[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Phiz (Hablot K. Browne) —> The O'Donoghue —> Charles Lever —> Next]
Mark recognised by an old Acquaintance, or The Glen __anything you please my little dear
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
steel engraving
14.2 cm by 11.8 cm (5 ½ by 4 ⅝ inches), vignetted
November 1845
Charles Lever's The O'Donoghue; A Tale of Ireland Fifty Years Ago, Chapter LXVIII, "The Glen and the Bay," facing p. 398.
[Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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 person who scanned it, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
We will once more ask our readers to accompany us to the glen, the scene of our story. It was of an evening, calm and tranquil as that on which our tale opened, on a day in August, in the year 1815, that two travellers, leaving the postillion of their carriage to refresh his horses, advanced alone and on foot for above a mile into this tranquil valley; the air had all that deathlike stillness so characteristic of autumn, while over the mountains and the lake the same rich mellow light was shed. As the travellers proceeded slowly, they stopped from time to time, and gazed on the scene; and, although their looks met, and glance seemed to answer glance, they neither of them spoke: from their appearance, it might have been conjectured that they were foreigners. The man, bronzed by weather and exposure, possessed features which, in all their sternness, were yet eminently handsome: he wore a short thick moustache, but the armless sleeve of his coat, fastened on the bosom, was a sign still more indisputable than even his port and bearing, that he was a soldier. His companion was a lady in the very pride and bloom of beauty, but her dress, more remarkably than his, betrayed the foreigner; in the rapid look she turned from the bold scenery around them to the face of him at whose side she walked, one might read either a direct appeal to memory, or the expression of wonder and admiration of the spot. Too much engrossed by his own thoughts, or too deeply occupied by the scene before him, the man moved on, until at last he came in front of a low ruined wall, beneath a tall and overhanging cliff. He stopped for some seconds, and gazed at this with such intentness as prevented him from noticing the figure of a beggar, who, in all the semblance of extreme poverty, sat crouching among the ruins. She was an old, or at least seemed a very old woman — her hair, uncovered by cap or hood, was white as snow, but her features still preserved an expression of quick intelligence, as, lifting her head from the attitude of moping thought, she fixed her eyes stedfastly on the travellers.
“Give her something, 'mon cher,'” said the lady to her companion in French; but the request was twice made before he seemed conscious of it. The woman, meanwhile, sat still, and neither made any demand for charity, or any appeal to their compassion.
“This is Glenflesk, my good woman,” said he at length, with the intonation of a foreign accent on the words. [Chapter LXIX, "The End," pp. 407-408]
The book-binders of the publisher have clearly mounted the illustration in the wrong chapter, as the events depicted here allude to the final chapter, not Chapter LIX, "The Glen and the Bay." On the facing page in the volume, Mark is still trying to persuade Tom o the M'Carthy and his fellow fisherman to row him through the heavy surf and out to the only French frigate remaining in the bay. The "List of Illustrations" at the very front of the 1845 volume indicates that this illustration should be mounted against page 408.
The scene is the site of the former cabin of Mary Kelly, blown up through Hemsworth's discharging his pistol into the lock of what he thought was the wine cellar, but in fact was the powder magazine and armoury. All that remains of Mary's little cabin is but a ruined bit of wall (right foreground) and Mary herself, right of centre. The former publican brings the foreigners up-to-date on events from 1798 to 1815. The soldier with one arm is Mark O'Donoghue, and the woman beside him, his wife, is likely Kate — at least, that is the identification which Mary makes. The O'Donoghue is dead; his educated son, the Protestant Herbert, is a judge in India; and The Lodge remains abandoned as, owing to Hemsworth's machinations, its ownership has been in litigation the whole time. Phiz has deliberately cut a fourth figure out of the picturesque scene: "a very old man dressed in black, and with all the semblance of a priest" (410). This must be Father O'Rourke, Herbert's Latin tutor who all those years ago refused to throw his clerical authority behind an uprising instigated by the godless French.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Lever, Charles. The O'Donoghue; A Tale of Ireland Fifty Years Ago. With 26 engravings by Phiz [Hablột Knight Browne]. Dublin: William Curry, Jun., 1845.
Lever, Charles. The O'Donoghue; A Tale of Ireland Fifty Years Ago. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablột Knight Browne]. Novels and Romances of Charles Lever. In One Vol. Project Gutenberg. Last Updated: May 11, 2010.
Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter VIII, "Heretic Among Tories, 1844-1845." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. Pp. 128-145.
Sutherland, John A. "Lever, Charles." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989, rpt. 1990, 372-374.
Created 10 January 2024