to the room just described. Taking a key from the bunch at his girdle, he unlocked it, and entered the room. A female was seated in one corner with her face buried in her hands. Raising her head at his approach, she disclosed the features of Cicely. Her eyes were red with weeping — and her figure attenuated by long suffering. Conceiving from the savage expression of the jailor s countenance that he meditated some further act of cruelty, she uttered a loud shriek, and tried to avoid him. [Chapter XIV. — "What bifel Cicely in the Salt Tower," pp. 222-23]
Left: The wood-engraving of the mysterious staircase as it looked in 1840, Secret Staircase in the Salt Tower (July 1840). Centre: Chamber in the Salt Tower as it appeared, elegantly decorated, in 1840 (July 1840). Right: The brutal jailor callously trying to shift his victim's location in order to avoid detection, Lawrence Nightgall Dragging Cicely Down the secret stairs in the Salt Tower (July 1840). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
The picture of a bronze astrological globe which Hew Draper, a Bristol inn-keeper accused of sorcery, inscribed in May1561 in the wall near the doorway (centre), is still evident in the Salt Tower, thanks to Anthony Salvin's restoration work seventeen years after Ainsworth published the novel. The arched door stands open, inviting the reader of 1840 to ascend, retracing the steps of the fictional Nightgall and Cicely, who were inmates of the Salt Tower (Ainsworth would have us suppose) in the decade prior to Draper's incarceration.
Perhaps the attention that Salvin devoted to the Salt Tower was the direct result of the importance of the Salt Tower in the Ainsworth novel. The Salt Tower appears first in North View of the Salt Tower, and again in Masque in the Palace Garden of the Tower, Secret Staircase in the Salt Tower, Chamber in the Salt Tower, and Basement Chamber in the Salt Tower, as well as torture scenes probably enacted in the dungeons of the Salt Tower, significantly Elizabeth confronted with Wyat in the Torture-Chamber in Chapter 34 in the final instalment. Ainsworth's firing the public imagination probably led to the government's commissioning Salvin, at the behest of Prince Albert, to undertake a comprehensive refurbishing of the Tower's mediaeval and Tudor buildings.
Ainsworth now drops the political-historical plot in favour of the strain of Gothic romance. He causes Cholmondeley to be recaptured by Nightgall, and reincarcerated, and then proceeds to deal with the perverted jailor's treatment of Cicely. The sadistic Nightgall, implies Ainsworth, buries Alexia alive in the basement of the Devlin Tower, then goes to visit her imprisoned daughter in the Salt Tower, where most of the chapter's action occurs. Fearing that the young esquire may have detected where she has been held a prisoner, Nightgall attempts to move her. Her screaming and refusal to leave her place of confinement voluntarily prompt Nightgall to drag her down a secret staircase to a dark chamber beneath the Tower leading to the Iron Gate.
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Last modified 18 October 2017