Passage Illustrated: The Uproarious Clerical "Supper"

"Come, my lord and gentlemen, da capo, if ye please — Fill up your glass," and the chanson was chorussed with a strength and vigour that would have astonished the Philharmonic.

The mirth and fun now grew "fast and furious;" and Father Malachi, rising with the occasion, flung his reckless drollery and fun on every side, sparing none, from his cousin to the coadjutor. It was not that peculiar period in the evening's enjoyment, when an expert and practical chairman gives up all interference or management, and leaves every thing to take its course; this then was the happy moment selected by Father Malachi to propose the little "contrhibution." He brought a plate from a side table, and placing it before him, addressed the company in a very brief but sensible speech, detailing the object of the institution he was advocating, and concluding with the following words: — "and now ye'll just give whatever ye like, according to your means in life, and what ye can spare." [Chapter VI, "The Priest's Supper — Father Malachi and the Coadjutor — Major Jones and the Abbé," 59]

Commentary: Looking a Lot like Dickens

As both Lever himself and Michael Steig have suggested, since the illustrations belong to the same period as that in which Phiz was working on Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), the Lorrequer plates look much like his work for Dickens — and he even makes the Lever protagonist look "so like Nicholas Nickleby" (Lever to James M'Glashan, in Downey I: 110). And, working simultaneously on two lengthy series, Browne produced plates that occasionally fell below the level of quality that he had demonstrated in Dickens's best-selling serial Pickwick. Steig notes that "The plates for Lorrequer are, like the novel, boisterous, exaggerated, and seemingly done in a fair hurry." (301). The energy here, Steig suggests, is that of the Regency style of book illustration. In particular, he says, in The Supper at Father Malachi's, Phiz "gives the impression of a normal man who accidentally happens to be present at a gathering of grotesques invented by a follower of Gillray and Rowlandson" (Steig 302).

Also common in the illustrations for this early Lever novel is Phiz's attempting to capture many elements from an extended passage in a single plate. In the same illustration (The Supper at Father Malachi's) there is not really a single "moment" or passage realised. Rather, here Phiz combines Lever's description of the rollicking "feast" with Lever's introduction of Father Malachi himself:

Father Malachi Brennan, P. P. of Carrigaholt, was what I had often pictured to myself as the beau ideal of his caste; his figure was short, fleshy, and enormously muscular, and displayed proportions which wanted but height to constitute a perfect Hercules; his legs so thick in the calf, so taper in the ancle, looked like nothing I know, except perhaps, the metal balustrades of Carlisle-bridge; his face was large and rosy, and the general expression, a mixture of unbounded good humour and inexhaustible drollery, to which the restless activity of his black and arched eye-brows greatly contributed; and his mouth, were it not for a character of sensuality and voluptuousness about the nether lip, had been actually handsome; his head was bald, except a narrow circle close above the ears, which was marked by a ring of curly dark hair, sadly insufficient however, to conceal a development behind, that, if there be truth in phrenology, bodes but little happiness to the disciples of Miss Martineau. [Chapter VI, "The Priest's Supper — Father Malachi and the Coadjutor — Major Jones and the Abbe," 54]

In this, his first picaresque serial, Lever has taken considerable pains to describe the characters as well as the action, as if providing a blueprint for his illustrator. The description of the supper betrays the anecdotal and satirical nature of the material that were gradually coalescing into a novel. Here, for example, Lever is satirising an actual Catholic priest, "Father Duggan, who appeared in caricatured but unmistakable form, with the name of his parish unchanged, and his own name most flimsily veiled as 'Father Malachi Brennan'" (Stevenson 55).

This was among the first of Phiz's illustrations that Lever saw, once M'Glashan had made the decision to publish what was becoming a novel in monthly parts in the manner of the recently serialised Pickwick, with Phiz as the illustrator — although Lever had hoped for George Cruikshank to distinguish his novel from Dickens's. As it was, he felt that everyone could see "at a glance" the likeness to Nicholas Nickleby (Downey I: I10).

Bibliography

Downey, Edmund. Charles Lever, His Life in His Letters. Vol. I. 2 Vols. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1906. Internrt Archive. From a copy in the New York Public Library. Web. 13 April 2023.

Lever, Charles. Chapter VI: "The Priest's Supper — Father Malachi and the Coadjutor — Major Jones and the Abbe." The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer. London: William S. Orr, 1839; rpt., George Routledge, 1872.

Steig, Michael. Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978.

Steig, Michael. Plate 116, The Supper at Father Malachi's. Chapter Seven: "Phiz the Illustrator: An Overview and a Summing Up." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 299-316.

Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter IV, "Involuntary Novelist, 1836-1839." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. Pp. 53-71.

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Created 17 August 2002

Last updated 11 April 2023