Mr. Freney's horse endangers a pillar of the church (facing p. 247) — Phiz's eighteenth illustration for Charles Lever's The Knight of Gwynne; A Tale of the Time of Union, August 1846. Steel engraving for Chapter XXX, "Bagenal Daly's Visiters" (originally in Part 8, August 1846). 8.9 cm high by 14.5 cm wide (3 ⅜ by 5 ¾ inches), vignetted. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
Inset Illustrated: The Laughing Robber Freney Reminisces about Matchlock
“He [the Dean] was riding home from an early dinner with the bishop, and as he was cantering along the side of the road, a chaise with four horses came tearing past. Matchlock, true to his old instinct, but not knowing who was on his back, broke into a gallop, and in half a dozen strides brought the dean close up to the chaise window, when the traveller inside sent a bullet past his ear that very nearly made a vacancy in the best living of the diocese. As I said, sir, the dean had had enough of him; he sold him the next morning, and that day week he was bought by a young fellow in the West whom I found out to be a grandson of old Hickman.” [Chapter XXX, "Bagenal Daly's Visiters [sic]," 247]
Commentary: An Inset Narrative, a Distinctive Voice, and a Broader Social Perspective
The loss of Lionel's borrowed mount, a thoroughbred worth three hundred pounds, occurs in the previous chapter, but is resolved by Lord Netherby's offering to purchase the beast from Beecham O'Reilly on Lionel's behalf. We now revert to Bagenal Daly's attempts to extricate the Knight from financial ruin after Tom Gleeson's abusing his powers of attorney to raise and expropriate a huge loan from the London Company. Hickman's attorney asserts that he has not received even payment of the interest on the bond of seventy-four thousand pounds at five per cent; however, Daly believes that Gleeson had repaid the entire amount, and is determined to prove he did so before he jumped overboard in the Channel.
Sandy, Daly's servant, is still looking for Freney, since the memorandum page he stole from Hickman suggests that the bond has been paid. Bicknell, Hickman's attorney, counsels patience. Left to himself, Daly now receives a visitor — he assumes an ex-tenant has come for his assistance, but the man proves to be Freney himself. What a coincidence! The notorious highwayman has come from Mayo in the west, where, in the village of Ballinasloe he suffered the loss of his favourite thoroughbred, Matchlock. The horse had already been bought and sold twice in the intervening week, partly owing to his fractiousness, as Freney recounts. And it turns out that the horse stolen by the mysterious stranger in Chapter XXVIII, "The Hunt-Breakfast," was in fact Freney's Matchlock — and the thief was not Nolan, but Freney himself. Since the characters depicted have no existence outside the inset narrative, Phiz's focus is on the horse which has led to all these plot complications in the previous chapter. Oddly enough, perhaps because he felt that having four horses pull the chaise would clutter the composition, Phiz has included only two.
Related Material: Horses in The Knight of Gwynne (1846-47)
Scanned image and commentary by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose, as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned them, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Buchanan-Brown, John. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.
Lester, Valerie Browne Lester. Chapter 11: "'Give Me Back the Freshness of the Morning!'" Phiz! The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004. Pp. 108-127.
Lever, Charles. The Knight of Gwynne; A Tale of the Time of the Union. London: Chapman and Hall, serialised January 1846 through July 1847.
Lever, Charles. The Knight of Gwynne. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. Novels and Romances of Charles Lever. Vol. I and II. In two volumes. Project Gutenberg. Last Updated: 28 February 2018.
Steig, Michael. Chapter Four: "Dombey and Son: Iconography of Social and Sexual Satire." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 86-112.
Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter IX, "Nomadic Patriarch, 1845-1847." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. Pp. 146-164.
_______. "The Domestic Scene." The English Novel: A Panorama. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin and Riverside, 1960.
Created 3 August 2023