Passage Illustrated: The Gossiping Kennyfeck Sisters

Ascending cautiously the stairs, you pass through a little conservatory, at the end of which a heavy cloth curtain conceals a door. It is that of a dressing-room, off which, at opposite sides, two bedrooms lie. This same dressing-room, with its rose-colored curtains and ottoman, its little toilet-tables of satin-wood, its mirrors framed in alabaster, its cabinets of buhl, and the book-shelves so coquettishly curtained with Malines lace, is the common property of the two sisters whom we so lately introduced to your notice.

There were they wont to sit for hours after the return from a ball, discussing the people they had met, their dress, their manner, their foibles and flirtations; criticising with no mean acuteness all the varied games of match-making mammas and intriguing aunts, and canvassing the schemes and snares so rife around them. And oh, ye simple worshippers of muslin-robed innocence! oh, ye devoted slaves of ringleted loveliness and blooming freshness! bethink ye what wily projects lie crouching in hearts that would seem the very homes of careless happiness; what calculations; what devices; how many subtleties that only beauty wields, or simple man is vanquished by!

It was considerably past midnight as the two girls sat at the fire, their dressing-gowns and slippered feet showing that they had prepared for bed; but the long luxuriant hair, as yet uncurled, flowed in heavy masses on their neck and shoulders. They did not, as usual, converse freely together; a silence and a kind of constraint sat upon each, and although Olivia held a book before her, it was less for the purpose of reading than as a screen against the fire, while her sister sat with folded arms and gently drooping head, apparently lost in thought. It was after a very lengthened silence, and in a voice which showed that the speaker was following up some train of thought, Miss Kennyfeck said, —

“And do you really think him handsome, Olivia?”

“Of whom are you speaking, dear?” said Olivia, with the very softest accent. [Chapter VII, "Peeps behind the Curtain," 52]

Commentary: Miss Kennyfeck and her junior, Olivia, Described

Lever introduces the Kennyfeck sisters in the context of their father’s grandly furnished townhouse at Dublin’s fashionable Merrion Square in Chapters 4 and 5:

Mr. Kennyfeck's family consisted of two daughters: the eldest had been a beauty for some years, and, even at the period our tale opens, had lost few of her attractions. She was tall, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, with an air of what in the Irish capital is called “decided fashion” about her, but in less competent circles might have been called almost effrontery. She looked strangers very steadily in the face, spoke with a voice full, firm, and unabashed, — no matter what the subject, or who the audience, — and gave her opinions on people and events with a careless indifference to consequences that many mistook for high genius rebellious against control.

Olivia, three years younger than her sister, had just come out; and whether that her beauty — and she was very handsome — required a different style, or that she saw more clearly “the mistake” in Miss Kennyfeck's manner, but she took a path perfectly her own. She was tenderness itself; a delicacy too susceptible for this work-a-day world pervaded all she said and did,— a retiring sensitiveness that she knew, as she plaintively said, would never “let her be loved,” overlaid her nature, and made her the victim of her own feelings. Her sketches, everlasting Madonnas dissolved in tears; her music, the most mournful of the melodies; her reading, the most disastrously ending of modern poems, — all accorded with this tone, which, after all, scarcely consorted well with a very blooming cheek, bright hazel eyes, and an air and carriage that showed a full consciousness of her captivations, and no small reliance on her capacity to exercise them. [Chapter IV, "The Kennyfeck Household," pp. 29-30]

The sisters are sharing their confidential impressions about Lever's handsome but impetuous hero, Roland Cashel. Significantly, they focus on his appearance rather than his character or intelligence. They are individuals in Lever's letterpress, but very much representatives of a type — young, slender, dark-haired, fashionably dressed, and innocently alluring — in Phiz's illustration. They could as easily be mistaken for his Ruth Pinch or Mary Graham in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Kate Nickleby, Florence Dombey, Little Dorrit, or Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities for that matter. However, what distinguishes this dark plate of the Kennyfeck sisters in the 1850 seriasation is their beauty, for Phiz here is primarily interested in providing an atmospheric portrait rather than realizing a narrative action. Whereas Lever gives a sense of the verbal sparring between the Kennyfeck siblings, Phiz is using the scene of the midnight conversation by firelight to highlight their youthful beauty with stunning chiaroscuro. The scene follows hard upon the heels of Roland's dashing off two very different letters, one to his friend Enrique in Columbia, the other to his bankers in Cheapside, London; both, in a sense, discharge old debts and pave the way for his new life as an Irish millionaire, as the society column of Dublin Mail the next morning styles him.

Bibliography

Lever, Charles. Roland Cashel. With 39 illustrations and engraved title-vignette by Phiz. London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.

Lever, Charles. Roland Cashel. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. Novels and Romances of Charles Lever. Vols. I and II. In two volumes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1907. Project Gutenberg. Last Updated: 19 August 2010.

Steig, Michael. Chapter One, "Illustration, Collaboration, and Iconography." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 1-23.

Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter X, "Onlooker in Florence, 1847-1850." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. Pp. 165-183

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Created 3 December 2022