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Farewell to Tipperary Joe
Phiz
October 1842 instalment
Steel-engraving
14 cm by 10.6 cm (4 ⅝ by 3 ⅞ inches), vignetted
Nineteenth steel-engraving and twenty-ninth serial illustration for Charles Lever's Jack Hinton, The Guardsman (1843), facing page 300.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Poor fellow! his wayward and capricious flights, now grave, now gay, were but the mockery of that sympathy my heart required. Still did he heal the sadness of the moment. We need the voice, the look, the accent of affection when we are leaving the spot where we have once been happy. It will not do to part from the objects that have made our home, without the connecting link of human friendship. The hearth, the roof-tree, the mountain, and the rivulet are not so eloquent as the once syllabled 'Good-bye,' come it from ever so humble a voice.
The bustle and excitement of the scene beside the packet seemed to afford Joe the most lively gratification; and, like the genius of confusion, he was to be seen flitting from place to place, assisting one, impeding another, while snatches of his wild songs broke from him every moment. I had but time to press his hand, when he was hurried ashore amongst the crowd; and the instant after the vessel sheered off from the pier, and got under way. The poor boy stood upon a block of granite, waving his cap over his head. He tried a faint cheer, but it was scarcely audible; another, it too failed. He looked wildly around him on the strange, unknown faces, as if a scene of desolation had fallen on him, burst into a torrent of tears, and fled wildly from the spot. And thus I took my leave of Ireland. [Chapter XLVI, "Farewell to Ireland," 300]
Jack Hinton's somewhat melancholy reflection on leaving Ireland, a mood which Phiz emphasizes in his full-length portrait of the eccentric wild huntsman Tipperary Joe, probably reflects something of what twenty-one-year-old Charles Lever felt when in 1827 he sailed for Canada. He was about Jack Hinton's age, and all the world (to say nothing of a proper career) lay ahead of him, although he would not take his medical degree until 1831. He left again, in 1837, now a fully qualified physician with some experience, to set up a practice in Brussels.
As the Liverpool evening packet recedes into the distance (left) a melancholy Joe watches from the shore, on a large block in the harbour of Queenstown, County Cork. In bidding farewell to his friend, Tipperary Joe, Jack Hinton is in fact bidding farewell to his post as an aide-de-camp at Dublin Castle and to Irish society itself. He has decided to pursue a legitimate military career in the Guards, whether in the North American or Peninsular campaigns of the Napoleonic era wars. He has discovered through Mrs. Paul Rooney that Sir Simon Bellew (whose name before coming into an ancestral title was "Simon Barrington") had slain a young Major of Dragoons in a duel — the major had run off with Sir Simon's wife, This indiscreet British officer, the Honourable Horace Jerningham, was the brother of Jack Hinton's mother. Thus, Hinton has solved the mystery presented by Molly Ban the witch at St. Senan’s Well in Chapter XXXVIII. No wonder, then, that he feels he should not pursue the Bellews on the Continent. But a new set of problems awaits him back in London thanks to malicious rumours about Louisa, the steeple chase, and the duel, spread by the envious Lord Dudley de Vere.
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, 1841-1843." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. 92-107.
Sutherland, John A. "The Dublin University Magazine." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989, rpt. 1990, 200.
Thomson, David Croal. Life and Labours of Hablột Knight Browne, "Phiz". London: Chapman and Hall, 1884.
Created 2 June 2023