February 1843: Instalment One (Chapters I-III)
Tom Burke's father is dying, and in the next room his attorney and physician are already deliberating how best to manage the considerable estate and keep the younger son, Tom himself, from enjoying any of his inheritance before his majority. In the opening chapter, as elsewhere in the novel, the narrative voice is Tom's. And here Lever establishes the novel's initial antagonist — the scheming lawyer, Bassett, whom the boy must somehow outwit.
The well-dressed middle-aged professionals shown in Phiz's illustration (Law and Physic in the Chamber of Death), as well as the numerous "papers, parchments, leases, [and] deeds," indicate that Tom's father is a member of the monied class in Ireland, although the narrative shows that his affairs have taken a turn for the worse, and that what income he has has been lavished on the education of the older brother. Notably absent from the bedside colloquy about the estate is the parish priest, whether Catholic or Protestant, and a mother and siblings. In the accompanying letterpress, Tom, recalling this scene from childhood, explains that his father is a widower, and that his only sibling, an older brother named George, is away studying at Eton. As he stealthily enters, Tom focuses on his father's laboured breathing, but gradually becomes aware of the watchers' conversation, which he gives us in detail:
Into the company of these two worthies I now found myself thus accidentally thrown, and would gladly have retreated at once, but that some indescribable impulse to be near my father's sickbed was on me; and so I crept stealthily in and sat down in a large chair at the foot of the bed, where unnoticed I listened to the long-drawn heavings of his chest, and in silence wept over my own desolate condition.
For a long time the absorbing nature of my own grief prevented me hearing the muttered conversation near the lire; but at length, as the night wore on and my sorrow had found vent in tears, I began to listen to the dialogue beside me.
“He'll have five hundred pounds under his grandfather's will, in spite of us. But what's that?” said the attorney.
“I'll take him as an apprentice for it, I know,” said the doctor, with a grin that made me shudder.
“That's settled already,” replied Mr. Basset. “He's to be articled to me for five years; but I think it's likely he'll go to sea before the time expires. How heavily the old man is sleeping! Now, is that natural sleep?” [10]
In short, text and illustration taken together establish this as a first-person Bildungsroman set initially on a run-down estate in Ireland. The doctor and attorney have sent for Tom, who has been away at school in Dublin, but have taken no care about the boy's reception at the coach stop. He has had to make his own way on foot in the January rain through the blighted fields and dilapidated gatehouse, and has encountered only a mentally incapacitated old servant downstairs. After his interview with Bassett, Tom encounters Darby the Blast among the servants in the kitchen.
“Come down to the kitchen, alannah!” said the old cook, as the hall door closed; “come down and sit with us there. Sure it 's no wonder your heart 'ud be low.”
“Yes, Master Tommy; and Darby “the Blast” is there, and a tune and the pipes will raise you.”
I suffered myself to be led along listlessly between them to the kitchen, where, around a huge fire of red turf, the servants of the house were all assembled, together with some neighboring cottagers; Darby “the Blast” occupying a prominent place in the party, his pipes laid across his knees as he employed himself in concocting a smoking tumbler of punch.
“Your most obadient!” said Darby, with a profound reverence, as I entered. “May I make so bowld as to surmise that my presence isn't unsaysonable to your feelings? for I wouldn't be contumacious enough to adjudicate without your honor's permission.” [Chapter II, "Darby 'The Blast'," 14]
Lever introduces this spokesperson for frustrated Irish nationalsim, whose real name is Darby M'Keown, in the third chapter, although he has appeared briefly in the kitchen among the servants, playing his bagpipes and singing the traditional air of "Una" just after the funeral, at the beginning of the second chapter. Perhaps it is owing to his prowess as a piper that Darby is colourfully called "Darby the Blast." An ardent Irish patriot, Darby serves as young Tom's friend and surrogate father in the opening instalments. Darby's genial attitude contrasts with the open hostility of Tony Bassett, the family attorney, towards the orphan. Since a sudden snowfall has prevented Darby from attending a wedding at Croocknavorrigha that evening, he practices his skills as a humorous raconteur and folk musician for the amusement of the servants, who are in a quandary after their master's death, and take solace in Darby's tunes and numerous servings of punch around the kitchen fire.
The next morning, anticipating Tony Basset's coming to remove him from the house, Tom decides to unburden himself to Darby about Basset's determination to apprentice him as an attorney, and therefore to act in loco parentis throughout Tom's minority. Tom asks the piper to help escape by the high road to Athlone, where he hopes to find his friend from the coach, the jolly, sympathetic Captain Bubbleton. Thus, the pair find themselves on foot, trudging down the windswept, rainy road when they arrive at Peg M'Casky's gabled, smoke-filled cottage, with a low doorway and mud walls.
