[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> George Cruikshank —> Guy Fawkes —> W. H. Ainsworth —> Next]
Vision of Guy Fawkes at Saint Winifred's Well
George Cruikshank
June 1840
Steel-engraving
13.1 cm high by 9.1 cm wide vignetted, facing p. 83
Fifth monthly engraving for William Harrison Ainsworth's Guy Fawkes, sixth number.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Serialised in Bentley's Miscellany, vols. 7-10, in twenty-three monthly parts.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Accustomed to a soldier's couch, he soon fell asleep. He had not long closed his eyes when he dreamed that from out of the well a female figure, slight and unsubstantial as the element from which it sprang, arose. It was robed in what resembled a nun's garb; but so thin and vapoury, that the very moonlight shone through it. From the garments of the figure, as well as from the crimson circle round its throat, he knew that it must be the patroness of the place, the sainted Winifred, that he beheld. He felt no horror, but the deepest awe. The arm of the figure was raised, — its benignant regards fixed upon him, — and, as soon as it gained the level of the basin, it glided towards him. [Book I, "The Plot," Chapter XI, "The Pilgrimage to St. Winifred's Well," p. 83]
Ainsworth and Cruikshank inherited hidden passages, sliding panels, and hairbreadth escapes from thge Gothic Romances of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. The previous monthly illustration, Guy Fawkes and Humphrey Chetham rescuing Father Oldcorne & Viviana Radcliffe from the Pursuivant, utilises these features; this month's plate highlights another stock element of the Gothic: a supernatural visitation amidst moonlit ruinst. Although the illustration pertains to the final paragraph of Chapter 11, it appeared at the start of the June instalment (Chapters 12 and 13), and it therefore facilitated the serial reader's recalling the curtain of the fifth (May) instalment, when the Saint's spirit glides towards the sleeping Fawkes in a dream. What she tells him merely reiterates the prophecy of the reanimated Elizabeth Orton, namely that the Gunpowder Plot will fail because it is contrary to the will of Heaven.
Although Cruikshank omits many details that contribute to Ainsworth's atmospheric setting of the scene, he includes the long-barrelled pistol that Fawkes grips in his right hand as he sleeps, lest he be taken unawares: "grasping a petronel in his right hand, to be ready in case of a surprise, disposed himself to slumber." The curtain, which accordingly establishes the possibility that he will be set upon while he sleeps, thus helps to establish the suspense needed at the curtain of the installment, but the illustration as a whole dos not succeed.
Critics such as W. H. Chesson have been particularly scathing in their assessments of this illustration of Fawkes's receiving the ghostly visitation of the thinly-clad St. Winifred, "a celestial visitot [who] resembles a Dutch doll" (85). The juvenile, willowly saint in a sheet is as stiff as the pillars of the decrepit chapel, and Cruikshank has ineptly described the posture of the sleeper as well as the physical setting. Graham Everitt interprets the awkwardness of this particular illustration as a byproduct of the quarrel between the illustrator and the publisher:
The worst of all is the Vision of Guy Fawkes at Saint Winifred's Well, and a very singular "vision" it is. The Saint has all the appearance, with all the grace, expression, and symmetry of a Dutch doll arrayed in a pocket handkerchief; the sky is "machine ruled;" the pillars and tracery of the ruined chapel are architectural impossibilities; while at the very first snort, the slumbering figure of Guy Fawkes must roll inevitably into he well towards the brink of which he lies in dangerous propinquity. [194]
What Walter Allen’s The English Novel (1954) said about Horace Walpole's seminal Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, applies to this scene in Ainsworth’s novel: it "creaks as artificial dreams commonly do" (93) in part because this fantastic element jars with the realistic narrative. Fittingly, Cruikshank's realisation of it is simply ludicrous in both premises and execution. In contrast, Cruikshank masterfully handled similar supernatural materials in other Ainsworth novels of the period, notably the visitation of the shade of Anne Boleyn in The Tower of London and Herne the Hunter's haunting of Henry VIII in Windsor Castle.
Plausibility, of course, hardly guided Gothic novelists, but Ainsworth's scene stretches credulity, and Cruikshank's interpretation of it does little to enforce even a temporary suspension of disbelief. The illustrator, uninspired by the creaking supernatural visitation, shows neither the "fairy architecture" of the backdrop, nor the "inexpressibly beautiful" fountain, nor yet the lurid mark on the neck of the spectre.
Because the illustration appears at the curtain of two instalments, it applies equally to what occurs at the end of the May instalment and the beginning of the June number, in which Fawkes revealed the prophecy which the saint delivered to him while he was in a trance:
"Thus then it was, father," returned Fawkes. "The figure of the saint arose from out the well, and gliding towards me laid its finger upon my brow. My eyes opened, but I was as one oppressed with a nightmare, unable to move. I then thought I heard my name pronounced by a voice so wondrously sweet that my senses were quite ravished. . . . "if the form I beheld was that of Saint Winifred, — and that it was so, I cannot doubt, — the enterprise on which we are engaged will fail. It is not approved by Heaven. The vision warned me to desist."
"You cannot desist, my son," rejoined Garnet, sternly. "Your oath binds you to the project."
"True," replied Fawkes; "and I have no thought of abandoning it. But I am well assured it will not be successful." [84]
Left: Cruikshank's atmospheric engraving of Anne Boleyn's ghost appearing at the site of Lady Jane Grey's beheading, The Night before the Execution (December 1840). Right: Cruikshank's realisation of Herne's appearing before Henry VIII on the battlements of Windsor Castle during a lightning storm, Herne the Hunter Appearing to Henry on the Terrace (January 1843). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Ainsworth, William Harrison. Guy Fawkes, or The Gunpowder Treason: An Historical Romance. With 22 illustrations by George Cruikshank. London: Cunningham & Mortimer, 1841 (first edition). Rpt., London: George Routledge & Sons, n. d. [See the text and images of the novel posted in May 2013 at Project Gutenberg Australia's website: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1302021h.html .]
Allen, Walter. "The Eighteenth Century." The English Novel: A Short Critical History. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954, rpt. 1967. Pp. 43-102.
Carver, Stephen. "Ainsworth’s Guy Fawkes: Tragic Hero, Catholic Martyr". Online version available from Harrison Ainsworth and Friends. Web. 5 November 2016.
Chesson, Wilfred Hugh. George Cruikshank. The Popular Library of Art. London: Duckworth, 1908.
Everitt, Graham. English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century: How They Illustrated and Interpreted Their Times; a Contribution to the History of Caricature. London: S. Sonnenschein, 1893. Digitized from a Copy at Harvard, 1 December 2005.
Vann, J. Don. "Guy Fawkes in Bentley's Miscellany, January 1840-Noevmber 18401." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. P. 20.
Last modified 13 August 2018