"A Lecture" — Phiz's sixteenth Illustration for Charles Lever's "Barrington" (1863)

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A Lecture

Phiz

steel engraving

10.8 cm high by 9.5 cm wide (4 ¼ by 3 ¾ inches), vignetted

1863

Charles Lever's Barrington; Tales of the Trains, Chapter XXVII, "The Convent of the Meuse," facing p. 221.

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.]

Commentary

In this scene, the Abbess of the Convent of Bramaigne, Sister Lydia, reproves the Barringtons for removing Josephine from her institution and thereby denying her a religious vocation. Luckily, the full force of her argument is lost on the elderly couple since only Peter remembers any French. Dinah, informed by her brother that they are being given "a rare lesson" for their apparent "ignorance, apathy, worldliness, sordid and poor ambitions, and, last of all, a levity unbecoming their time of life" (221), waves her fan in contempt. However, Lever immediately forgets Dinah's lack of fluency in the language of the abbess by having her reply directly to her.

Phiz implies the Abbess's slightly sanctimonious nature by placing her directly under the portrait of a saint. The reproving gesture of the Abbess forces the viewer to look upward, as if the speaker implies that the elderly couple have robbed their daughter of a spiritual vocation, although Sister Lydia hardly seems "aged," and lacks the rigour of Lever's description: "a grim-looking little woman in a nun's costume" (221). By her facial expression and her deployment of her fan Phiz brilliantly conveys Dinah Barrington's hauteur.

Related Material

Scanned image and text 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

Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Lever, Charles. Barrington. With 25 engravings by Phiz [Hablột Knight Browne]. London: Chapman and Hall, 1863.

Sutherland, John A. "Barrington." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989, rpt. 1990, 48-49.

Created 10 November 2007

Last modified 17 January 2024