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Mr. Harkin
Evans
Phiz
June 1842 instalment
Wood-engraving
12.5 cm by 10 cm (5 by 4 inches), vignetted
Eighth wood-cut: twentieth illustration for Charles Lever's Jack Hinton, The Guardsman (June 1842), embedded on page 185.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The country-dance was at length formed, and poor Mr. Harkin, the master of the ceremonies and Coryphaeus-in-ordinary of Loughrea, had, by dint of scarce less fatigue than I experienced in my steeplechase, by running hither and thither, imploring, beseeching, wheedling, coaxing, and even cursing, at length succeeded in assembling sixty-four souls in a double file upon the floor. Poor fellow! never was there a more disorderly force. Nobody would keep his own place, but was always trying to get above his neighbour. In vain did he tell the men to stand at their own side. Alas! they thought that side their own where the ladies were also. Then the band added to his miseries; for scarcely had he told them to play 'The Wind that shakes the Barley,' when some changed it to 'The Priest in his Boots,' and afterwards to 'The Dead March in Saul.' These were heavy afflictions; for be it known that he could not give way, as other men would in such circumstances, to a good outbreak of passion — for Mr. Harkin was a public functionary, who, like all other functionaries, had a character to sustain before the world. When kings are angry, we are told by Shakespeare, Schiller, and others, they rant it in good royal style. Now, when a dancing-master is excited by passion, he never loses sight of the unities. If he flies down the floor to chide the little fat man that is talking loudly, he contrives to do it with a step, a spring, and a hop, to the time of one, two, three. Is there a confusion in the figure, he advances to rectify it with a chassé rigadoon. Does Mr. Somebody turn his toes too much out, or is Miss So-and-so holding her petticoats too high, he fugles the correction in his own person — first imitating the deformity he would expose, and then displaying the perfection he would point to.
On the evening in question, this gentleman afforded me by far the most of the amusement of the ball. Nearly half the company had been in time of yore his pupils, or were actually so at the very moment; so that, independent of his cares as conductor of the festivities, he had also the amour propre of one who saw his own triumphs reflected in the success of his disciples.
At last the dances were arranged. A certain kind of order was established in the party; and Mr. Harkin, standing in the fifth position, with all his fingers expanded, gave three symbolic claps of his hand, and cried out, 'Begin!' Away went the band at once, and down the middle I flew with my partner, to the measure of a quick country-dance that no human legs could keep time to. Two others quickly followed, more succeeding them like wave after wave. Nothing was too fat, nothing too short, nothing too long, to dance. There they were, as ill-paired as though, instead of treading a merry measure, they had been linked in the very bonds of matrimony — old and young, the dwarf and the brobdingnag, the plump and the lean, each laughing at the eccentricities of his neighbour, and happily indifferent to the mirth he himself afforded. [Chapter XXVII, "The Race Ball," 185]
After the tense and sustained life-and-death drama of the steeple-Chase comes Hinton's being feted at a dinner at Brown Hall, Mr. Dillon's country-house, Mount Brown, and then honoured again for his victory at the race ball back in Loughrea. In both social events he is accompanied by the beautiful Louisa Bellew, who is witty and flirtatious and generally unrestrained in her enjoyment of Hinton's company. The inset character study, then, merely establishes the light-hearted tone of the chapter as we arrive at the end of the first volume of the novel. This pleasant mood Lever shatters at the close of the chapter when Ulick Burke dashes a glass of wine in Hinton's face, nearly provoking a duel. Having established Burke as the narrative's principal villain, Lever sets the stage for a continuation of this rivalry in the next volume, the complication being that the villainous Burke is related to Louisa Bellew. In the second half there will be but one such embedded woodcut, Corny Delany (p. 215).
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 27 May 2023