[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> George Cruikshank —> The Tower of London —> W. H. Ainsworth —> Next]
The Bell Tower
George Cruikshank
August 1840
Wood-engraving
9.2 cm high by 8.4 cm wide, vignetted
Illustration for Book II, Ch. XVIII, of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Tower of London, p. 236.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
By this time, the earl's flight from the Bell Tower had been discovered. On his return, finding the door barred withinside, the warder suspected something wrong, and gave the alarm. A few seconds sufficed to the men-at-arms to break down the door with their bills, and they then found what had occurred. The alarm-bell was instantly rung, and word passed to the sentinels on the By-ward Tower, and on the other fortifications, that the Earl of Devonshire had escaped. In an instant, all was in motion. Torches gleamed along the whole line of ramparts; shouts were heard in every direction; and soldiers hastened to each point whence it was conceived likely he would attempt to break forth. [ChapterXVIII. — "How Courtenay Escaped from the Tower," p. 238]
Construction of the Bell Tower started under William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and King Richard's regent while the crusader king was in the Middle East, during the late twelfth century. Although work on the reinforcing bastionbegan in the reign of Richard the Lionheart (1189-99), it was not completed until John's reign. Designed in the new, Romanesque order to reinforce the inner bailey, the Bell Tower is older than any other tower in the complex, with the exception of the Norman Keep (The White Tower, 1078). The Bell Tower derives its name from the small wooden turret situated on top of the tower (seen in the upper register of the illustration) which contains the Tower's curfew bell, which used to inform prisoners given the liberty of the Tower that it was time to return to their quarters. Among the famous prisoners who were housed in the Bell Tower, adjacent to the Lieutenant's Lodgings (known since 1880 as "The Queen's House" and seen to the left), were the Princess Elizabeth(1554), Sir Thomas More (1534-35), and Bishop John Fisher(1534-35).Mary permitted her sister Elizabeth to take exercise by walking along the battlements which adjoined the Beauchamp and Bell Towers, an area which is still known as Elizabeth's Walk.
Imprisoned in the Tower of London at the age of twelve, Edward Courtenay, whom Mary created the first Marquess of Exeter, was a leading Catholic claimant to the throne through the Yorkist bloodline. He remained under house arrest for fifteen years, but at Easter, 1555, he was released,and exiled to Continental Europe. Although Ainsworth'saccount of his escape from the Bell Tower makes exciting reading, it is not an accurate portrayal of the latter history of Edward Courtenay. English Protestant "Marian exiles" in Venice were plotting Courtenay's return to England to marry Elizabeth, but his sudden death in 1556, in Padua, terminated such plans, which in any event Elizabeth herself would have opposed as she blamed him for her imprisonment in the Tower.
"Ainsworth, William Harrison." http://biography.com
Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Tower of London. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Richard Bentley, 1840.
Burton, Anthony. "Cruikshank as an Illustrator of Fiction." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 92-128.
Carver, Stephen. Ainsworth and Friends: Essays on 19th Century Literature & The Gothic. 11 September 2017.
Department of Environment, Great Britain. The Tower of London. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1967, rpt. 1971.
Chesson, Wilfred Hugh. George Cruikshank. The Popular Library of Art. London: Duckworth, 1908.
Golden, Catherine J. "Ainsworth, William Harrison (1805-1882." Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell. New York and London: Garland, 1988. Page 14.
Kelly, Patrick. "William Harrison Ainsworth." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 21, "Victorian Novelists Before 1885," ed. Ira Bruce Nadel and William E. Fredeman. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. Pp. 3-9.
McLean, Ruari. George Cruikshank: His Life and Work as a Book Illustrator. English Masters of Black-and-White. London: Art and Technics, 1948.
Pitkin Pictorials. Prisoners in the Tower. Caterham & Crawley: Garrod and Lofthouse International, 1972.
Sutherland, John. "The Tower of London" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19893. P. 633.
Steig, Michael. "George Cruikshank and the Grotesque: A Psychodynamic Approach." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 189-212.
Vogler, Richard A. Graphic Works of George Cruikshank. Dover Pictorial Archive Series. New York: Dover, 1979.
Worth, George J. William Harrison Ainsworth. New York: Twayne, 1972.
Vann, J. Don. "The Tower of London, thirteen parts in twelve monthly instalments, January-December 1840." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 19-20.
Last modified 18 October 2017