A Market Day by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne), facing page 77 at the beginning of Chapter IX (February 1855). Steel-engraving. 9.8 cm high by 17.8 cm wide (3 ⅞ by 7 inches), vignetted, full-page illustration for The Martins of Cro' Martin, for the opening of Chapter IX, "The Martin Arms." [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Passage Illustrated: Jack Massingbred as the straw-hatted traveller
In the small and not over-neat parlor of the Martin Arms at Oughterard, a young man sat at his breakfast, at times casting his eyes over the columns of the Vindicator, and anon strolling to the window to watch the gathering of the country people at the weekly market. The scene was one of that mingled bustle and languor so characteristically Irish. Cart-loads of turf, vegetables, fruit, or turkeys blocked up the narrow passage between booths of fancy wares, gilt jewelry, crockery, and cutlery; the vendors all eagerly vociferating commendations of their stores, in chorus with still more clamorous beggars, or the discordant notes of vagrant minstrelsy. Some animal monstrosity, announced by a cracked-voiced herald and two clarionets, added to a din to which loud laughter contributed its share of uproar.
The assemblage was entirely formed of the country people, many of whom made the pretext of having a pig or a lamb to sell the reason of their coming; but, in reality, led thither by the native love of a gathering, — that fondness to be where their neighbours were, — without any definite aim or object. There was, then, in strong contrast to the anxious solicitation of all who had aught to sell, the dreary, languid, almost apathetic look of the mere lounger, come to while away his weary hour and kill time just like any very bored fine gentleman who airs his listlessness along St. James's Street, or lazily canters his ennui down Rotten Row.
Jack Massingbred — for he was the traveller whose straw hat and knapsack stood upon a table near — was amused at a scene so full of its native characteristics. The physiognomy, the dress, the bearing of the people, their greetings as they met, their conduct of a bargain, all bespoke a nation widely differing from the sister country, and set him a-dreaming as to how it was that equality of laws might very possibly establish anything but equality of condition amongst people so dissimilar. [Chapter Nine, "The Martin Arms," 77]
Commentary: A Mixed Commercial Crowd in front of The Martin Arms
Here Phiz again applies the "streaky bacon" organizational principle by providing a scene of everyday life after the portrait of the self-satisfied attorney, Scanlan, and the comic relief of Godfrey Martin, dressed as the Emperor Charles V, trying to revive the little painter, Simmy Crow. Lever has developed these characters and situations from Mary Martin's perspective. Although she is absent from the marketplace, the gathering of so many Irish characters recalls Phiz's previous group study, Mary Martin’s Levee in Chapter I (in the initial, December 1854 number). The presiding consciousness, that of Trinity College bon-vivant Jack Massingbred, doing a walking tour through Galway late in the summer term, does not appear within the frame, but Lever has prepared us for his arrival: "Partly to shake off the depression that was over him by change of place, and in part to see something of the country itself, Massingbred resolved to make a walking-tour through the south and west of Ireland, and with a knapsack on his back, he started one fine autumn morning for Wicklow" (close of Chapter VII, "A College Competitor," 64).
Phiz's group studies such as this are so effective because he renders each person in the crowd an individual in terms of pose, gesticulation, facial features, and clothing. He has carefully realised all elements of Lever's description, and yet he has not singled out one person for the reader's scrutiny, so that we must conceive of Jack Massingbred on the strict basis of how Lever has described and dramatised him. For the moment the disaffected Anglo-Irish youth sits across the square, in the parlour of the Martin Arms. He stands outside the frame, as it were, and entirely within the text. Quite by chance, Jack is about to make the acquaintance of his friend Joe Nelligan's father, whose nane appears prominently above a business portal across the street. Since Joe has been reluctant to reveal much about his background, which is (unlike Jack's) neither aristocratic nor Protestant, Jack has no notion that the shop he is about to enter on market-day belongs to Joe's father.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image 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 Martins of Cro' Martin. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. London: Chapman & Hall, 1856, rpt. 1872.
Lever, Charles. The Martins of Cro' Martin. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. Novels and Romances of Charles Lever. Introduction by Andrew Lang. Lorrequer Edition. Vols. XII and XIII. In two volumes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1907.
Steig, Michael. Chapter VII, "Phiz the Illustrator: An Overview and Summing Up." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 299-316.
Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter XII, "Aspirant for Preferment, 1854-1856." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. New York: Russell and Russell, 1939; rpt. 1969. Pp. 203-220.
Created 11 September 2022