Comments on: The Bloody Romance Of The Tower

By: Clive jennings

Clive jennings — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 23:38:41 +0000

You are spot on with the Edward Gorey comparison, I looked at the images before I read your text, and thought exactly the same.

Fascinating stuff, as always!

Best to you, Sir / Fitzrovia Flaneur

By: Jim McDermott

Jim McDermott — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 16:04:22 +0000

I fear that after such lurid fare I shall have to seek out a Labrador puppy calendar.

By: Michael Knight

Michael Knight — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 15:16:27 +0000

Thanks for a fascinating article made the more vivid by showing Cruikshank’s ‘grand-guignol’ illustrations. And wasn’t William Harrison Ainsworth a contemporary and friend of Dickens and author of over forty somewhat lurid ‘historical’ novels?

By: Helen Breen

Helen Breen — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 11:31:53 +0000

Greetings from Boston,

GA, thanks so much for unearthing these great Cruikshank sketches. They certainly capture the essence of Ainsworth’s romance THE TOWER OF LONDON as you describe it. Agreed:

“There is a grim humour and surreal poetry in pictures which… created a sinister diaphanous world out of dense hatching…. Cruikshank’s pictures are like glimpses of a strange dream, drawing the viewer into a compelling emotional universe with its own logic, peopled by its own inhabitants and where it is too readily apparent what is going on.”

“Jane Grey interposing between the Duke of Northumberland and Simon Renard” shows a weird gallows humor with the principals quibbling while standing on the grave stones of Henry VIII’s wives.

Sketches also channel the artist works in Dickens…

By: John Barrett

John Barrett — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 07:06:20 +0000

Have been to Tower Green not walked on, its surrounded by mega history. All well illustrated here. John a bus pass poet