"Death of Lady Rookwood" — twelfth George Cruikshank illustration for Ainsworth's "Rookwood. A Romance" (1834, il. 1836) (original) (raw)

Passage Illustrated

"The figure points to that sarcophagus," returned Lady Rookwood — "can you raise up the lid?"

"No," replied Alan; "my strength will not avail to lift it."

"Yet let the trial be made," said Lady Rookwood; "the figure points there still — my own arm shall aid you."

Alan watched her in dumb wonder. She advanced towards the marble monument, and beckoned him to follow. He reluctantly complied. Without any expectation of being able to move the ponderous lid of the sarcophagus, at Lady Rookwood's renewed request he applied himself to the task. What was his surprise, when, beneath their united efforts, he found the ponderous slab slowly revolve upon its vast hinges, and, with little further difficulty, it was completely elevated; though it still required the exertion of all Alan's strength to prop it open, and prevent its falling back.

"What does it contain?" asked Lady Rookwood.

"A warrior's ashes," returned Alan.

"There is a rusty dagger upon a fold of faded linen," cried Lady Rookwood, holding down the light.

"It is the weapon with which the first dame of the house of Rookwood was stabbed," said Alan, with a grim smile:

"Which whoso findeth in the tomb
Shall clutch until the hour of doom;
And when 'tis grasped by hand of clay,
The curse of blood shall pass away.

So saith the rhyme. Have you seen enough?"

"No," said Lady Rookwood, precipitating herself into the marble coffin. "That weapon shall be mine."

"Come forth — come forth," cried Alan. "My arm trembles — I cannot support the lid."

"I will have it, though I grasp it to eternity," shrieked Lady Rookwood, vainly endeavoring to wrest away the dagger, which was fastened, together with the linen upon which it lay, by some adhesive substance to the bottom of the shell.

At this moment Alan Rookwood happened to cast his eye upward, and he then beheld what filled him with new terror. The axe of the sable statue was poised above its head, as in the act to strike him. Some secret machinery, it was evident, existed between the sarcophagus lid and this mysterious image. But in the first impulse of his alarm Alan abandoned his hold of the slab, and it sunk slowly downwards. He uttered a loud cry as it moved. Lady Rookwood heard this cry. She raised herself at the same moment — the dagger was in her hand — she pressed it against the lid, but its downward force was too great to be withstood. The light was within the sarcophagus, and Alan could discern her features. The expression was terrible. She uttered one shriek and the lid closed for ever.

Alan was in total darkness. The light had been enclosed with Lady Rookwood. There was something so horrible in her probable fate, that even he shuddered as he thought upon it. Exerting all his remaining strength, he essayed to raise the lid, but now it was more firmly closed than ever. It defied all his power. Once, for an instant, he fancied that it yielded to his straining sinews, but it was only his hand that slided upon the surface of the marble. It was fixed — immovable. The sides and lid rang with the strokes which the unfortunate lady bestowed upon them with the dagger's point; but those sounds were not long heard. Presently all was still; the marble ceased to vibrate with her blows. Alan struck the lid with his knuckles, but no response was returned. All was silent. — Book Five, "The Oath," Chapter 5, "The Sarcophagus," p. 533-534.

Commentary

A possible source for Ainsworth's account of Lady Rookwood's death in the sarcophagus is "The Mistletoe Bough Legend." In the castle, beneath the mistletoe bough, the lord's daughter prepares to wed young Lovel. The girl, tired of dancing, decides to hide and have her bridegroom find her. Neither he nor an army of searchers ever does. Years later, her body is found "in a living tomb," trapped in a chest. The song, written by Haynes Bayly in 1823, was much in the vogue of Gothic melancholy. That the song is indeed the inspiration for the charnel house scene in Rookwoodis the name of the bridegroom, Lovell, which is the name of the ill-fated Gypsy family in the novel, although the family name is associated with Oxfordshire rather than Yorkshire; the song, however, was most popular in the North Yorkshire and Derbyshire areas near Sheffield. Various country-houses are associated with the fatal chest include Bramshill House and Marwell Hall in Hampshire, Castle Horneck in Cornwall, Basildon Grotto in Berkshire, Minster Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire, Exton Hall in Rutland, Brockdish Hall in Norfolk, and Bawdrip Rectory in Somerset. Another version of the legend occurs in Samuel Rogers' Italy (1822), in which the story of the ill-fated bride, Ginevra Orsini, occurs at a palazzo in Mordena, near Florence. The very marriage chest in which Ginevra perished was brought back to England in the seventeenth century by Sir John Cope after his Grand Tour, and installed at Bramshill. Lady Maud Rookwood is hardly the innocent, young bride of the poem, but her death is caused by her own wilfulness and lack of caution.

Of course, a sensible reader might well ask such reasonable questions as "What is Maud Rookwood doing in the vault with her sworn enemy, Alan Rookwood?" and "Whatever possessed Lady Rookwood to enter the sarcophagus?" Her markedly odd behaviour, reminiscent of that of Poe's demented protagonists, suggests that she has descended into madness from mere paranoia and vindictiveness, and that she requires the Rookwood dagger to cancel one of the family curses to ensure her son's happiness. Alan is not there by prior arrangement to assist her; rather, after Luke has secured Eleanor Mowbray, he has arranged to meet his grandfather at the vault — having been poisoned by the lock of Sybil's hair, Luke never arrives, leaving his grandfather trapped in the vault. Maud perpetrates the greater folly of entering the casket, but Alan rivals her stupidity by leaving the key in the lock on the outside of the door, and is trapped in the vault, taking days to perish of exhaustion, dehydration, and hunger. The departure of Luke, Maud, and Alan at least paves the way for a happy bridal ceremony for Ranulph and Eleanor.

Cruikshank establishes Alan Rookwood's (alias, Peter Bradley's) identity by his clothing, for he has worn precisely the same outfit in The Manse, The Vault, and The Bridal, while Maud Rookwood's dress is consistent with the clothing that she is wearing in Rescue of Lady Rookwood. The scene itself, with the black armour, gigantic battle-axe, and stacked coffins, is a repetition of the scene which opened the narrative-pictorial sequence, The Vault, although the sarcophagus upon which the sexton is seated is only suggested in that earlier illustration, and is nothing like the size of the black marble sarcophagus in the final illustration since here it occupies a substantial portion of the vaulted chamber. Another significant difference between the earlier description of the family vault and the present illustration is that the statue, dimly scene in The Vault, is much larger, and the battle-axe is now raised, impeding Alan Rookwood's attempt to halt the mechanical closing of the sarcophagus, which Cruikshank this time has sunken into the floor, so that it appears that Lady Rookwood is descending a staircase. Certainly the fact that we cannot be sure of the female's identity and that the sexton's struggling to prevent the lid from closing on her impel the reader in the final pages of the romance to scrutinize the accompanying text.

The Other Cruikshank Illustrations of Gothic Scenes in the Romance

Left: George Cruikshank's first regular "Gothic" plate, The Vault (1836). Centre: Cruikshank's second markedly Gothic plate, Rescue of Lady Rookwood (1836). Right: Cruikshank's third Gothic plate, Sybil and Barbara Lovel. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Bibliography

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

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. 544-545.

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

Last modified 27 February 2017