Thus, in the first instalment Tom acquires an inveterate enemy, Tony Bassett, and two adults who are prepared to help him: a whimsical British officer, Captain George Frederic Bubbleton, and an Irish piper, his mentor and companion, Darby the Blast (M'Keown). Darby determines to help Tom escape from the unscrupulous lawyer, and acts as guide on the high road to Ned Malone's at Athlone. Since Tom is a mere child, and has been absent for some time at school in Dublin, the reader naturally wonders what Tom has done to earn the curse of the crone, Peg M'Casky, as he and Darcy leave her cabin on just off the high road Chapter III. Tom has earned her ire because his father, Matthew, is responsible for the transportation of her sons and the early death of her heartbroken husband. The first instalment thus ends with Darby dragging Tom down the road as the witch curses him with a burning heart.
March 1843: Instalment Two (Chapters IV-VIII)
In the March 1843 instalment Tom escapes both his dead father's unscrupulous attorney, Tony Bassett, and a party of soldiers that has raided the cabin of Darby the Blast's friend and fellow nationalist, Ned Mallone. Here, Lever and Phiz also introduce the enigmatic figure of French military officer Lieutenant Charles de Meudon, who has remained in Ireland after the failed Rebellion of 1798.
The pair of illustrations in this instalment point to the significance of Darby the Blast, and serve also to introduce a new character who will convert Tom's discontent into a burning enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution and their leading exponent, First Consult Napoleon Bonaparte. As they walk along the road together, Darby The Blast and acolyte observe the harsh conditions of the Irish peasantry:
As I travelled along I wove within my mind a whole web of imaginary circumstances — of days of peaceful toil; of nights of happy and contented rest; of friendship formed with those of my own age and condition; of the long summer evenings when I should ramble alone to commune with myself on my humble but happy lot; on the red hearth in winter, around which the merry faces of the cottagers were beaming, as some pleasant tale was told; and as I asked myself, would I exchange a life like this for all the advantages of fortune my brother's position afforded him, my heart replied, No. Even then the words of the piper had worked upon me, and already had I connected the possession of wealth with oppression and tyranny, and the lowly fortunes of the poor man as alone securing high-souled liberty of thought and freedom of speech and action. [Chapter III, 33]
We have already been introduced to Darby the Blast, and he has already appeared prominently in Phiz's narrative-pictorial sequence in The Curse for Chapter III, "The Departure" (February 1843). The second instalment of the novel furthers our understanding of the genial and knowledgable piper as the quintessential artist whose imagination conjures up visionary creatures — "fairies" — clothed in the fashions of the eighteenth century. In this instalment, too, Tom falls under the spell of an ardent French revolutionary whose devotion to Napoleon inspires Tom to become an officer of the Grand Armee.
Part Two deals with the raid by government troops led by Barton on the nationalist stronghold of Ned Malone, Darby's intimate friend with whom he has deposited Tom while theauthorities in Athlone nearby interrogate him. Malone attempts to prevent Barton and his squadron from arresting his French guest, Lieutenant Charles Gustave de Meudon, 3me Cuirassiers (only formally introduced at the end of this number, in Chapter VIII, "No. 39, and Its Frequenters," 59). An ardent revolutionary, the French officer has remained behind in Ireland after the Rising of 1798, assisted by the French revolutionary government, had failed. De Meudon repudiates a nationalist plan to hurl hand-grenades into the legislative chamber, and persists in advancing the notion of another nationalist uprising in which Irish patriots fight English troops openly, on the field of battle. After Tom's escape, facilitated by Darby, the pair are reunited at De Meudon's hideout in Dublin. Admiring de Meudon's revolutionary fervor, Tom becomes his student in personal seminars on military history, battlefield strategy, logistics, and the ideals of the French Revolution as embodied in De Meudon's idol, the First Consul of France, Napoleon Buonaparte.
Lieutenant Charles Gustave de Meudon infects Tom with his mania for Napoleon, and teaches the lad as much as he knows about the soldier's trade and the officer's calling. He then dies painfully of consumption and fever as Tom tends him. The "one engrossing topic of my mind" (63), confides Tom at the end of Chapter VIII, is how to get to France, join the Army of the Republic, and fight for the ideals of the Revolution as embodied in the First Consul. Thanks to Darby's intervention and assistance, he soon gets his chance. And still he yearns, after his heroic military service, to return to his homeland, "and cut off the head of this terrible Monsieur Basset" (59), to quote De Meudon, whose inscribed blade proclaims him the veteran of the famous French victories at Rivoli and Arcole.
