English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century.: How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times.Everitt, Graham
History
English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century.: How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times.
Everitt, Graham
Caricature -- Great Britain; Illustration of books -- Great Britain -- 19th century
The "Tower of London" introduces us to two scenes of a dismal and
terrible character in the etching entitled _Xit Wedded to the
Scavenger's Daughter_, the artist carries us to a gloomy torture
chamber, dimly lighted by a solitary lantern. On the framework of the
rack sits the dwarf Xit, his limbs compressed in the grip of the
frightful instrument called the "Scavenger's daughter," while Simon
Renard, scarcely able to repress a smile, interrogates the comical
little figure at his leisure. Behind him stands Sorrocold, the surgeon;
and in the farther corner Mauger (the headsman), Nightgall, and an
assistant torturer, recline against the wall. The feeble rays of the
lantern throw an obscure light upon the gloomy walls decorated with the
stock in trade of the torturers, thumb-screws, gauntlets, collars,
pinchers, saws, chains, and other horrible and suggestive implements.
Affixed to the ceiling is a steel pulley, the rope which traverses it
terminating with an iron hook and two leathern shoulder straps. Facing
the gloomy door stands a brazier filled with blazing coals, in which a
huge pair of pinchers are suggestively heating. Reared against the side
of a deep dark recess is a ponderous wheel--broad as that of a wagon,
and twice the circumference; and next it the iron bar with which the
bones of those condemned to die by this most horrible torture were
broken while alive. The etching of _Mauger Sharpening his Axe_ is nearly
as celebrated as that of _Fagin in the Condemned Cell_. "A wonderful
weird dusk, with no light but that which glimmers on the bald scalp of
the hideous headsman, who, feeling the edge of his axe with his thumb,
grins with a devilish foretaste of his pleasure on the morrow. I need
scarcely say that all the poetry, dramatic force, mystery, and terror of
the design is attributable to Cruikshank, and not to Ainsworth."[93]
Scenes still more realistically terrible even than these, such as the
_Massacre at Tullabogue_, _The Rebel Camp on Vinegar Hill_, and the
_Executions at Wexford Bridge_, will be found in Maxwell's "History of
the Irish Rebellion."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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