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The discovery of the mysterious packet
George Cruikshank
Auguat 1842
Steel-engraving
12.9 cm high by 10.6 cm wide, framed
Fifteeth illustration for the volume edition of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Miser's Daughter: A Tale, Book Three, Chapter 4, facing page 226 (second plate for the eighth instalment, August 1842, in Ainsworth's Magazine).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Here are several bills," she continued, taking up a roll of smaller papers — "and another bundle of mortgages, will you hear any of them?"
The miser shook his head. The movement was almost mechanical with him.
"Then I will go on," pursued Hilda. "Ah! what is this letter with the black seal! Shall I read it?"
The miser made no reply. He was gazing listlessly into the fire, and watching the wreaths of smoke ascend the chimney with childish delight.
Hilda, therefore opened the letter, and found a small memorandum enclosed in it, which she placed upon the table. Trembling with emotion, she then began to read aloud the following lines: —
"Old and valued Friend, — If this should ever meet your eye, I shall have been a year in my grave, for in accordance with our agreement, it will not be delivered to you until the expiration of that time after my death. The agreement, I need not remind you, was so formed, that in case we should both die within the year, the contract entered into by us respecting the marriage of our children should be null and void."
Here Hilda was startled by a sharp cry from her father, and looking up, she saw that he was staring wildly and inquiringly at her. [Book III, Chapter IV, "Treats Of The Miser's Illness; and the Discovery of the Mysterious Packet by Hilda," page 224]
The illustration involving Hilda's reading the contents of the packet that Randulph Crew delivered to her father earlier in the story (in Book One, Chapter II) has two interesting features. The first is the embedded picture from Holbein's The Dance of Death above the mantelpiece, a bizarre memento mori upon which Ainsworth did not comment in his earlier descriptions of the miser's rooms, chiefly because those earlier scenes were enacted in his parlour and home-office. Given that John Scarve is near death, the facsimile of the Holbein woodcut provides a suitable comment to both the characters and the reader upon the folly of amassing wealth without regard for the feelings and welfare of friends and family as the acquisition of wealth has been the miser's chief obsession throughout his life. The second feature concerns the influence of Cruikshank's illustration upon the narrative-pictorial sequences for a much more significant novel, A Christmas Carol, written shortly after the publication of The Miser's Daughter in the autumn of 1842. This picture of the miser in his chair in front a fireplace lined with Dutch tiles bears some resemblance to that in which Ebenezer Scrooge takes his gruel before the fire on the evening just prior to the arrival of the ghost of his dead partner, Marley's Ghost by John Leech. Dickens may well have had the Cruikshank illustration in mind when he wrote in the autumn of 1843:
The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaohs' daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts. . . . [Stave the First, "Marley's Ghost," p. 23]
The irony of the description is much more subtle than that of the embedded picture in the Cruikshank illustration in that, as a pragmatist who believes only in material things, Scrooge conceives of the biblical stories alluded to in the seventeenth-century tiles in materialistic terms such as "feather-beds" and "butter-boats." In other words, he has not internalised the themes of such stories as "Belshazzar's Feast," themes that his dead partner is about to underscore "like the ancient Prophet's road" in his ghostly visitation. The passage describing Scarve before the fire sets up the illustration:
The next day, finding himself unable to go down stairs, he ordered Jacob to bring up all his boxes, and to place them near him. His fever increasing, and assuming somewhat of the character of an ague, he consented to have a small fire kept up constantly in his bedroom, and set his chair close beside it. In addition to his dressing-gown, he wrapped an old blanket over his shoulders, and tried to keep his lower limbs warm by clothing them in a couple of worsted hose. His bed being totally destitute of hangings, he had a sheet hung up against the lower end of it to keep off the blaze of the fire which he fancied disturbed him during the night. These slight comforts were all he permitted himself, and he remained as inflexible as ever on the score of medicine, and medical advice. {Book III, Chapter IV, page 222]
"Well, perhaps you're right sir," said Jacob; "but I wish you'd think less o' your worldly affairs, and more o' your sperretual ones. Look at that pictur' over your chimney-piece, and see how Death is takin' away the covetous man's treasures before his very eyes. It might be intended as a warnin' to you."
The picture, alluded to by Jacob, was a copy of one of Holbein's designs of theDance of Death ( plate) suspended over the chimney-piece, and with the scriptural motto underneath it — "Stulte, hac nocte repetunt animum tuam: et quae parasti cujus erunt?" — did seem to have a fearful and, solemn application to the present conjuncture. The miser shuddered as he looked at it, but he would not acknowledge the justice of the porter's remark. [Book III, Chapter IV, p. 222-23]
The passage in question from the New Testament might be translated as follows: "You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?"(Luke,12: 20). Here Cruikshank has embedded a picture that Ainsworth specifically mentions in the text as positioned above Mr. Scarve's mantelpiece, the Hans Holbein study of Death's triumph over a miser (1523), with the Latin motto from the Vulgate Bible immediately beneath it. Both the images of the distraught Miser and the Grim Robber are perfectly clear, and Latin subscript is sufficiently large and sharp to be readable.
Cruikshank has rendered the twenty-eighth Holbein woodcut in the series encompassing the whole of early Renaissance society, Der Rych man (1523) in its bare essentials: the long-haired miser's hands raised in anguish, Death brazenly picking up the Miser's gold coins, the large window above Death, and the much smaller window above the Miser. Cruikshank substites the quotation from St. Luke for the miser's trunks at the bottom of the frame. In the original woodcut the three trunks and money-bags are within the frame and the Latin quotation lies outside the frame:
Stulte, hac nocte repetunt animum tuam: & quae parasti cujus erunt? Lukae XII.
sits above the carouche, and below appears an additional line:
Hac te nocte manu rapiet Mors tristis aurare, Inq; brevi tumba cras tumulatus eris. Ergo cum procul hinc vita privatus abibis Quo pervenient accumulata tibi?
Cruikshank, then, does not wholly replicate the original's quotations, perhaps since Ainsworth mentions only the first, whereas the original woodcut sandwiches the detailed image between two New Testament quotations: "You fool! This very night your life will be required of you, and then who will own what you have accumulated?" and "This very night by the hand of sad Death . . . So where does this get the one who lays up treasure for himself?" That the Miser shudders as his butler Jacob draws the picture to his attention suggests that he is probably cognizant of the meaning of the Latin text, and that in Holbein's rich man he recognizes himself.
Above: Detail of Cruikshank's embedded Holbein illustration from The Dance of Death. Right: The 1523 Holbein original of Death's stealing the coins from the rich man's counting-house before his very eyes, demonstrating human powerlessness to counter mortality. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Miser's Daughter: A Tale. With 20 illustrations by George Cruikshank. First published in 3 volumes by Cunningham and Mortimer, London, 1842. London, Glasgow, and New York: George Routledge, 1892.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being A Ghost Story of Christmas. With illustrations by John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843. Rpt. New York: Columbia U. P., 1956.
Holbein, Hans. "Genres - allegorical painting." Online version available from Wiki Art: Visual Art Encyclopedia. Web. 26 June 2018.
Pollefeys, Patrick. "Les simulacres de la Mort." (1996-2017). Hans Holbein's "Death and the Miser." Online version available from Death in Art. Web. 26 June 2018.
Vann, J. Don. "The Miser's Daughter in Ainsworth's Magazine January-October 1842." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1988. Pp. 22-23.
Last modified 26 June 2018