"The Hornsey Gate," Sir John Gilbert's sixth illustration for W. Harrison Ainsworth's "Rookwood. A Romance" (1878)

[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Sir John Gilbert, R. A. —> Next]

The Hornsey Gate

Sir John Gilbert, R. A.

1878

Wood-engraving

14 x 9.6 cm, vignetted

Sixth illustration for W. H. Ainsworth's Rookwood: A Romance, facing p. 298 (1878 edition).

In one volume, with illustrations by Sir John Gilbert. London: George Routledge and Sons, Broadway, Ludgate Hill; New York: 416 Broome Street, 1878.

Stop thief! stop thief! a highwayman!
Not one of them was mute;
And all and each that passed that way. — Did join in the pursuit. John Gilpin.

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Passage Illustrated

The whole neighbourhood was alarmed by the cries, and by the tramp of horses: the men of Hornsey rushed into the road to seize the fugitive, and women held up their babes to catch a glimpse of the flying cavalcade, which seemed to gain number and animation as it advanced. Suddenly three horsemen appear in the road — they hear the uproar and the din. "A highwayman! a highwayman!" cry the voices: "stop him, stop him!" But it is no such easy matter. With a pistol in each hand, and his bridle in his teeth, Turpin passed boldly on. His fierce looks — his furious steed — the impetus with which he pressed forward, bore down all before him. The horsemen gave way, and only served to swell the list of his pursuers.

"We have him now — we have him now!" cried Paterson, exultingly. "Shout for your lives. The turnpike man will hear us. Shout again — again! The fellow has heard it. The gate is shut. We have him. Ha, ha!"

The old Hornsey toll-bar was a high gate, with chevaux-de-frise on the upper rail. It may be so still. The gate was swung into its lock, and, like a tiger in his lair, the prompt custodian of the turnpike trusts, ensconced within his doorway, held himself in readiness to spring upon the runaway. But Dick kept steadily on. He coolly calculated the height of the gate; he looked to the right and to the left — nothing better offered; he spoke a few words of encouragement to Bess, gently patted her neck, then struck his spurs into her sides, and cleared the spikes by an inch. Out rushed the amazed turnpike man, thus unmercifully bilked, and was nearly trampled to death under the feet of Paterson's horse. — Book IV, "The Ride to York," Chapter 4, "The Hue and Cry," pp. 267-68 [1882 edition].

Commentary

Dick Turpin and Tom King were nearly apprehended at the Kilburn inn by the Rookwood lackey, Titus Tyrconnel, and the family attorney Coates, led by the Chief Constable for Westminster, Paterson. In the ensuing fray, in attempting to free Tom from Paterson's grasp, Turpin has inadvertently killed his friend, who has been betrayed by his doxy, Susan, to the minions of the law. Since Jerry and the Magus, his other drinking companions, have already effected their escape, Turpin now has only himself to save. Thus, turning his back on "the great Babel" of London, Turpin turns Black Bess's head towards Hampstead Heath, the Hendon Road, Crackskull Commons, and Highgate Hill, as, apparently "for the first time" he considers "executing his extraordinary ride to York" (266) to avoid capture and ride to Luke Rookwood's assistance back in Yorkshire.

Thus begins Dick Turpin's heroic ride to York, in which he continually eludes his pursuers through a combination of his own brilliant horsemanship, Black Bess's remarkable endurance, and the ineptitude of the minions of the law. Since Hornsey is a parish at the beginning of the Great North Road, only six miles north of London's Charing Cross, it is logical that Dick Turpin's initial obstacle should be the toll gate, since stopping to pay the fee would enable Coates and his fellows to catch up. The toll gate presents a very real danger to the horse who attempts to vault, the chevaux-de-frise of spikes on the upper rail. So celebrated a moment in the ride could not be avoided by the novel's second illustrator, Sir John Gilbert, whose version of the scene is not merely different in style, but in perspective. George Cruikshank gives us the scene as if it were being staged at Astley's hippodrome, with the startled toll-keeper looking out of his booth just in time to see the rear hooves of Black Bess, the rates for various kinds of vehicles as well as riders posted immediately behind the air-borne Dick Turpin. In the 1834 frontispiece, the barrier looks much higher than that in Cruikshank's illustration; it was, in fact, about 12 feet in height, making Turpin's clearing it all the more remarkable. Although earlier Dick Turpin throws way one of his pistols, Ainsworth specifies that, as he surmounts the Hornsey Gate, "With a pistol in each hand, and his bridle in his teeth, Turpin passed boldly on" (267). Other artists of the 1830s have shown the highwaymen with a flintlock pistol in either hand, closely pursued; however, Cruikshank focusses on Turpin's feat as a rider and correctly does not show him trying to shoot the posse. However, the juxtaposition of the tollgate, the keeper "ensconced within his doorway" (267), and the horse and rider are fundamentally the same, even if Cruikshank, unlike the other illustrators of the 1830s, has elected not to depict the pursuers. An interesting detail is that, in the 1836 illustration, the weathervane on the tollbooth and the wind-blown bush both indicate that Turpin and Bess have cleared the hurdle with the wind against them. Whereas Cruikshank places his viewer opposite the tollbooth to watch the highwayman "bilk" the petty functionary of his fee, Gilbert, using linear perspective, places the reader in the midst of the action, giving the reader the pursuers' sense of Turpin as as small figure on the horizon. Already Turpin has passed, as the toll-keeper shakes his fist at him. The juxtaposition of the functionary and the gate suggests that it is roughly six feet in height.

