Passage Illustrated: Another comic interlude with Albert Jekyl

“Pray send me three lines, just to say —— Is it to be or not to be? Rose, the tailor, is persecuting me about a Mocha-brown, for a wedding garment, which certainly would harmonise well with the prevailing tints of my hair and eyebrows, but I am too prudent a diplomatist to incur 'extraordinaires' till I be sure of 'my mission.' Therefore write at once, for such is my confidence in your skill and ability that I only wait your mandate to launch into kid-gloves and lacquered leather, quite regardless of expense.

“Yours, most devotedly,

“ALBERT JEKYL. [Chapter LXVII, "Plots, Politics, and Priestcraft," pp. 614-615]

Commentary: Jekyl a Footnote

Lever uses a lengthy letter from D'Esmonde to his confidant Michel in Ireland to comment upon events in the Italian War of Independence and the Hungarian Uprising, and establishes a curious connection between yet another "Irishman abroad" and the Daltons, for D'Esmonde it turns out was virtually adopted by Geoffrey, Peter Dalton's older brother. He also comments upon the fate of Frank, whom we saw in the exchange of prisoners in Valeggio in The Wounded Soldier in Chapter 66:

It appeared that a certain Count von Walstein was enabled to clear young Dalton's character from all taint of treason, by exhibiting, in his own correspondence, some letters and documents that related to the events detailed in Frank's writing, and of which he could have had no possible knowledge. This avowal may be a serious thing for Walstein, but rescues the young Dalton at once, and proves that he was merely the writer of Ravitzky's sentiments; so that here, again, Michel, he escapes. Is not this more than strange? [II: 248]

Phiz, however, clearly found nothing in the lengthy epistle that was congenial to his art, and seized instead upon the comic relief afforded by Albert Jekyl at the close of the chapter. D'Esmonde turns from his own correspondence to a short note from Florence, in which the writer informs D'Esmonde that Norwood has just arrived from Ireland, where he had been staying with Lady Hester Onslow: she has accepted Norwood's marriage proposal. Jekyl knows that D'Esmonde has sources in Ireland that will refute or confirm the engagement.

One has to read a great deal into the Phiz illustration since the passage it elaborates upon merely mentions "Rose, the tailor," and details neither the fashionable drawing-room decorated with fine art that reflects the fastidious Jekyl's tastes, nor the patterned silk dressing-gown; but earlier in the letter the correspondent mentions "a red silk cap on my head" (615). Although the reader might reasonably assume before reading the letterpress that Jekyl is considering what he as a groom will wear, in fact the dilettante is worrying about a suit he should order for the forthcoming wedding of his patrons Lord Norwood and Lady Hester, which is presumably to be in Florence rather than Ireland. Phiz imagines the kind of ostentatious neoclassical bric-a-brac suitable for Jekyl's drawing-room, and the kinds of designs that a Florentine haberdasher might show his wealthy client.

Bibliography

Browne, John Buchanan. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribner's, 1978.

Downey, Edmund. Charles Lever: His Life in Letters. 2 vols. London: William Blackwood, 1906.

Fitzpatrick, W. J. The Life of Charles Lever. London: Downey, 1901.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Lever, Charles. The Daltons, or, Three Roads in Life. Illustrated by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1852, rpt. 1859, and 1872. [Two volumes as one, with separate page numbers in the 1859 volume, after I: 362.]

_______. The Daltons and A Day's Ride. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). Vol VI of Lever's Works. New York: P. F. Collier, 1882. [This large-format American edition reproduces only six of the original forthy-eight Phiz illustrations.]

Lever, Charles James. The Daltons, or, Three Roads in Life. Vol. 2. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32062/32062-h/32062-h.htm

Skinner, Anne Maria. Charles Lever and Ireland. University of Liverpool. PhD dissertation. May 2019.

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

_______. "The Domestic Scene." The English Novel: A Panorama. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin and Riverside, 1960.

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Created 1 June 2022