[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Phiz (Hablot K. Browne) —> The Knight of Gwynne —> Next]

Passage Illustrated

By this time old Peter had laid his hand on the sick man's wrist, and, with a large watch laid before him on the bed, was counting his pulse aloud.

"It's a hundred and fifty," said he, in a whisper, which, although intended for Daly's ear, was overheard by Forester; "but it's thin as a thread, and looks like inward bleeding."

"What's to be done, then? have you anything to advise?" said Daly, almost savagely.

"Very little," said Hickman, with a malignant grin, “except writing to his friends. I know nothing else to serve him."

A brief shudder passed over Daly's stern features, rather like the momentary sense of cold than proceeding from any mental emotion, and then he said, "I spoke to you as a doctor, sir; and I ask you again, is there nothing can be done for him?"

"Well, well, we might plug up the wound, to be sure, and give him a little wine, for he's sinking fast. I've got a case of instruments and some lint in the gig — never go without the tools, Mr. Daly — there's no knowing when one may meet a little accident like this."

"In Heaven's name, then, lose no time!" said Daly. "Whatever you can do, do it at once."

The tone of command in which he spoke seemed to act like a charm on the old doctor, for he turned at once to hobble from the room.

"My servant will bring what you want," said Daly, impatiently.

"No, no," said Peter, shaking his head, "I have them under lock and key in the driving-box; there's no one opens that but myself."

Daly turned away with a muttered execration at the miser's suspicions, and then, fixing his eyes steadily on Sandy's face, he gave a short and significant nod. The servant instinctively looked after the doctor; then, slowly moving across the floor, the nod was repeated, and Sandy, wheeling round, made three strides, and, catching the old man round the body with his remaining arm, carried him out of the room with the same indifference to his struggles or his cries as a nurse would bestow on a misbehaving urchin. [Chapter VIII, "The 'Head' of the Family," pp. 54-56]

Commentary: Forester, grievously wounded in a duel, requires a Surgeon

Having entered into a quarrel with the disreputable Mac Donough at the fox-hunters' banquet, Forester fights a duel on the promontory of Cluan point with Bagenal Daly as his second. At the end of Chapter Six, Lever leaves readers in doubt as to outcome of the pistol duel until Tate Sullivan announces to Lady Eleanor and her daughter Helen at Gwynne Abbey that their young English visitor has been gravely wounded. Although the local surgeon, who possesses considerable military experience, has been summoned, Daly has extracted the ball himself. Coincidentally at this point, the local physician (and notorious miser), Dr. Peter Hickman, arrives to pay a social call — and check up on a bond that he holds on Daly. The wounded youth is being tended on a bed set up in the library, the setting of the present scene. The elderly physician is so slow that, when he mentions he should get his surgical kit, which is in a locked case in his driving-box, Daly gives his servant, Sandy McGrane, a nod to intimate that he should carry the old man out to the gig to get the black leather case. Shortly after, the surgeon, Mulville, arrives.

The portraits on the wall (rear) and the book-lined shelves to the left establish the setting. Mc Grane bodily carries out the decrepit physician as his sharp-faced master watches intently from the patient's bedside, so that the illustration marks the entrance into the narrative-pictorial sequence of one of the novel's most important characters, Bagenal Daly. Adroitly Phiz combines the ludicrous (the old miser's being carried out in haste to retrieve his surgical case) and the serious, the gravely wounded young officer, propped up in the makeshift bed and barely conscious.

Related Material

• Duelling in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• Review of Marc Mulholland's The Murderer of Warren Street (with details of two nineteenth-century duels)
• The University of London: The Founding Colleges (the reason for Wellington's duel)

Bibliography

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.

---

Victorian
Web

Illustra-
tion

Phiz

Knight
of Gwynne

Next

Created 11 July 2023