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The Escape, No. 3
George Cruikshank
December 1839
Two Etchings each 5.0 by 9.3 cm
11.2 x 9.3 cm
"Epoch the Third, 1724. The Prison Breaker," Vol. 3, for Chapter 20, "The Leads" in William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard. A Romance, facing page 222.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Ascending a short flight of steps, Jack found at the summit a door, which being bolted in the inside he speedily opened.
The fresh air, which blew in his face, greatly revived him. He had now reached what was called the Lower Leads, — a flat, covering a part of the prison contiguous to the gateway, and surrounded on all sides by walls about fourteen feet high. On the north stood the battlements of one of the towers of the gate. On this side a flight of wooden steps, protected by a hand-rail, led to a door opening upon the summit of the prison. This door was crested with spikes, and guarded on the right by a bristling semicircle of spikes. Hastily ascending these steps, Jack found the door, as he anticipated, locked. He could have easily forced it, but preferred a more expeditious mode of reaching the roof which suggested itself to him. Mounting the door he had last opened, he placed his hands on the wall above, and quickly drew himself up.
Just as he got on the roof of the prison, St. Sepulchre's clock struck eight. It was instantly answered by the deep note of St. Paul's; and the concert was prolonged by other neighbouring churches. Jack had thus been six hours in accomplishing his arduous task. — Chapter XX, "The Leads," p. 168-169.
Throwing the blanket over his left arm and shouldering the iron bar, he again clambered up the chimney; regained the Red Room; hurried along the first passage; crossed the Chapel; threaded the entry to the Lower Leads; and, in less than ten minutes after quitting the Castle, had reached the northern extremity of the prison.
Previously to his descent he had left the nail and spike on the wall, and with these he fastened the blanket to the stone coping. This done, he let himself carefully down by it, and having only a few feet to drop, alighted in safety. — Chapter XX, "The Leads," p. 174.
Having now fairly got out of Newgate for the second time, with a heart throbbing with exultation, he hastened to make good his escape. To his great joy he found a small garret-door in the roof of the opposite house open. He entered it; crossed the room, in which there was only a small truckle-bed, over which he stumbled; opened another door and gained the stair-head. As he was about to descend his chains slightly rattled. "Oh, lud! what's that?" exclaimed a female voice, from an adjoining room. "Only the dog," replied the rough tones of a man.
Securing the chain in the best way he could, Jack then hurried down two pair of stairs, and had nearly reached the lobby, when a door suddenly opened, and two persons appeared, one of whom held a light. Retreating as quickly as he could, Jack opened the first door he came to, entered a room, and searching in the dark for some place of concealment, fortunately discovered a skreen, behind which he crept. — Chapter XX, "The Leads," p. 174-175.
The basis for the "legend" of Jack Sheppard is the celebrated and previously thought impossible escape from the Castle, the strongest cell in the prison-fortress of Newgate in central London. Ainsworth utilized sources that lend his thrilling limited omniscient a high degree of verisimilitude: Langley's An Accurate Description of Newgate . . . Written for the Publick Good. By B. L. of Twickenham (London: T. Warner, 1724), Daniel Defoe's first-person account The History of the remarkable Life of John Sheppard, Containing A Particular Account of his Many Robberies and Escapes (London: Applebee, 19 October 1724) and Defoe's A Narrative of all the Robberies, Escapes, &C. of John Sheppard: Giving an Exact Description of the manner of his wonderful Escape from the CASTLE in Newgate, and of the Methods he took afterwards for his Security (London: Applebee, 1724). The ten Cruikshank miniatures constitute a visual re-telling of Jack's ingenious escape rather than a mere visual accompaniment to Ainsworth's text. For Cruikshank, the climax is not the hanging of Jack Sheppard, but his re-capture in the churchyard at Willesden by Jack's nemesis, Jonathan Wild and his agents, in Jonathan Wild seizing Jack Sheppard at his Mother's Grave in Chapter XXVI, "Mrs. Sheppard's Funeral" in the January 1840 instalment in Bentley's Miscellany.
