Passage Illustrated: Cudmore makes himself "the admired of all admirers"

"Mr. Cudmore, may I take the liberty of requesting you would hand me the kettle beside you."

Now, though the kettle aforesaid was, as the hostess very properly observed, beside him, yet the fact that in complying with the demand, it was necessary for the bashful youth to leave the recess he occupied, and, with the kettle, proceed to walk half across the room — there to perform certain manual operations requiring skill and presence of mind, before a large and crowded assembly — was horror to the mind of the poor Jib; and he would nearly as soon have acceded to a desire to dance a hornpipe, if such had been suggested as the wish of the company. However, there was nothing for it; and summoning up all his nerve — knitting his brows — clenching his teeth, like one prepared to "do or die," he seized the hissing cauldron, and strode through the room, like the personified genius of steam, very much to the alarm of all the old ladies in the vicinity, whose tasteful drapery benefitted but little from his progress. Yet he felt but little of all this; he had brought up his courage to the sticking place, and he was absolutely half unconscious of the whole scene before him; nor was it till some kind mediator had seized his arm, while another drew him back by the skirts of the coat, that he desisted from the deluge of hot water, with which, having filled the tea-pot, he proceeded to swamp every thing else upon the tray, in his unfortunate abstraction. Mrs. Clanfrizzle screamed — the old ladies accompanied her — the young ones tittered — the men laughed — and, in a word, poor Cudmore, perfectly unconscious of any thing extraordinary, felt himself the admired of all admirers, — very little, it is true, to his own satisfaction. After some few minutes exposure to these eclats de rire, he succeeded in depositing the source of his griefs within the fender, and once more retired to his sanctuary, — having registered a vow, which, should I speak it, would forfeit his every claim to gallantry for ever. [Chapter XIII, "Dublin — The Boarding-house — Select Society," 101]

Commentary: Embarrassing ineptitude with a kettle

In the absence of an overarching plot, Phiz must content himself with realising humorous moments in Lever's various anecdotes indicative of upper-middle-class life in early nineteenth-century Ireland. After his misadventure at Colonel Kamworth's with Jack Waller, Lorrequer plans to rejoin the regiment at their new posting in Kilkenny. En route he stops in "Dear, dirty Dublin," as he terms it, before returning to what he anticipates will be amateur theatricals with the garrison. He now keeps a dinner date with his pal Tom O'Flaherty at Mrs. Clanfrizzle's boarding-house. After O'Flaherty has introduced him to sundry old maids (seen in a great state of alarm to the left in Phiz's engraving), Harry makes the acquaintance of Mr. Garret Cudmore, a recent matriculate from Dublin University: "a low-sized, dark-browed man, with round should, and particularly long arms," exactly as in Phiz's illustration. A countryman with a thick brogue, Cudmore has been advised by his college friends to observe the manners and the speech of the denizens of chez Clanfrizzle without saying anything much himself. The scene in the drawing-room has succeeded that in the dining-room, where twenty-five or thirty guests (although Phiz depicts just sixteen exclusive of Cudmore) had consumed an indigestible multi-course dinner with much witty conversation. The mixed company has now retired for tea (foreground) and whist (background).

Bibliography

Buchanan-Brown, John. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.

Lester, Valerie Browne Lester. Phiz! The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Lever, Charles. The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. Dublin: William Curry, Jun. London: W. S. Orr, 1839.

Steig, Michael. Chapter Two: "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 24-85.

Steig, Michael. Chapter Seven: "Phiz the Illustrator: An Overview and a Summing Up." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 299-316.

Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter V, "Renegade from Physic, 1839-1841." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. Pp. 73-93.

_______. "The Domestic Scene." The English Novel: A Panorama. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin and Riverside, 1960.

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19 April 2023