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The Finalé to an Evening
Phiz
March 1842 instalment
Steel-engraving
13.4 cm by 11.5 cm (5 ¼ by 4 ½ inches), vignetted
Fifth steel engraving for Charles Lever's Jack Hinton, The Guardsman (1843), facing page 63.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Into the supper-room we rushed; but what a change was there! The brilliant tables, resplendent with gold plate, candelabras, and flowers, were now despoiled and dismantled. On the floor, among broken glasses, cracked decanters, pyramids of jelly, and pagodas of blancmange, lay scattered in every attitude the sleeping figures of the late guests. Mrs. Rooney alone maintained her position, seated in a large chair, her eyes closed, a smile of Elysian happiness playing upon her lips. Her right arm hung gracefully over the side of the chair, where lately his grace had kissed her hand at parting. Overcome, in all probability, by the more than human happiness of such a moment, she had sunk into slumber, and was murmuring in her dreams such short and broken phrases as the following: — 'Ah, happy day! — What will Mrs. Tait say? — The lord mayor, indeed! — Oh, my poor head! I hope it won't be turned. — Holy Agatha, pray for us! your grace, pray for us I — Isn't he a beautiful man? Hasn't he the darling white teeth?' [Chapter X, "A Finalé to an Evening," 63]
Mrs. Rooney is instantly recognizable in her oversized hat, and again the novelist and the illustrator associate her with excessive consumption of food and drink, as in Mrs. Paul taking a Little Snack in Chapter VI, "The Sham Battle."
The construction of the chapter, if not the juxtaposition of the bumbling husband in the previous plate and the inebriated wife in this, exhibits "streaky-bacon" plot construction. After the presentation of the Rooneys to the Lord-Lieutenant, Lever enables his protagonist to dance with the charming and witty Miss Bellew, and then to accompany her up the grad staircase to the lavish supper after midnight. Their hour's sophisticated and far-ranging conversation and debate about the contrasting national characters of the aloof English and the eccentric Irish contrasts this less-than-grand finalé. Sadly for our hero, his nemesis, the foppish Lord Dudley de Vere, asks Louisa Bellew to dance, and Hinton nods off in a corner.
Suddenly Phil O'Grady announces that the Duke is so "delighted with the Rooneys" that he intends to knight Paul Rooney; he and Hinton dash downstairs, and find the Duke very much under the influence of Paul's excellent Burgundy. He borrows Hinton's sword with every intention of knighting the attorney, and into the supper-room he and his party dash. And what they find there Phiz has dramatically depicted: Mrs. Rooney enthroned and inebriated seems to be presiding over a room of comatose young men. Propped up in the corner they discover her husband, dead to the world from having consumed too much punch. This discovery leads immediately to the Duke's mistakenly knighting Delaney in The Duke knighting Corny Delaney, facing 73.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Lever, Charles. Jack Hinton, The Guardsman. Illustrated by Hablột Knight Browne (Phiz). London: Downey & Co., 1901. [First published serially in The Dublin University Magazine January through December 1842; and subsequently in a single volume, Dublin: William Curry, Jun. December 1842, pp. 396. Illustrated with wood and steel engravings by H. K. Browne: 27 full-page plates. 8vo, 396pp. Boston: Little, Brown, 1894; New York: Croscup, 1894. 2 vols.]
Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter VI, "Editor, 1839-1841." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. 92-107.
Sutherland, John A. "Jack Hinton The Guardsman." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989, rpt. 1990, 323.
Thomson, David Croal. Life and Labours of Hablột Knight Browne, "Phiz". London: Chapman and Hall, 1884.
Created 19 May 2023