This series of short chapters (17-23) illustrated constitutes what was the December 1839 instalment in Bentley's Miscellany, accompanied by the three Escape from Newgate illustrations already published in the November triple-decker. Mirroring Ainsworth's innovative documentary re-telling of the celebrated escape, Cruikshank presents the same material visually, in a series of vignettes that demonstrate each of the challenges that Jack confronted and his growing confidence as he breaks out of eighteenth-century England's stoutest prison-fortress. Armed with only his indefatigable resourcefulness and an iron bar torn from the chimney of his cell, Jack accomplishes the seemingly impossible through his understanding of locks, building construction, and the layout of the prison, all of which dictate that his pathway to freedom lies upward, towards the roof. The illustrations, unfortunately, lack the intense suspense of Ainsworth's third-person, limited omniscient narrative. Unusually, the entire sequence, "Escapes, 1 through 3," appeared in the December 1839 issue of Bentley's Miscellany, as the third, showing Jack approaching freedom on the prison roof, is a necessary climax to the visual sequence. However, in the third volume, although associated with the conclusion of Chapter XX and given in the index for the first volume as facing p. 174, the third escape engraving does not occur until p. 222, that is, inside Chapter XXV, the second chapter of the January 1840 instalment.
Concerned with authenticity in this most historical segment of Ainsworth's novel, designer George Cruikshank breaks down the heroic escape from the strongest cell in Newgate into ten components, the last two of which composite engravings are distinctly different from the previous eight in that they are exterior scenes. Coincidence has played a significant role in Jack's escape at several crucial moments, beginning with the turnkey's telling Jack that he will not return to check on him until the following morning, and Jack's encountering no turnkeys on his way up to the roof from the Castle and through the Red Room and the Chapel and adjacent corridors. Now, as dusk settles on London, he finds an open garret door and a staircase which leads him down to the turner's shop, where the woollen-draper William Kneebone is again pressing his suit with Winifred Wood. By coincidence Jack arrives just in time to rescue the girl whom both he and Thames love.
For his final Escape sequence of ten illustrations Cruikshank shows Jack after he has gone all the way back to his cell in the Castle to retrieve his blanket in order to get over the wall and down to the lower leads on the roof. Although the scenes described in the text presented the illustrator with an opportunity to provide panoramas of the eighteenth-century metropolis, a city considerably smaller than Victorian London, he elected instead to focus on the small, manacled figure who has defied the odds and overcome so many obstacles (including his own irrational fears of Jonathan Wild) in his bid for freedom after being unjustly sentenced to death for what, after all, were mere property crimes as the reader knows that he in no way participated in the murder of Mrs. Wood, although he was present when Blueskin did the deed.
Cruikshank might have daringly elected to realise Jack's psychological conflicts during the escape, particularly his dread of encountering the demonic and unrelenting thief-taker, Jonathan Wild, just as Cruikshank had realised Fagin's terrors on the night before his execution at the close of Oliver Twist in Fagin in the Condemned Cell (March 1839). However, the melodramatic and theatrical nature of the work illustrated, as well as the illustrator's determination to be historically accurate with respect to settings and scenes from the life of the historical Jack Sheppard, must have dictated once again that he stick to external conflicts. The illustration, as noted above, is misplaced in the 1839 triple-decker, appearing against a passage in Chapter 25, "How Jack Sheppard got rid of his Irons." Thus, the volume reader would have scrutinized the pair of engravings analeptically, recalling the scene in which Jack gains his freedom even as he or she encounters the scene in which he tries to shed his leg-irons subsequently, even as he is pursued by both Jonathan Wild and his agents and the popular hue-and-cry and learns that his exploits are now the subjects of the mass communication medium of the street ballad.
There are no famous London landmarks in Cruikshank's final pair of illustrations graphing Jack's flight through the corridors of Newgate and towards the freedom represented byn the open garret door (lower left). Several solid but lacklustre houses surmounted by chimney-pots are the only "over London" view afforded, and the salient features are the corona of spikes (upper right), the upper level of the turner's house (lower left), and the spike and blanket with which he has just let himself down to the lower roof (upper centre). But subtly Cruikshank implies Jack's passing from imprisonment to personal (if temporary) liberty and from the unnatural, enclosed environment of Newgate towards the natural, daylight setting by emphasizing the prison wall in the top register of the first engraving, and then replacing it with the cloudy early evening sky of the lower engraving, as Jack moves left, towards the facing text, rather right, as in theatrical compositions.
Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. A Romance. With 28 illustrations by George Cruikshank. In three volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1839.
Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. Edited by Edward Jacobs and Manuela Mourao. With 31 illustrations. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007.
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans; Chapman and Hall, 1846.
Meisel, Martin. Chapter 13, "Novels in Epitome." Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Pp. 247-282.
Sutherland, John. "Jack Sheppard" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19893. Pp. 323-324.
Vann, J. Don. "Jack Sheppard in Bentley's Miscellany, January 1839 — February 1840." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Page 19.
Last modified 24 December 2016