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The women were equally enchanted​— equally eloquent in the expression of their admiration.

"What ogles!" cried a mort.

"What pins!" said an autem mort, or married woman.

"Sharp as needles," said a dark-eyed dell, who had encountered one of the free and frolicsome glances which our highwayman distributed so liberally among the petticoats.

It was at this crisis Dick took off his hat. Caesar betrayed his baldness.

"A thousand pities!" cried the men, compassionating his thinly covered skull, and twisting their own ringlets, glossy and luxuriant, though unconscious of Macassar. "A thousand pities that so fine a fellow should have a sconce like a cocoanut!"

"But then his red whiskers," rejoined the women, tired of the uniformity of thick black heads of hair; "what a warmth of colouring they impart to his face; and then only look how beautifully bushy they make his cheeks appear!"

La Fosseuse and the court of the Queen of Navarre were not more smitten with the Sieur de Croix's jolly pair of whiskers.

The hawk's eye of Turpin ranged over the whole assemblage. Amidst that throng of dark faces there was not one familiar to him. — p. 168-169.

Next to the knight of Malta stood the whip-jack, habited in his sailor gear​ — striped shirt and dirty canvas trousers; and adjoining him was the palliard, a loathsome tatterdemalion, his dress one heap of rags, and his discoloured skin one mass of artificial leprosy and imposthumes.

As Turpin's eye shifted from one to another of these figures, he chanced upon an individual who had been long endeavoring to arrest his attention. This personage was completely in the background. All that Dick could discern of him was a brown curly head of hair, carelessly arranged in the modern mode; a handsome, impudent, sun-freckled face, with one eye closed, and the other occupied by a broken bottle-neck, through which, as a substitute for a lorgnette, the individual reconnoitered him. A cocked hat was placed in a very dégagée​manner under his arm, and he held an ebony cane in his hand, very much in the style of a "fassionable," as the French have it, of the present day. This glimpse was sufficient to satisfy Turpin. He recognized in this whimsical personage an acquaintance.

Jerry Juniper was what the classical Captain Grose would designate a "gentleman with three outs," and, although he was not entirely without wit, nor, his associates avouched, without money, nor, certainly, in his own opinion, had that been asked, without manners; yet was he assuredly without shoes, without stockings, without shirt. This latter deficiency was made up by a voluminous cravat, tied with proportionately large bows. A jaunty pair of yellow breeches, somewhat faded; a waistcoat of silver brocade, richly embroidered, somewhat tarnished and lack-lustre; a murrey-colored velvet coat, somewhat chafed, completed the costume of this beggar Brummell, this mendicant macaroni!

Jerry Juniper was a character well known at the time, as a constant frequenter of all races, fairs, regattas, ship-launches, bull-baits, and prize-fights, all of which he attended, and to which he transported himself with an expedition little less remarkable than that of Turpin. You met him at Epsom, at Ascot, at Newmarket, at Doncaster, at the Roodee of Chester, at the Curragh of Kildare. The most remote as well as the most adjacent meeting attracted him. The cock-pit was his constant haunt, and in more senses than one was he a leg.​No opera-dancer could be more agile, more nimble; scarcely, indeed, more graceful, than was Jerry, with his shoeless and stockingless feet; and the manner in which he executed a pirouette, or a pas, before a line of carriages, seldom failed to procure him "golden opinions from all sorts of dames." With the ladies, it must be owned, Jerry was rather upon too easy terms; but then, perhaps, the ladies were upon too easy terms with Jerry; and if a bright-eyed fair one condescended to jest with him, what marvel if he should sometimes slightly transgress the laws of decorum. These aberrations, however, were trifling; altogether he was so well known, and knew everybody else so well, that he seldom committed himself; and, singular to say, could on occasions even be serious. In addition to his other faculties, no one cut a sly joke, or trolled a merry ditty, better than Jerry. His peculiarities, in short, were on the pleasant side, and he was a general favourite in consequence. — Book III, "The Gipsy," Chapter 5, "The Inauguration," pp. 170-71.

Commentary

Offered "the freedom of the crew," Dick Turpin (centre in the present plate) at the suggestion of Jerry Juniper agrees to become an honorary member of the gypsy fraternity in order to indemnify himself against being turned in for the substantial reward that the authorities have posted for his detention and capture. The strange meeting (something of a narrative digression, but full of visual appeal) occurs at a ruined Franciscan priory near the Rookwood estate. Whereas George Cruikshank had organised his composition around the figure of bald-pated, luxuriantly bewhiskered Dick Turpin (centre), seated on a dias before the gypsy throng, John Gilbert introduces the reader to the gypsies and vagabonds by metonymy, so to speak, singling out several of the most significant figures introduced several pages before Turpin's "inauguration": The Knight of Malta (distinguished by his gigantic hat and broadsword), the ragged sailor, the "patrico" or priest, Balthazar (centre, behind Turpin), and Jerry Juniper (left foreground). Noticeably absent are the Gypsy "Queen," Barbara Lovel (whose importance has already been established in Chapter 4), who has raised Luke Bradley, and the young lovers, Luke Bradley and Sybil Lovel. The figure of the self-confident Dick Turpin Gilbert has derived from an earlier description of the charismatic highwayman of a decidedly "horsey" nature that would certainly have appealed to later novelist Charles Lever:

