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The Packet
Phiz
January 1842 instalment
Steel-engraving
12.5 cm by 11.3 cm (4 ⅞ by 4 ⅜ inches), vignetted
Initial steel engraving for Charles Lever's Jack Hinton, The Guardsman (1843), facing page 11.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The trip as occasionally happened, was a rapid one; and while under the miserable impression that a fourth part of the journey had not been accomplished, we were blessed with the tidings of land. Scarcely was the word uttered, when it flew from mouth to mouth; and I thought I could trace the elated look of proud and happy hearts, as home drew near. What was my surprise, however, to see the enthusiasm take another and very different channel. With one accord a general rush was made upon the hampers of prog. Baskets were burst open on every side. Sandwiches and sausages, porter bottles, cold punch, chickens, and hard eggs, were strewn about with a careless and reckless profusion; none semed too sick or too sore for this general epidemic of feasting. Old gentlemen sat up in their beds and bawled for beef; children of tender years brandished a drumstick. Individuals who but a short half-hour before seemed to have made a hearty meal, testified by the ravenous exploits of their appetites to their former forbearance and abstemiousness. Even the cautious little man in the brown spencer, who wrapped up the remnant of his breakfast in the Times, now opened his whole store, and seemed bent upon a day of rejoicing. Never was such a scene of riotous noise and tumultuous mirth. Those who scowled at each other till now, hob-nobbed across the table; and simpering old maids cracked merry thoughts with gay bachelors, without even a passing fear for the result. “Thank Heaven,” said I, aloud, “that I see all this with my sense and my intellects clear about me.” Had I suddenly awoke to such a prospect from the disturbed slumber of sickness, the chances were ten to one I had jumped overboard, and swam for my life. In fact, it could convey but one image to the mind, such as we read of, when some infuriated and reckless men, despairing of safety, without a hope left, resolve upon closing life in the mad orgies of drunken abandonment.
Here were the meek, the tranquil, the humble-minded, the solitary, the seasick, all suddenly converted into riotous and roystering feasters. The lips that scarcely moved, now blew the froth from a porter cup with the blast of a Boreas: and even the small urchin in the green face and nankeen jacket, bolted hard eggs with the dexterity of a clown in a pantomime. The end of all things (eatable) had certainly come. Chickens were dismembered like felons, and even jokes and witticisms were bandied upon the victuals. “What, if even yet,” thought I, “the wind should change!” The idea was a malicious one, too horrible to indulge in. [Chapter II, "The Irish Packet," 11]
In those days there was some honour in being a traveller, and the man who had crossed the Channel a couple of times became a kind of Captain Cook among his acquaintances. — "The Irish Packet," 10.
Our Mess; Volume I, Jack Hinton, the Guardsman ran serially from March 1840 to December 1841 in the magazine, and in twelve monthly parts, January to December 1842. Thus, the present from which we are to view the action of the opening chapters concerning society life in Dublin is early 1840. The narrator mentions that he has been seasick for almost thirty hours in the second chapter. What has made all the difference between the speedy, overnight passage from Liverpool to Dublin in 1840 versus the much longer passage three decades earlier is the introduction of steam power. The City of Dublin Steam Packet Company began regular service as Charles Wye Williams & Co. in 1822 between the two ports. The allusions to the Prince Regent and Carlton House date the opening of the action of the novel to the later stages of the Regency (in other words, before the ascension of George IV in 1830). The Prince of Wales ("Prinny") used Carlton House to which Hinton alludes as his London residence from 1783 to 1826, and as Regent administered British political and military affairs from there throughout the Napoleonic Wars, from June 1811. Given Hinton's dating the opening chapters to February 181—, we may assume that the action opens some time prior to June 1813, when the Duke of Richmond was superseded in his post as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by Viscount Whitworth (who assumed the office on 23 June 1813). Second-Lieutenant Hinton has been posted through the efforts of his father General Hinton as an aide-de-camp at Dublin Castle.
As the ship nears port, the passengers suddenly indulge in a perfect orgy of feasting and drinking from the provisions they have brought with them for the voyage, the steward having nothing to serve but bad brandy and biscuits. Phiz has more or less made up the details of the various figures' clothing based on hints which Lever has provided, and has logically stationed the narrator in the passageway just outside the common room (rear).
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Lever, Charles. Jack Hinton, The Guardsman. Illustrated by Hablột Knight Browne (Phiz). London: Downey & Co., 1901. [First published serially in The Dublin University Magazine January through December 1842; and subsequently in a single volume, Dublin: William Curry, Jun. December 1842, pp. 396. Illustrated with wood and steel engravings by H. K. Browne: 27 full-page plates. 8vo, 396pp. Boston: Little, Brown, 1894; New York: Croscup, 1894. 2 vols.
Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter VI, "Editor, 1839-1841." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. 92-107.
Sutherland, John A. "Jack Hinton The Guardsman." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989, rpt. 1990, 323.
Thomson, David Croal. Life and Labours of Hablột Knight Browne, "Phiz". London: Chapman and Hall, 1884.
Created 20 May 2023