Having studied the Cruikshank illustration, Sir John Gilbert, in contrast, moves the perspective down the road, well behind Dick Turpin in the distance, and immediately to the rear of the three riders who attempting to apprehend him. Already the horseman has cleared the bar of the tollbooth, and will likely elude his three pursuers since they cannot possibly equal Turpin's feat and will have to wait for the keeper to let them pass. The same wind that opposes Dick and Bess in the 1836 plate is less evident here, and it is only just dawning on the the pursuers that Dick has cleared the gate and that they will not be able to duplicate his equestrian achievement. Nothing distinguishes those in pursuit as Gilbert subordinates everything in his composition to the concept of the chase, but the modelling of the figures and horses is thoroughly convincing, compelling the reader to find out what the trio will do once they realize that the highwayman has given them the slip.

Into the convoluted inheritance plot involving sibling rivalry, disguise, and deception Ainsworth injects the historical figure of "Jack Palmer," the Yorkshire alias for the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin (1705 — 1739), whose heroic ride north has little to do with the main plot, and is an adventure entirely of Ainsworth's own making, but brilliantly narrated. A total digression, the pursuit is by far the best thing in the novel. The historical Turpin, as Ainsworth notes in his conclusion, was hanged for horse thievery, one of some two hundred capital offences in eighteenth-century England. Like gaol-breaker Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin the highwayman has been venerated as a hero of the people for his feats both real and legendary, as recorded by Richard Bayes in The Genuine History of the Life of Richard Turpin (1739). London water-colourist and engraver Edward Hull (1823-1906) capitalised on the popularity of Ainsworth's story, publishing six prints of notable events in Turpin's career, notably the daring ride in which the single rider would appear to be the underdog, pitted against determined pursuers who have the possibility of obtaining fresh horses. Those engravings and Ainsworth's novel were in turn undoubtedly the impetus for George Dibdin-Pitt's recreating Turpin's notable exploits in an 1845 melodrama staged at The City of London Theatre, and for Marie Tussaud's including a wax sculpture of Turpin in her public exhibition of historical personages.

It is not insignificant that the novel is interspersed with ballads, for one feels that Turpin belongs properly to the ballad tradition. Consequently, Ainsworth's famous description of Turpin's ride, good as it is, clashes with the Gothic atmosphere of Rookwood Place. — Patrick Kelly, DLB, p. 8.

Thus, rather than begin, as George Cruikshjank had, with the The Old Manse, the title-page vignette of the seventeenth-century Rookwood mansion in Yorkshire, John Gilbert has chosen to focus on Dick Turpin's legendary ride. With ease, the gallant rider surmounts a donkey-drawn cart in a village high-street, causing consternation among the onlookers. Thus, the later illustrator responds to the text as if it were largely a rogue novel.

The Gilbert program of illustration consists of three illustrations associated with the Rookwood inheritance plot — The Vault, The Rescue of Lady Rookwood, and The Marriage, — and four associated with Dick Turpin and his swashbuckling two-hundred-mile ride north: Turpin leaping the cart, Hornsey Gate, The Gibbet, and The Death of Black Bess. Moreover, Dick Turpin rather than the eiron, Luke Bradley (Rookwood) dominates this program as the stalwart highwayman who seems reluctant to shoot anybody appears in a total of six of the illustrations, suggesting that Gilbert, like other nineteenth-century readers, found Dick Turpin, alias "Jack Palmer," the most compelling character in the story, although his intrusion seems unwarranted from the perspective of plot construction. Gilbert, indeed, begins the 1878 Routledge volume with one illustration associated with the Ride to York, Turpin leaping the cart, and the 1882 volume with another of the same ilk, Hornsey Gate, contradicting Cruikshank's emphasis in his 1836 title-page vignette, The Old Manse, Rookwood, on the somewhat confusing conflicts between the various Rookwoods over the matter of who should inherit after Sir Piers' death. Even in the 1836 one detects a greater interest in Dick Turpin than in Sir Luke Rookwood, for the former appears in seven out of a dozen illustrations, the latter in but four.

Related Materials

Bibliography

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

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. A Romance. With 28 illustrations by George Cruikshank. In three volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1839.

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

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Rookwood. A Romance. With 12 illustrations by George Cruikshank and 8 illustrations by Sir John Gilbert. 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. 544-45.

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

Victorian
Web

Illus-
tration

John
Gilbert

W. Harrison
Ainsworth

Last modified 23 February 2017