[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Phiz (Hablot K. Browne) —> The Knight of Gwynne —> Next]
Rhoudlum
Phiz
June 1846 (sixth) instalment
Steel-engraving
13.6 cm by 11.7 cm (5 ¼ by 4 ¾ inches), vignetted.
Charles Lever's The Knight of Gwynne; A Tale of the Time of the Union (June 1846), originally for Part 6, facing p. 188.
[Click on 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 photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Through this human hell Sandy wended his way, occasionally followed by the taunting ribaldry of such as remarked him: such testimonies were very unlike his former welcomes in these regions; but for this honest Sandy cared little; his real regret was to see so much more evidence of depravity and misery than before. Drunkenness and its attendant vices were no new evils, it is true; but he thought all these were fearfully aggravated by what he now witnessed: loud and violent denunciations against every rank above their own, imprecations on the Parliament and the gentry that “sowld Ireland:” as if any political perfidy could be the origin of their own degraded and revolting condition! Such is, however, the very essence of that spirit that germinates amid destitution and crime, and it is a dangerous social crisis when the masses begin to attribute their own demoralization to the vices of their betters. It well behooves those in high places to make their actions and opinions conform to their great destinies.
Sandy's Northern blood revolted at these brutal excesses, and the savage menaces he heard on every side; but perhaps his susceptibilities were more outraged by one trail of popular injustice than all the rest, and that was to hear Hickman O'Reilly extolled by the mob for his patriotic rejection of bribery, while the Knight of Gwynne was held up to execration by every epithet of infamy; ribald jests and low ballads conveying the theme of attack upon his spotless character.
The street lyrics of the day were divided in interest between the late rebellion and the act of Union; the former being, however, the favorite theme, from a species of irony peculiar to this class of poetry, in which certain living characters were held up to derision or execration. The chief chorist appeared to be a fiend-like old woman, with one eye, and a voice like a cracked bassoon: she was dressed in a cast-off soldier's coat and a man's hat, and neither from face nor costume had few feminine traits. This fair personage, known by the name of Rhoudlum, was, on her appearing, closely followed by a mob of admiring amateurs, who seemed to form both her body-guard and her chorus. When Sandy found himself fast wedged up in this procession, the enthusiasm was at its height, in honur of an elegant new ballad called “The Two Majors.” The air, should our reader be musically given, was the well-known one, “There was a Miller had Three Sons:” —
“Says Major Sirr to Major Swan, You have two rebels, give me one; They pay the same for one as two, I 'll get five pounds, and I 'll share with you. Toi! loi! loi! lay.”
“That's the way the blackguards sowld yer blood, boys!” said the hag, in recitative; “pitch caps, the ridin' house, and the gallows was iligant tratement for wearin' the green.”
“Go on, Rhoudlum, go on wid the song,” chimed in her followers, who cared more for the original text than prose vulgate.
“Arn't I goin' on wid it?” said the hag, as fire flashed in her eye; “is it the likes of you is to tache me how to modulate a strain?” And she resumed: —
“Says Major Swan to Major Sirr, One man's a woman! ye may take her. 'T is little we gets for them at all — Oh! the curse of Cromwell be an ye all! Toi! loi! loll lay.”
The grand Demosthenic abruptness of the last line was the signal for an applauding burst of voices, whose sincerity it would be unfair to question. [Chapter XXIV, "A Glance at 'The Full Moon'," 188]
Bagenal Daly returns from his overnight mission to Liverpool to report that Gleeson on board the American vessel has leaped overboard into the Channel at Holyhead, choosing suicide toapprehension for embezzlement and theft. But when Daly searches Gleeson's cabin he finds only a few hundred guineas in a purse; the servant is missing, along with all of Gleeson's papers. Having narrated the details of this failed mission to the Knight of Gwynne, Daly determines to discover whether Freney's note is correct, and the enormous loan has been repaid to Doctor: discovery of the bond will save Darcy from utter ruin, and leave him in possession of Gwynne Abbey at least. Accordingly, Daly despatches his confidential servant, Sandy M'Grane, to find the bearer of the note somewhere in the seamier neighbourhoods of Dublin: his quest begins at a public house denoted by the sign of the full moon. That Gleeson has paid the sum of seventy thousand pounds and acquired Hickman's bond Sandy must ascertain.
Outside the public house in Duck Alley on this Saturday evening in search of Jemmy, Sandy encounters a haggish ballad-singer, Rhoudlum (left), entertaining the street-people with an anti-Act of Union ditty that praises Hickman O'Reilly's patriotism in the House, and damns the Knight of the Gwynne for having succumbed to bribery. Phiz has captured the old singer's peculiar dress and the indignation of the stern Sandy (right). The "admiring amateurs" who take up her chorus are a ragged, misshapen lot indeed.
Buchanan-Brown, John. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.
Lester, Valerie Browne Lester. Chapter 11: "'Give Me Back the Freshness of the Morning!'" Phiz! The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004. Pp. 108-127.
Lever, Charles. The Knight of Gwynne; A Tale of the Time of the Union. London: Chapman and Hall, serialised January 1846 through July 1847.
Lever, Charles. The Knight of Gwynne. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablột Knight Browne]. Novels and Romances of Charles Lever. Vol. I and II. In two volumes. Project Gutenberg. Last Updated: 28 February 2018.
Steig, Michael. Chapter Four: "Dombey and Son: Iconography of Social and Sexual Satire." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 86-112.
Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter IX, "Nomadic Patriarch, 1845-1847." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. Pp. 146-164.
_______. "The Domestic Scene." The English Novel: A Panorama. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin and Riverside, 1960.
Created 14 July 2023