Jack Palmer was a good-humored, good-looking man, with immense bushy, red whiskers, a freckled, florid complexion, and sandy hair, rather inclined to scantiness towards the scalp of the head, which garnished the nape of his neck with a ruff of crisp little curls, like the ring on a monk's shaven crown. Notwithstanding this tendency to baldness, Jack could not be more than thirty, though his looks were some five years in advance. His face was one of those inexplicable countenances, which appear to be proper to a peculiar class of men — a regular Newmarket physiognomy — compounded chiefly of cunning and assurance; not low cunning, nor vulgar assurance, but crafty sporting subtlety, careless as to results, indifferent to obstacles, ever on the alert for the main chance, game and turf all over, eager, yet easy, keen, yet quiet. He was somewhat showily dressed, in such wise that he looked half like a fine gentleman of that day, half like a jockey of our own. His nether man appeared in well-fitting, well-worn buckskins, and boots with tops, not unconscious of the saddle; while the airy extravagance of his broad-skirted, sky-blue riding coat, the richness of his vest — the pockets of which were beautifully exuberant, according to the mode of 1737 — the smart luxuriance of his cravat, and a certain curious taste in the size and style of his buttons, proclaimed that, in his own esteem at least, his person did not appear altogether unworthy of decoration; nor, in justice to Jack, can we allow that he was in error. He was a model of a man for five feet ten; square, compact, capitally built in every particular, excepting that his legs were slightly imbowed, which defect probably arose from his being almost constantly on horseback; a sort of exercise in which Jack greatly delighted, and was accounted a superb rider. It was, indeed, his daring horsemanship, upon one particular occasion, when he had outstripped a whole field, that had procured him the honor of an invitation to Rookwood. —​ Book I, "The Wedding Ring,"​Chapter 9, "An English Adventurer," p.​47-48 [1882 edition].

Although Cruikshank fails to distinguish the Gypsy Queen, who has already become a significant secondary character, his composition presents the gypsy convocation effectively as Ainsworth's description of the ragtag gathering, punctuated by poetic effusions, is somewhat unclear. Not evident immediately as quirky individuals in the 1836 illustration The Inauguration are several figures whom Ainsworth describes in detail, and whom Gilbert here in the equivalent plate brings to the fore by giving the reader a close-up rather than a Cruikshankian panorama. Against the patina of Ainsworth's descriptive prose with complicated syntax and the dialect of thieves' cant in which the gypsies speak to Dick Turpin and each other Cruikshank juxtaposes a relatively straightforward group study in which the interpolated figure of the folk-hero highwayman, at least a quasi-historical figure, is conspicuous. Gilbert gives us little of the picturesque backdrop, the woodlands and the ruined priory (which he merely implies by the sketched in tracery of the Gothic window behind the highwayman). No matter that the engaging scene has very little to do with the Rookwood inheritance plot; the peculiar characters and woodland scenes borrowed from such early nineteenth-century melodramas as Isaac Pocock's The Miller and His Men (1813), Anne Radcliffe's "Wild and romantic" Apennine scenes in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), lend vivacity to the somewhat confusing narrative that awkwardly blends idiosyncratic secondary characters derived from Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels, Radcliffe's Gothic"word painting", and such Newgate constituents as "sunburnt varlets," dashing robbers, and Ainsworth's Joycean dialogic recourse, London underworld slang.

Related Materials

• The illustrations of George Cruikshank for Rookwood, A Romance (1836)
• William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) — King of the Historical Potboiler: A Brief Biography
• A Chronology of William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882)
• An Introduction to Ainsworth's Rookwood, A Romance (1836)
• An Introduction to Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard. A Romance (1839)

Bibliography

"Ainsworth, William Harrison." http://biography.com

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. A Romance. With 12 illustrations by George Cruikshank. In three volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1839.

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Rookwood. A Romance. With 8 illustrations by Sir John Gilbert. London: George Routledge, 1878, 1882.

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Rookwood. A Romance. With 12 illustrations by George Cruikshank. London: George Routledge, 1882.

Carver, Stephen. Ainsworth and Friends: Essays on 19th Century Literature & The Gothic. Accessed 1 November 2016. https://ainsworthandfriends.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/william-harrison-ainsworth-the-life-and-adventures-of-the-lancashire-novelist/

Dickens, Charles. Pilgrim ed. of the Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. 5 (1847-1849). Ed. Graham Storey and Katherine Tillotson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981.

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.

Muir, Percy. "Two Colossi — Thomas Bewick and George Cruikshank." Victorian Illustrated Books. London: B. T. Batsford, 1971. Pp. 25-58.

Steig, Michael. Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Sutherland, John. "Rookwood" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19893. Pp. 544-545.

Worth, George J. William Harrison Ainsworth. New York: Twayne, 1972.

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