Passage Illustrated: "No Popery!"

"'Here's the Pope in the pillory, and the Devil pelting him with priests.'"

At these words a kick from behind apprised the loyal champion that a very ragged auditory, who for some time past had not well understood the gist of his eloquence, had at length comprehended enough to be angry. Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte, certainly, in an Irish row. "The merest urchin may light the train; one handful of mud often ignites a shindy that ends in a most bloody battle."

And here, no sooner did the vis a-tergo impel Billy forward than a severe rap of a closed fist in the eye drove him back, and in one instant he became the centre to a periphery of kicks, cuffs, pullings, and haulings that left the poor deputy-grand not only orange, but blue.

He fought manfully, but numbers carried the day. . . . [Chapter XIII, "The Journey," 71]

And here, no sooner did the vis a-tergo impel Billy forward than a severe rap of a closed fist in the eye drove him back, and in one instant he became the centre to a periphery of kicks, cuffs, pullings, and haulings that left the poor deputy-grand not only orange, but blue.

He fought manfully, but numbers carried the day. . . . [Chapter XIII, "The Journey," 71]

Michael Steig on Nickleby and O'Malley

I think one grasps Browne's special talents only by considering this illustration [the first for "Dotheboys Hall"] along with its sequel. In the first, Nicholas is seen as simultaneously victim and oppressor: Squeers's stick is held with its point at his breast, so that the master-servant relationship is clear, yet at the same time Nicholas is, spatially, above the pupils, looking down upon them as if in his unwilling collaboration with Squeers he, too, is a "master." In the sequel we find Nicholas down in the boys' midst; he has become their ally against the Squeerses. The composition is of a kind favored by the early Phiz for scenes of violence, comic or real — a whirl of figures around one or two central ones; compare "Mr. Crow well plucked," in Lever's Charles O'Malley, 1840. Nicholas' pose may be somewhat stagy, but nowhere near as much so as Dickens' verbal handling of Nicholas' denunciation of Squeers. [Chapter Two: "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature," pp. 44-45]

Commentary: Billy Crow, The Orange Lodge Leader, Trashed by a Catholic Mob

Lever came from an Anglo-Irish, Protestant background, but he is quite out of sympathy with the virulent Protestant (Orangeman) Billy Crow. Phiz interprets the scene of an Irish mob trashing Billy (as in "King Billy," William III of Orange) without sympathy for the ultra-Protestant spokesman who has failed to read his audience properly in Mr. Crow well Plucked, among whom is O'Malley's faithful Catholic valet Mickey Free, for whom Orange Lodge 13,476 is anathema. The scene is the marketplace of Kinnegad, through which O'Malley is travelling on his way up to Dublin, where his uncle has arranged that he should attend the university with a view to becoming a lawyer at Trinity College. The incident in Chapter XIII, "The Journey," does not constitute one of the novel's many interpolated tales to which American short-story critic Edgar Allen Poe objected as violations of artistic unity. Rather, in contradiction to such anecdotes as Lever retails about Dr. Barrett, the Vice-Provost, in Chapter XVI, or Captain Power narrates himself in Chapter XV, Lever introduces a piece of religious/political satire showcasing Mickey Free. Despite his own Protestantism, Lever does not support Billy Crow against the three Mr. Trenches, Catholic priests from Tallybash. But Crow and his principal antagonist, Mickey Free (left, wielding a broom) are the only characters that Lever identifies; the remaining five assailants are purely Phiz's inventions, as are the other members of the ragtag mob filling the town square on marketday.

Related Material

• 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)

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. Plate 30, Mr. Crow Well Plucked. 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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Created 17 August 2002

Last updated 5 March 2023