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Mr. Delany
Phiz
January 1842 instalment
Wood-engraving
8.2 cm by 5.3 cm (3 ⅛ by 2 inches), vignetted
Initial wood-cut: third illustration for Charles Lever's Jack Hinton, The Guardsman (January 1842), embedded on page 16.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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As I lay thus pondering, the door cautiously opened, and a figure appeared, which, as I had abundant leisure to examine it, and as the individual is one who occasionally turns up in the course of my history, I may as well take the present opportunity of presenting to my reader. The man who entered, scarcely more than four feet and a half high, might be about sixty years of age. His head, enormously disproportioned to the rest of his figure, presented a number of flat surfaces, as though nature had originally destined it for a crystal. Upon one of these planes the eyes were set; and although as far apart as possible, yet upon such terms of distance were they, that they never, even by an accident, looked in the same direction. The nose was short and snubby; the nostrils wide and expanded, as if the feature had been pitched against the face in a moment of ill-temper, and flattened by the force. As for the mouth, it looked like the malicious gash of a blunt instrument, jagged, ragged, and uneven. It had not even the common-place advantage of being parallel to the horizon, but ran in an oblique direction from right to left, enclosed between a parenthesis of the crankiest wrinkles that ever human cheek were creased by. The head would have been bald but for a scanty wig, technically called a “jasy,” which, shrunk by time, now merely occupied the apex of the scalp, where it moved about with every action of the forehead and eyebrows, and was thus made to minister to the expression of a hundred emotions that other men's wigs know nothing about. Truly, it was the strangest peruke that ever covered a human cranium. I do not believe that another like it ever existed. It had nothing in common with other wigs. It was like its owner, perfectly sui generis. It had not the easy flow and wavy curl of the old beau. It had not the methodical precision and rectilinear propriety of the elderly gentleman. It was not full, like a lawyer's, nor horse-shoed, like a bishop's. No. It was a cross-grained, ill-tempered, ill-conditioned old scratch, that looked like nothing under heaven save the husk of a hedgehog.
The dress of this strange figure was a suit of very gorgeous light brown livery, with orange facings, a green plush waistcoat and shorts, frogged, flapped, and embroidered most lavishly with gold lace, silk stockings, with shoes, whose enormous buckles covered nearly the entire foot, and rivalled, in their paste brilliancy, the piercing brightness of the wearer's eye. [Chapter III, "The Castle," pp. 15-16]
With no memory as to how he arrived there or when, the narrator awakens in a room decorated with military cartoons and bizarre caricatures. His attendant is a cross-grained, ugly homunculus with a diminutive wig and a brusque brogue, a brilliant exercise in dialect on Lever's part. From Corny Delany Hinton learns that, unconscious, he was deposited by the police in a hackney-coach, and that he has been resting on a couch in Captain Phil O'Grady's room across the courtyard from the Castle's main reception suites. The odd little man's censorious attitude and unintelligible mutterings give the narrator the feeling that he has fallen down a rabbit hole. We meet him in the illustration precisely when we encounter him in the letterpress, foregrounded, the bizarre without any background details. Although Phiz has not quite captured Corny's massive, ill-proportioned head, he has certainly made Cornelius Delany physically repulsive. Corny reappears in two full-page steel engravings, The Duke knighting Corny Delany (facing p. 73) and A Monk of the Screw unscrews Mr. Delany’s Courage (facing p. 122), and finally about half-way through the narrative-pictorial sequence in the last of the thumbnail woodcuts, on page 215 in Chapter XXXI.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Lever, Charles. Jack Hinton, The Guardsman. Illustrated by Hablột Knight Browne (Phiz). London: Downey & Co., 1901. [First published serially in The Dublin University Magazine January through December 1842; and subsequently in a single volume, Dublin: William Curry, Jun. December 1842, pp. 396. Illustrated with wood and steel engravings by H. K. Browne: 27 full-page plates. 8vo, 396pp. Boston: Little, Brown, 1894; New York: Croscup, 1894. 2 vols.
Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter VI, "Editor, 1839-1841." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. 92-107.
Sutherland, John A. "Jack Hinton The Guardsman." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989, rpt. 1990, 323.
Thomson, David Croal. Life and Labours of Hablột Knight Browne, "Phiz". London: Chapman and Hall, 1884.
Created 13 May 2023