Passage Illustrated: Mickey's Comic Finalé in the Saddle

In less than twenty minutes my worthy follower appeared beneath my window, surrounded by a considerable mob, who seemed to take no small interest in the proceedings.

“What the deuce is the matter?” cried I, as I opened the sash and looked out.

“Mighty little’s the matter, your honor; it’s the savages, here, that’s admiring my horsemanship,” said Mike, as he belabored a tall, scraggy-looking mule with a stick which bore an uncommon resemblance to a broom-handle.

“What do you mean to do with that beast?” said I. “You surely don’t expect me to ride a mule to Courtrai?”

“Faith, and if you don’t, you are likely to walk the journey; for there isn’t a horse to be had for love or money in the town; but I am told that Mr. Marsden is coming up to-morrow with plenty, so that you may as well take the journey out of the soft horns as spoil a better; and if he only makes as good use of his fore-legs as he does of his hind ones, he’ll think little of the road.” [Chapter CXVII, "An Old Acquaintance," 613]

Commentary: The Comic Irishman Rides Again — But this time, a Mule!

Lever has admirably adapted the comic Irishman from the stage to serve as a necessary foil to the sometimes overly reflective and angst-ridden young protagonist. In essence, this constitutes the last appearance of the young comic, although serial readers were to see this delightfully dialectal supporting character one more time: in the December 1841 frontispiece Phiz gives us a somewhat older Mickey carousing with tavern wenches in Mr. Free making free. Mickey Free is both an individual and a caricature: garrulous, boastful, unreliable, hard-drinking, but not consistently (unlike his stage original) belligerent, impecunious, or deceitful; he is, however, always thoroughly dialectal and Irish Catholic. He is another iteration of the type so ably exploited by Anglo-Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault (1820?-1890). The name of O'Malley's indefatigable valet has a curious afterlife, for it was accorded to a former Apache captive, Felix Telles, by the soldiers of Brigadier-General George Cook when the fair-skinned, auburn-haired twenty-four-year-old, illegitimate son of an Irish immigrant, signed on with the cavalry regiment as an Indian scout in December 1872.

Commentary: Recalled to Duty — O'Malley presents himself for Service in June 1815

Some four years have passed since O'Malley left the Peninsular campaign for his native Galway. Lever and Phiz have led readers to expect through the foregoing chapters and a pair of illustrations that the retired Dragoon will succumb to the charms of his bewitching cousin, "Baby" Blake. But events take a surprising turn as he advocates with Mr. Blake on behalf of his friend Sparks, and then learns that Napoleon has escaped from Elba and returned in triumph to Paris on 20 March 1815 as Louis XVIII has fled. By mid-June O'Malley and Mickey Free are in Brussels, where General Picton picks up O'Malley's offer to be of service in the forthcoming military action during what historians have subsequently called "The Hundred Days" or "The War of the Seventh Coalition."

Thus, O'Malley, appointed to report to Courtrai with Picton's despatches, suddenly finds himself in need of a serviceable mount. But the best that Mickey can find at short notice is — a mule! Phiz shows us a comic street scene outside the Brussels hotel. He does not depict O'Malley at the hotel window (rear), dressed once again as an officer in the Fourteenth Irish Dragoons (who have been recently shipped to India) on the morning of June 13th in a Brussels street not far from where he had overheard Lucy Dashwood reject Hammersley's offer of marriage in the Great Walk near the palace of the Prince of Orange. This setting Phiz suggests by the trees and park entrance, and an entrance way with pillars surmounted by Baroque cupids.

Related Material

• Charles Lever's Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon (1840-41)
• Hablot Knight Browne, 1815-1882; A Brief Biography
• Cattermole and Phiz: The First illustrators of Barnaby Rudge: A Team Effort by "The Clock Works" (1841)
• Horses by "Phiz" for Charles Lever's Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon (Nov.-Dec. 1841, rpt., 1873)
• Phiz: 'A Good Hand at a Horse'" — A Gallery and Brief Overview of Phiz's Illustrations of Horses for Defoe, Dickens, Lever, and Ainsworth (1836-64)

Bibliography

Cook, Alexander. " Wild West Book Review: Mickey Free." [Review of Allan Radbourne's Mickey Free: Apache Captive, Interpreter, and Indian Scout, $34.95]. Originally published in the June 2006 issue of Wild West. Posted 1 October 2020; accessed 5 April 2023.

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

Lever, Charles. Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon. "Edited by Harry Lorrequer." Dublin: William Curry, Jun. London: W. S. Orr, 1841. 2 vols.

Lever, Charles. Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. Published serially in The Dublin University Magazine from Vol. XV (March 1840) through XVIII (December 1841). Dublin: William Curry, March 1840 through December 1841. London: Samuel Holdsworth, 1842; rpt., Chapman and Hall, 1873.

Lever, Charles. Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. Novels and Romances of Charles Lever. Vol. I and II. In two volumes. Project Gutenberg. Last Updated: 2 September 2016.

Steig, Michael. Chapter Two: "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 24-50.

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

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Created 5 April 2023