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Mr. Paul Rooney's introduction to the Duke
Phiz
February 1842 instalment
Steel-engraving
13.4 cm by 11.9 cm (5 ¼ by 4 ¾ inches), vignetted
Fourth steel engraving for Charles Lever's Jack Hinton, The Guardsman (1843), facing page 63.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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'Ah, your grace,' uttered in an accent of the most melting tenderness, were the only words she could speak, as she bestowed a look of still more speaking softness. 'Ah, did I ever hope to see the day when your Highness would honour ——'
'My dear madam,' said the duke, taking her hand with great courtesy, 'pray don't overwhelm me with obligations. A very natural, I hope a very pardonable desire, to witness hospitality I have heard so much of, has led me to intrude thus uninvited upon you. Will you allow me to make Mr. Rooney's acquaintance?'
Mrs. Rooney moved gracefully to one side, waving her hand with the air of a magician about to summons an attorney from the earth, when suddenly a change came over his grace's features; and, as he covered his mouth with his handkerchief, it was with the greatest difficulty he refrained from an open burst of laughter. The figure before him was certainly not calculated to suggest gravity.
Mr. Paul Rooney for the first time in his life found himself the host of a viceroy, and, amid the fumes of his wine and the excitement of the scene, entertained some very confused notion of certain ceremonies observable on such occasions. He had read of curious observances in the East, and strange forms of etiquette in China, and probably, had the Khan of Tartary dropped in on the evening in question, his memory would have supplied him with some hints for his reception; but, with the representative of Britannic Majesty, before whom he was so completely overpowered, he could not think of, nor decide upon anything. A very misty impression flitted through his mind, that people occasionally knelt before a Lord-Lieutenant; but whether they did so at certain moments, or as a general practice, for the life of him he could not tell. While, therefore, the dread of omitting a customary etiquette weighed with him on the one hand, the fear of ridicule actuated him on the other; and thus he advanced into the presence with bent knees and a supplicating look eagerly turned towards the duke, ready at any moment to drop down or stand upright before him as the circumstances might warrant. [Chapter IX, "The Ball," 63]
Like Dickens, Lever often based his somewhat whimsical supporting characters upon people whom those in the know might recognise. Certainly, Lever's fellow Dubliners would likely apprehend the original of the bumbling "Paul Rooney" (whom Phiz has already depicted in a separate thumbnail wood-engraving dropped into the text on page 46 in the guise of a west country squire) as the local attorney named "Paul Mooney."
For a change of air, in the summer, he rented "Oatlands," at Stillorgan, and was somewhat embarrassed to find that the house immediately facing it was occupied by Mr. Paul Mooney, a well-known Dublin solicitor whom he had caricatured, under the flimsiest disguise, as "Paul Rooney," in Jack Hinton. At first there was distinct awkwardness in their inevitable encounters, but both had sufficient sense of humour to meet the situation, and they soon became friendly enough to dine at one another's tables. [Stevenson, "Spare-Time Squire, 1842-1843," 123]
One naturally wonders whether Lever took his illustrator into his confidence about the actual Mooney and described him, but the illustrator renders Rooney as a comic type: the rotund, deferential, slightly hen-pecked upper-middle-class Irishman who is also a shrewd attorney and financial advisor. The illustrator has realised Mrs. Rooney's husband here as Lever had described him in Chapter VI, "The Sham Battle," page 46, as "a short, pursy, round-faced little man." Here, at the ball that the attorney and his wife are throwing for the cream of Dublin society at their city mansion at Stephen's Green, the Duke arrives with his retinue from the theatre in Crow Street, following the departure of most of the audience for the ball after the comedy. Apparently the Viceroy has never before graced the Rooneys with a visit. Suddenly the dancers in the grand drawing-room clear a passage for the Viceroy, and the musicians strike up the grand march from Blue Beard (composed by Michael Kelly, in the 1798 opera by George Colman, Jr.) as the Rooneys bow before the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. The woman in the extravagant hat to the immediate left of the Duke we recognize from her miniature as Mrs. Rooney.
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 19 May 2023