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Title-page Vignette: Pursuing the Gipsy on the River
Phiz
1858
Steel-engraving
12.5 cm high by 10.4 cm wide, vignetted
Title-page vignette for W. H. Ainsworth's Life and Adventures of Mervyn Clitheroe, facing frontispiece.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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To keep him in view, however, was no easy matter, for, the gleam of light having been instantly withdrawn, it was now dark as pitch. In spite of all our efforts to silence them, the hounds would not cease baying, and, consequently, though we could hear nothing of him, our movements must be made known to the fugitive, and help him to avoid us. Of this we were fully aware; and though I steered the boat as well as I could, I was in great uncertarnty. How anxiously I watched for another gleam! At last it came, and then we found that, instead of being ahead, as we supposed, the gipsy had doubled upon us, and was rowing back towards the point from which he had started. The head of our boat was instantly turned, and we gave him chase.
"We must mind what we're about, Ned, or he'll give us the slip yet," I cried, " and I wouldn't lose him — no, not for a thousand pounds."
"Never fear, sir," the keeper replied, pulling away with lusty strokes.
Again, all was darkness and uncertainty. My eyes were strained to catch the slightest glimpse of the other boat, and my ears open for any sound, however faint.
"I think he has turned again, Ned," I exclaimed. "Rest on your oars for a moment, and listen."
The keeper complied, and the next instant got up, and, seizing the two hounds by the throat, so tightly as to almost throttle them, he said in a whisper to me:
"He's comin' direct towards us. Howd your tongues, wun ye — ye dang'd tell-tale brutes."
Ned was right. In his atiempt to escape, the cunning fox had run right into our jaws. The darkness which had hitherto favoured him, now helped us in our turn, and he did not descry us till he was with twenty yards of our boat. Uttering a fearful oath, he made an effort to turn; but it was now too late. On seeing his prey within reach, Ned instantly set free the hounds, snatched up the oars, and, with loud shout, in which I joined, dashed at him. Phaleg, I suppose, finding he could not escape, awaited us, and in a minute we were beside him. I thought we should have overset his boat, for we struck against it with great force.
"W'un yo' yield quietly?" Ned thundered.
"You'd best let me alone," the gipsy rejoined, fiercely.
"Take care o' the oars," Ned cried to me. "Here, Lupus — here, Gaunt — at him, lads!"
The savage hounds were as fully prepared for the attack as the master, aud sprang after him into the other boat, yelling dreadfully. The contest was unequal, but Phaleg was desperate, and not disposed to yield tamely. He had unshipped an oar, and before Ned could seize him, he strudk the keeper such a violent blow on the head, that I thought he had killed him. The poor fellow lost his footing, aad fell overboard. But thoueh he had thus liberated himself from one foe, Phaleg had two others, yet more formidable, to contend with. [Book the Third, Chapter XV, "I meet Phaleg at midnight in Marston Churchyard, and my Uncle Mobberley's Ghost appears to us," pp. 123-24]
Beginning in 1847, Phiz had begun to experiment with creating dramatic effects through extreme chiaroscuro by etching ‘dark plates’, an effect he achieved by scoring the plate with closely set parallel lines after bollting out areas that were not to receive the extra ink. Steig argues that Phiz had learned the technique by studying John Franklin's dark plates for W. H. Ainsworth's Old Saint Paul's (1841). Such atmospheric illustrations as Phiz's interpretation the squalid Tom-all-alone's in Chapter 46 of Bleak House (1853) use intense shades of grey to describe twilight, evening, night, and gloomy interiors and invest them with suggestions of the moods ranging from the sinister, to the malignant, and the apprehensive. Here, the partially hidden moon and dark clouds intensify the suspenseful mood. Phaleg's figure, ready to dash his raised oar upon the hounds as Ned tumbles into the water, in a strong diagonal connects the top and bottom registers, and the engraved title and the publication data.
The title-page vignette for the last instalment of the monthly-issued novel poses certain problems for the present-day analyst in that its counterpart in the 1858 and 1882 volumes has never gone through the process of serialisation. Although this frontispiece is the second image that the modern reader of Routledge volume edition of The Life and Adventures of Mervyn Clitheroe encounters and the passage that it illustrates is roughly half-way through the volume, it was in fact one of the last that Phiz produced over the extended serial run that, including the publication hiatus, spanned seven years. The text illustrated actually occurs on pages 123 and 124 of the 372-page volume, at the very conclusion of Book the First, in the last chapter, issued just when Chapman and Hall had decided to terminate serial publication, and five years ahead of the resumption of the serial. In the vignette, then, in the re-serialisation, Ainsworth and Phiz are demanding that readers recall the boyhood chapters of the novel, and the exciting curtain that closed instalment four (March 1852).
"Ainsworth and Friends." Chapter V: "The Lancashire Novels," in Essays on 19th Century Literature & The Gothic, posted 16 January 2013; last updated October 2018. Online version available from wordpress.com — Dr. Stephen Carver's Blog. Web. 8 October 2018.
Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Life and Adventures of Mervyn Clitheroe (1851-2; 1858). Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). London: Routledge, 1882.
Carver, Stephen. The Life and Works of the Lancashire Novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, 1805–1882. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Steig, Michael. Dickens and Phiz. London and Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978.
Sutherland, John. "Mervyn Clitheroe." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1989. P. 431.
Vann, J. Don. "William Harrison Ainsworth. Mervyn Clitheroe, twelve parts in eleven monthly installments, December 1851-March 1852, December 1857-June 1858." New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 27-28
Last modified 10 October 2018
