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Swimming for a wager against a major player.
William Newman
15 September 1860
8.5 cm high by 6.5 cm wide (3 ½ by 2 ½ inches)
Charles Lever's A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance,
Harper's Weekly, Vol. IV (15 September 1860): top centre, p. 589.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Swimming for a wager against a major player. — staff artist William Newman's seventh composite woodblock engraving for Charles Lever's A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance, instalment 6, published on 15 September 1860 in Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vol. IV, Chapter VII, "Father Dyke's Letter," framed, top centre, page 589. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
“I came down here — Brighton — to swim for a wager of five-and-twenty sovereigns against a Major Blayse, of the Third Light Dragoon Guards; we made the match after mess at Aldershot, when neither of us was anything to speak of too sober; but as we were backed strongly, — he rather the favorite, — there was no way of drawing the bet. I beat him after a hard struggle; we were two hours and forty minutes in the water, and netted about sixty pounds besides. [Chapter VII, "Father Dyke's Letter," 589; pages 50-51 in the Chapman and Hall edition]
Father Thomas Dyke's interest in Potts's mount, Blondel, squares with his "sporting" character, rendering him as a clergyman a distinctly Irish type, apparently. Father Tom is, in fact, as much a poacher as a priest, with a taste for trout, salmon, partridge, and woodcock; he is a devotee of Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, a four-page broadsheet published from 1822 to 1886. In a letter home, Father Dyke discusses various sporting characters and events he has encountered in his travels in England, and mentions a swimming match in the English Channel. The part that concerns Potts is Dyke's encountering a foreign jockey as he is exercising Blondel on the Downs the next morning. The horse-dealer offers Dyke sixty-seven sovereigns to recover the very "good luck" horse he had owned years before.
Brown, Jane E., and Richard Samuel West. "William Newman (1817—1870): A Victorian Cartoonist in London and New York." American Periodicals, 17, 2: "Periodical Comics and Cartoons." (Ohio State University Press, 2007), 143-183. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20770984.
Lever, Charles. A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by William Newman. Vols. IV-V (13 April 1860 through 23 March 1861) in thirty-five weekly parts. Only a dozen of these weekly instalments were illustrated: p. 541 (one), 549 (two), 573, 589, 605, 621, 637, 649, 661, 678, 701, and 714.
_______. A Day's Ride; A Life's Romance. Illustrated by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1863, rpt. Routledge, 1882.
_______. A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance. London: Chapman and Hall, 1873.
Lever, Charles James. A Day's Ride; A Life's Romance. http://www.gutenberg.org//files/32692/32692-h/32692-h.htm
Stevenson, Lionel. Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. New York: Russell & Russell, 1939, rpt. 1969.
Sutherland, John. "Charles Lever." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989. Pp. 372-374.
Created 25 May 2022