Passage Illustrated: The Pallid Protagonist Accidentally Meets The Iron Duke

Something in this frame of mind, I was taking one evening a solitary ride some miles from the camp. Without noticing the circumstance, I had entered a little mountain tract, when, the ground being broken and uneven, I dismounted and proceeded a-foot, with the bridle within my arm. I had not gone far when the clatter of a horse’s hoofs came rapidly towards me, and though there was something startling in the pace over such a piece of road, I never lifted my eyes as the horseman came up, but continued my slow progress onwards, my head sunk upon my bosom.

“Hallo, sir!” cried a sharp voice, whose tones seemed, somehow, not heard for the first time. I looked up, saw a slight figure closely buttoned up in a blue horseman’s cloak, the collar of which almost entirely hid his features; he wore a plain, cocked hat without a feather, and was mounted upon a sharp, wiry-looking hack.

“Hallo, sir! What regiment do you belong to?”

As I had nothing of the soldier about me, save a blue foraging cap, to denote my corps, the tone of the demand was little calculated to elicit a very polished reply; but preferring, as most impertinent, to make no answer, I passed on without speaking.

“Did you hear, sir?” cried the same voice, in a still louder key. “What’s your regiment?”

I now turned round, resolved to question the other in turn; when, to my inexpressible shame and confusion, he had lowered the collar of his cloak, and I saw the features of Sir Arthur Wellesley.

“Fourteenth Light Dragoons, sir,” said I, blushing as I spoke.

“Have you not read the general order, sir? Why have you left the camp?”

Now, I had not read a general order nor even heard one for above a fortnight. So I stammered out some bungling answer.

“To your quarters, sir, and report yourself under arrest. What’s your name?”

“Lieutenant O’Malley, sir.”

“Well, sir, your passion for rambling shall be indulged. You shall be sent to the rear with despatches; and as the army is in advance, probably the lesson may be serviceable.” So saying, he pressed spurs to his horse, and was out of sight in a moment. [Chapter LXIV, "An Adventure with Sir Arthur," 319]

Commentary: The Historical-Picaresque-Bildungsroman

Through the frontispiece of sociable, womanizing Mickey Free at an Irish inn Phiz establishes that the novel will be something of a picaresque narrative involving the comic exploits and witty observations of a down-to-earth, working-class foil for the pallid, conscience-stricken middle-class protagonist. Charles O'Malley throughout the first movement of the novel is merely a young man from a respectable family having the kinds of local adventures and assignations that any such youth might have had in Dublin at the beginning of the nineteenth century. If plebeian Mickey Free is the story's "Picaro," then Lieutenant O'Malley provides another novel element, the youthful protagonist of the Bildungsroman.

However, in the second movement of the novel Lever converts his narrative into an historical novel in the manner of the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott and, later in the decade, the period tales of William M. Thackeray such as Barry Lyndon and Vanity Fair. As in George Eliot's Romola (1862) and Scott's Ivanhoe (3 vols., 1819), purely fictional characters rub shoulders (so to speak) with actual historical personages at important points in history. Thus, the title-page vignettes for volumes one and two (O'Malley in the Presence of Napoleon) put the fictional youth in the company of such well-known figures from the Napoleonic wars as the epic antagonists, the Duke of Wellington and the Emperor of the French, Napoleon Buonaparte. The point of conjunction turns out to be the June 1815 Battle of Waterloo, for which the present illustration prepares us.

Here, having survived his duel with the cunning, unscrupulous Trevyllian in Chapter LXII, O'Malley becomes melancholy and yearns to see his uncle, now embittered by the loss of a legal action and part of the O'Malley estate: "brooding melancholy gained daily more and more upon me. A wish, to return to Ireland, a vague and indistinct feeling that my career was not destined for aught of great and good crept upon me, and I longed to sink into oblivion, forgotten and forgot" (318). Thus, lost in his own thought, he fails to recognise the Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Iberian Peninsula.

Related Material

• The Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)
• Napoleon's Surprising Popularity in Nineteenth-Century England
• Charles Lever's Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon (1840-41)
• Hablot Knight Browne, 1815-1882; A Brief Biography
• Cattermole and Phiz: The First illustrators of Barnaby Rudge: A Team Effort by "The Clock Works" (1841)
• Phiz: 'A Good Hand at a Horse'" — A Gallery and Brief Overview of Phiz's Illustrations of Horses for Defoe, Dickens, Lever, and Ainsworth (1836-64)

Bibliography

Lever, Charles. Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. Published serially in The Dublin University Magazine from Vol. XV (March 1840) through XVIII (December 1841). Dublin: William Curry, March 1840 through December 1841, 2 vols. London: Samuel Holdsworth, 1840; rpt., Chapman and Hall, 1873.

Lever, Charles. Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. Novels and Romances of Charles Lever. Vol. I and II. In two volumes. Project Gutenberg. Last Updated: 2 September 2016.

Steig, Michael. Chapter Two: "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 24-50.

Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter V, "Renegade from Physic, 1839-1841." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. Pp. 73-93.

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19 March 2023