April 1843: Instalment Three (Chapters IX-XII)
In Chapter XI, "Too Late," De Meudon dies, apparently afflicted by a brain fever and possibly of complications of consumption (tuberculosis). Tom is distraught at the sudden loss of his friend and mentor. Ironically, no sooner has he breathed his last (laid out on the bed, in full uniform) than a party of British regulars arrives with a warrant for the arrest of Captain de Moeudon, the French officer who has been hiding in the cabin several days' march from Dublin. Daniel Kelly, the mere ruffian and turncoat informer who led the search party in the graveyard recently, hopes to profit from De Meudon's "capture." When Barton arrives, however, he scotches that notion, and orders the Sergeant to arrest Tom as De Meudon's accomplice. Fortunately for Tom, Darby the Blast falls in with the soldiers on the road. With the loan of the piper's clasp-knife, Tom cuts his bonds and makes his escape. Darby's insulting the British "Grenadiers" for taking to their heels in the Rising of Ninety-eight when French troops landed to support the Irish nationalists so infuriates his English captors that they attack him, and Darby defends himself, creating a distraction so that Tom can escape unobserved. In Chapter XI, having arrived in Dublin, Tom joins a fractious mob outside the Parliament-house, the scene of the confrontation between the ragged mob opposed to the Act of Union (signed into law in January 1801) and the rowdy Trinity College students in favour of it. Here Tom is caught up in a fray between anti-Union protestors throwing paving stones and soldiers discharging their muskets and setting bayonets. He is trampled by the escaping mob, and struck on the head by a musket butt.
Tom awakens in a sickbed, recovering from his ordeal, but not in custody as the inciter of a riot, as readers would have expected at the close of Chapter XI. Rather, he is Bubbleton's guest, received in the barracks under the misapprehension that the mob and not the soldiers had attacked him. Just as Tom has recovered, Major Barton arrives from the Castle to clarify that Tom was not accidentally caught up in the riot, but was an instigator in leading the attack on the troops. He bears an arrest warrant from the Privy Council consigning Tom to Newgate Prison. Captain Bubbleton is incredulous when he learns that his guest is not "Tom Burke of 'Ours'" at all, but a rebel.
The Irish Rebellion of 1798: A Note
The social and political upheavals in nineteenth-century Ireland have their origin in the late eighteenth century, when the ultra-nationalist United Irishmen began to organize both politically and militarily. The Society of United Irishmen, which was inspired by the American and French revolutions, was established in 1791, first in Belfast and then in Dublin. The membership of both societies was primarily middle-class, but Presbyterians predominated in the Belfast society whereas the Dublin society was composed of both Catholics and Protestants. Leaders of the organization, most notably Theobald Wolfe Tone, met with Napoleon Bonaparte in revolutionary France, seeking his assistance in overthrowing British rule in Ireland, precipitating the Rebellion of 1798, which is the antecedent event in Lever's novel. Lieutenant Charles de Meudon, Tom's mentor, was dispatched as part of the French contingent to direct and supply the Irish rebels.
Further Information
- Charles Lever's Fourth Novel, Tom Burke of "Ours" (February 1843 — September 1844)
- Law and Physic in the Chamber of Death. in Chapter I, "Myself." (February 1843)
- The Curse in Chapter III, "The Departure." (February 1843)
- Instalment-by-instalment Synopsis of the Novel's Plot and Characters: Lever's Tom Burke of "Ours" (May 1843 through August 1843)
- Instalment-by-instalment Synopsis of the Novel's Plot and Characters for Tom Burke's Problems in Dublin: Lever's Tom Burke of "Ours" (April 1843 through August 1843)
- Synopsis of the Novel's Plot and Characters for Tom Burke's Final Adventures: Lever's Tom Burke of "Ours" (July through September 1844)
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Bibliography
Lever, Charles. Tom Burke of "Ours." Dublin: William Curry, Jun., 1844. Illustrated by H. K. Browne. Rpt. London: Chapman and Hall, 1865. Serialised February 1843 through September 1844 in twenty parts. 2 vols.
Lever, Charles. Tom Burke of "Ours." Illustrated by Phiz [Hablột Knight Browne]. Novels and Romances of Charles Lever. Vols. I and II. In two volumes. Dublin: William Curry, 1844, and London: Chapman and Hall, 1865, Rpt. Boston: Little, Brown, 1907. Project Gutenberg. Last Updated: 27 February 2018.
Stevenson, Lionel. Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939.
Sutherland, John. "Tom Burke of "Ours"." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989. P. 632.
Created 2 December 2023 Updated 6 December 2023