"He saddled and bridled a horse, and rode for the sea-coast." Ninth illustration by William Newman for Charles Lever's "A Day's Ride" (22 September 1860)

"He saddled and bridled a horse, and rode for the sea-coast.' — staff artist William Newman's ninth composite woodblock engraving for Charles Lever's A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance, instalment 7, published on 22 September 1860 in Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vol. IV, Chapter VIII, "Imagination Stimulated by Brandy and Water," 2 ⅝ by 3 ½ inches (6.5 cm by 8.7 cm), framed, bottom right, page 605. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Passage Illustrated

“My father fancied that Hammond grew paler as he thus alluded to their old friendship, and he gave my mother a rapid glance of his sharp eye, and, taking the cellar key, he left the room. Immediately outside the door, he hastened to the stable, and saddled and bridled a horse, and, slipping quietly out, he rode for the sea-coast, near the Skerries. It was sixteen miles from Dublin, but he did the distance within the hour. And well was it for him that he employed such speed! With a liberal offer of money and the gold watch he wore, he secured a small fishing-smack to convey him over to France, for which he sailed immediately. I have said it was well that he employed such speed; for, after waiting with suppressed impatience for my father's return from the cellar, Hammond expressed to my mother his fears lest my father might have been taken ill. She tried to quiet his apprehensions, but the very calmness of her manner served only to increase them. 'I can bear this no longer,' cried he, at last, rising, in much excitement, from his chair; 'I must see what has become of him!' At the same moment the door was suddenly flung open, and an officer of police, in full uniform, presented himself. 'He has got away, sir,' said he, addressing Hammond; 'the stable-door is open, and one of the horses missing.' [Chapter VIII, "Imagination Stimulated by Brandy and Water," 605; page 67 in the Chapman and Hall edition]

Commentary: Potts adopts yet another bogus identity to impress an interlocutor

“My father was the tried and trusted friend of that noble-hearted but mistaken man, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The famous attempt of the year 'eight was concerted between them; and all the causes of its failure, secret as they are and forever must be, are known to him who now addresses you. [Chapter VIII, p. 605]

Thus, the timeline that Potts is creating for his fictional persona, the disinherited son of one of the aristocratic leaders of the 1798 Irish rebellion, does not quite withstand scrutiny. However, that failure, despite Potts's plausible narration, reveals Lever's intention. He wants the reader to find Potts's new backstory (told to one up the sea captain's anecdotes about mutinies, shipwrecks, and being sold into slavery by Barbary pirates) improbable, given the chronological setting (1855) and Potts's age (22). Lever wants his readers to ask themselves, "How likely is it that Potts's father, a Dublin apothecary named 'Launcelot Peter Potts,' was one of the noble ring-leaders of that ill-fated popular uprising six decades earlier, made a hair's breadth escape, and fled to Paris, where he joined the Emperor Napoleon's secret service? After all, the rebellion occurred in 1798, and Bonaparte was not crowned Emperor until Sunday, 2 December 1804. Lever's reference, however, to Lord Edward Fitzgerald at least makes the inset narrative momentarily believable.

The ship's captain with whom Potts is drinking in Chapter 8 likely knows about the Irish popular uprising of 1798, and he may even recall that French troops landed in support of the rebels, led by the thirty-five-year-old nobleman Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763-1798). Renowned for his gallantry and courage, Fitzgerald was the leading conspirator against British rule in Ireland. The rebellion failed when the British Army defeated the rebels and the invaders at the Battle of Vinegar Hill on 21 June 1798.

Potts certainly fulfills his own critical expectations for an exciting inset narrative, if his critique of Captain Rogers' "unremarkable" sea yarns is any indication of his standards. Potts as storyteller employs compelling details, including his father's escape from Major Henry Charles Sirr (1764–1841), the very Anglo-Irish officer who shot Lord Edward Fitzgerald as he was trying to escape arrest. The periodical artist thus seizes upon a particularly gripping part of Potts's tall tale about his supposedly illustrious parent. Potts fashions his fabricated story with attention to variety, characterization, complication, and sustaining the auditor's interest, to none of which his host apparently pays the slightest attention in his recounting of his own adventures on land and sea:

It was not in any respects a remarkable one; though it had its share of those mishaps and misfortunes which every sailor must have confronted. He was wrecked in the Pacific, and robbed in the Havannah; had his crew desert him at San Francisco, and was boarded by Riff pirates, and sold in Barbary just as every other blue jacket used to be; and I listened to the story, only marvelling what a dreary sameness pervades all these narratives. Why, for one trait of the truthful to prove his tale, I could have invented fifty. There were no little touches of sentiment or feeling, no relieving lights of human emotion, in his story. [Chapter VIII, p. 605]

In case the reader should be so gullible as to believe Potts's narrative about the Rebellion of '98, in the next chapter he confesses the next morning after his debauch with the skipper, that he fabricated entirely his account of his father's adventures as "the famous rebel friend of Lord Edward Fitzgerald" (Chapter IX, "My Interest in a Lady Fellow-Traveller," 621).

Links to related material on the Irish Rebellion of 1798

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Bibliography

Brown, Jane E., and Richard Samuel West. "William Newman (1817—1870): A Victorian Cartoonist in London and New York." American Periodicals, 17, 2: "Periodical Comics and Cartoons." (Ohio State University Press, 2007), 143-183. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20770984.

Lever, Charles. A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by William Newman. Vols. IV-V (13 April 1860 through 23 March 1861) in thirty-five weekly parts. Only a dozen of these weekly instalments were illustrated: p. 541 (one), 549 (two), 573, 589, 605, 621, 637, 649, 661, 678, 701, and 714.

_______. A Day's Ride; A Life's Romance. Illustrated by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1863, rpt. Routledge, 1882.

_______. A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance. London: Chapman and Hall, 1873.

Lever, Charles James. A Day's Ride; A Life's Romance. http://www.gutenberg.org//files/32692/32692-h/32692-h.htm

Stevenson, Lionel. Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. New York: Russell & Russell, 1939, rpt. 1969.

Sutherland, John. "Charles Lever." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989. Pp. 372-374.

Created 17 June 2022