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recollection of many surviving spectators of
such tragedies "athwart ship "at right angles
to the building across the Old Bailey.
But a much more flagrantly outrageous misrepresentation was published in an illus- ! tration to a paper on this dreary subject I the gallows appearing in a popular and j eminently meritorious monthly magazine, a professedly " up-to-date " serial, only two and a half years ago. I do not propose to " gibbet " the title of this magazine, rior of the article thus absurdly illustrated, but! have supplied the Editor with reference "to witness if I lie." The writer contrasts the former with the present method of inflicting capital punish- ment, and illustrates the latter process with a fairly accurate delineation of the execution shed within the gloomy walls that still frown on us from the north-eastern angle of the Old Bailey ; but the vignette frontispiece to the article, professing to give a view of the ob- solete "hanging in front of Newgate," surely, in its gruesome absurdity, may be said to "out-herod Herod." The convict is repre- sented swinging and struggling, partially over the heads of the conventional mob, from a sort of barber's pole thrust through an aper- ture of the grated window over the " debtors' door" the "door of the dead," as it was styled by the late Mr. George Augustus Sala (see 'N. & Q.,' 2 nd S. xi. 322). The artist seems to have been wholly ignorant, and to have assumed a like ignorance on the part of his readers, that such machines as a cross-beam gallows, a scaffold, a platform, and a drop were ever employed !
But to turn to a more agreeable subject of criticism. Some score or more of years ago a cheap " People's Edition " of Dickens's works in double-column octavo form was brought out. I think the illustrations (woodcuts) were by the late Frank Barnard, an excellent draughtsman. But alas for the anachronistic frontispiece to 'Pickwick ' ! It will be remem- bered that during a short journey (in 1828) in that modern convenience, a cabriolet, then just beginning to shoulder the cumbrous hackney coach off the road, the dear old gentleman pulls out his note -book and engages in conversation with the driver, inquisitorially essaying to enhance his knowledge of metropolitan folk-lore. This curiosity the Jehu resents, and so prac- tically that the Christian namesake of the immortal diarist, who, a century and a half before Mr. Pickwick's time, was the very type of the man " who wanted to know, you know," finds himself on the pavement at Charing Cross engaged in a pugilistic encounter with his late charioteer. Well, the engraving pur-
porting to illustrate this episode represents
the cab as a modern "growler" of the
brougham pattern that did not come into
vogue until about a score of years subse-
quently to the fracas ! Now it does not seem
to have occurred to the artist that a pro-
longed colloquy between driver and fare
during the drive would have been wholly
impracticable in such a vehicle. The " cabrio-
let " in which Mr. Pickwick is described as
having ridden was, in fact, a kind of a gig
with a convenience which might be regarded
as an excrescence on the right-hand side, form-
ing a seat for the driver, who, thus sitting
side by side and on the same plane with
the passenger, was in a position practicable
enough for carrying on a continuous conver-
sation while guiding the vehicle in motion.
This adjunct was called a " dickey." I write
from personal experience. During the late
thirties, when I was a small boy, such cabs
were common in the streets of London, and
were handier and cheaper than the machine
called in cockney dialect a "glass cutch"
(coach). My tiny frame often rode in one of
these "traps," not "on the knees of the gods,"
but on the knees of my aunt, or squeezed in
on her left-hand side, and, as she was a gar-
rulous lady, I can vouch for the animation
with which, during the transit, she would
carry on a conversation with her attendant
neighbour seated externally to the main body
of the conveyance. Thus we see how the in-
quiring mind of Dickens's hero was able, or
endeavoured, to gather information.
One more instance and I conclude (for the present, for, subject to our Editor's gracious permission, I propose to animadvert on a future occasion on another phase of this description of artistic anachronism). The renowned "thrice Lord Mayor of Lon- don" was again presented at quite a number of our metropolitan theatres last Christmas / but "conspicuous by its absence" was an anachronistic slip which irritated me at the last avatar of the famous Dick a few years ago, although the same error is still per- petrated in the illustrated advertisements of a few newspapers which textually profess to reproduce "Old St. Paul's" ! Then the hoard- ings abounded with the delineations of the runaway boy listening intently to the recall chimed by Bow Bells, seated on the im- mortal stone at Highgate, contemplating the great city displayed at his feet, crowned with the dome of Wren's great work, not in situ until two centuries and three score years after Whittington had been laid in his honoured grave. Were the artists oblivious of the fact that towers and a spire and the
