Passage Illustrated: Jekyl receives an unexpected caller

Having failed to attract notice by all his cries and shouts, he determined to reach the window, to which, fortunately, a large vine, attached to the wall, offered an easy access. George [Onslow] was an expert climber, and in less than a minute found himself seated on the window-sill, and gazing into a room by the aperture between the half-closed shutters. His first impression on looking in was that it was a servant's room. The bare, whitewashed walls; the humble, uncurtained bed; three chairs of coarse wood, all strengthened this suspicion, even to the table, covered by a coarse table-cloth, and on which stood a meal if meal it could be called an anchorite might have eaten on Friday. A plate of the common brown bread of the country was balanced by a little dish of radishes, next to which stood a most diminutive piece of Baden cheese, and a capacious decanter of water, a long-wicked tallow candle throwing its gloomy gleam over the whole. For a moment or two George was unable to detect the owner of this simple repast, as he was engaged in replenishing his fire; but he speedily returned, and took his place at the table, spreading his napkin before him, and surveying the board with an air of self-satisfaction such as a gourmand might bestow upon the most perfect petit diner. In dress, air, and look, he was thoroughly gentlemanlike; a little foppish, perhaps, in the arrangement of his hair, and somewhat too much display in the jewelled ornaments that studded his neckcloth. Even in his attitude, as he sat at the table, there was a certain air of studied elegance that formed a curious contrast with the miserable meal before him. Helping himself to a small portion of cheese, and filling out a goblet of that element which neither cheers nor inebriates, he proceeded to eat his supper. Onslow looked on with a mingled sense of wonder and ridicule, and while half disposed to laugh at the disparity of the entertainment and him who partook of it, there was something in the scene which repressed his scorn and rendered him even an interested spectator of what went forward. [Chapter XI, "'A Peep between the Shutters' at a New Character," 79]

Commentary

What with his gambling beyond his means and covering his debts at sixty per cent interest with Jewish money-lenders, George Onslow finds himself in dire financial straits. His father, Sir Stafford, is aghast, for only eighteen months earlier he had discharged similar debts for his son. Again, First Lieutenant George Onslow of the —th, an Irish regiment to which he has been assigned in disgrace after being discharged from the elite Coldstream Guards, owes about seven thousand pounds. Rather than suffer his mother's gibes all day, he tends to quit the house in the morning and return at nightfall. Upon returning to the hotel on this particular evening, he finds it locked up tight, and cannot obtain admission, so he scales the paling in the garden and tries to climb up by a vine and in through an open window. Thus, wastrel George Onslow encounters in a servant's room Albert Jekyl, whom Lord Norwood has mentioned to him in a recent letter as the holder of minor debts for young aristocrats.

Phiz depicts George, just climbing in the window, as curious, and Jekyl as supremely self-satisfied and smug in his abstemiousness. Shortly, George will lose his balance, shattering the window as he falls to the ground, and Jekyl, taking notice, will offer to let George in. Subsequently, Lever adds a brief description that Phiz seems to have used in his portrait of Jekyl:

he saw before him a very dapper little figure, who with a profusion of regrets at not having heard him before, offered his candle a wax one on this occasion for George's accommodation. Protesting that the broken pane was not of the slightest inconvenience, that the room was a small dressing-closet, that it was not worth a moment's thought, and so forth, he permitted Onslow to escort him to the door of his room, and then wished him a good-night. The scene scarcely occupied the time we have taken to relate it, and yet in that very short space George Onslow had opportunity to see that the unknown had all the easy deportment and quiet breeding of one accustomed to good society. [80]

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. 1872.

Lever, Charles James. The Daltons, or, Three Roads in Life. http://www.gutenberg.org//files/32061/32061-h/32061-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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