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The Money-lender’s Drawing-room
Phiz
April 1842 instalment
Steel-engraving
12.8 cm by 11.4 cm (5 by 4 ½ inches), vignetted
Seventh steel-engraving and eleventh illustration for Charles Lever's Jack Hinton, The Guardsman (1843), facing page 109.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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'I say, O'Grady,' cried one, 'we muster strong this morning. I hope Fagan's bank will stand the run on it. What's your figure?'
'Oh, a couple of hundred,' said Phil carelessly; 'I have got rather a heavy book on the steeplechase.'
'So I hear,' said another; 'and they say Ulick Burke won't ride for you. He knows no one can sit the horse but himself; and Maher, the story goes, has given him a hundred and fifty to leave you in the lurch!'
'How good!' said Phil, smiling; for although this intelligence came upon him thus suddenly, he never evinced the slightest surprise nor the most trifling irritation.
'You'll pay forfeit, of course, Phil,' said the gentleman on the chimney.
'I fancy not.'
'Then will you take two fifties to one, against your horse?'
'Will you give it?' was the cool reply. 'Yes.'
'And I — and I also,' said different voices round the room.
'Agreed, gentlemen, with all of you. So, if you please, we 'll book this. Jack, have you got a pencil?' [Chapter XVI, "A Morning in Town," 109]
Lever himself struggled with being in debt to maintain a lifestyle beyond his income. Such is very much the case with Phil O'Grady, depicted here in uniform in the centre of the composition. The setting is the parlour of Dublin's chief holder of personal debt, Fagan, "the exchequer" of young gentlemen. O'Grady must approach him rather than Paul Rooney because the attorney has departed for the circuit, and because he is rumoured to have lost heavily in investments in a Peruvian gold-mine. The respectable and fashionably attired young men depicted in the front drawing-room of the Fleet Street money-lender are all a cut above those waiting in the narrow entranceway below, businessmen, shopkeepers, and traders, all unused to being in need of a temporary loan. The dozen young men in the front drawing-room (as mentioned by Lever and shown by Phiz), listlessly lounging on chairs, tables, and windowsills, are fashionably dressed, obviously youth of rank and condition. Laughing, joking, and anecdotalizing, this in-crowd welcomes Phil O'Grady. Hinton describes them all as being reckless in expenditure and extravagantly wasteful, but with limited means and encumbered fortunes. Ironically, O'Grady is well aware that Dublin's usurers charge as high as fifty per cent interest, but refuses to borrow from friends. The actual negotiation occurs "off-camera," so to speak, so that Lever's narrator is unaware of how O'Grady compacted with the money-lender in the back drawing-room.
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 24 May 2023