Left to right: (a) Mickey Free making free (Frontispiece: December 1840). (b) Frank Webber at his Studies (June 1840). This "class clown" is based on Lever's college friend Robert Boyle, who later became a clergyman. (c) Major Monsoon trying to Charge (December 1840). [Click on these images to enlarge them.]
What distinguishes Charles Lever's Charles O’Malley (1840-41), a novel in the form of a military reminiscence, is how effectively the three principal comic characters serve as foils to the sincere, self-critical, fluently-bilingual Anglo-Irish narrator.
When he goes up to Dublin for his tertiary education, young Charles O'Malley of course requires an appropriate valet from the Galway estates; thus, Lever, introduces the novel's chief wit and humorous observer, Mickey Free, in the twelfth chapter, "Mickey Free" (May 1840). As is appropriate for his satirical exploration of young O'Malley's "studies" at Dublin University (which reflect his own), Lever then introduces the rapscallion undergraduate Frank Webber, master of sophomoric humour and practical jokes involving disguise, in June 1840's Frank Webber at his Studies (Chapter XIV, "Dublin"). Boyle, the original of Frank Webber, and Lever earned pocket-money singing Irish ballad on street corners, and played numerous pranks that are the basis for some of the outlandish practical jokes in O'Malley, Con Cregan (1849), and his last novel, Lord Kilgobbin (1872). When O'Malley abandons the study of law for a military career, in the October 1840 instalment Lever introduces the rascally Miles Gloriosus in Major Monsoon and Donna Maria (Chapter XXXVI, "The Landing"). Major Monsoon was based on the half-pay Commissary-General whom Lever met in Brussels. This truly Falstaffian figure appears in the military chapters and features in three of original illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz").
For good reason, Lever's illustrator obviously favoured Mickey: he appears in nine of the forty-four illustrations of the novel, the majority again in the military chapters of Volume Two. The novel's chief purveyor of witty observations in suitable dialect, Mickey is the Lever adaptation of comedic stage Irishman. His sometimes satirical, sometimes unctuous brogue never fails to charm readers and relieve O'Malley's sometimes tedious self-analysis. As the happy newlyweds drive into the marketplace of Portumna near Castle O'Malley at the end of the serial, Mickey congratulates his master in characteristic Irish turns of phrase:
“Ah, then, the Lord be good to you; it’s yourself has the darling blue eyes! Look at them, Mary; ain’t they like the blossoms on a peacock’s tail? Musha, may sorrow never put a crease in that beautiful cheek! The saints watch over you, for your mouth is like a moss-rose! Be good to her, yer honour, for she’s a raal gem: devil fear you, Mr. Charles, but you’d have a beauty!” [Chapter CXXII, "Conclusion," 662]
Readers might be hoping here for another of Mickey's comic songs. Instead, perhaps because such verse would have interrupted the events at hand, Lever merely ties up the loose end by offering us a vision of the afterlife of Mickey Free as (no doubt) the husband of his beloved Lucy, and a regular at a certain "oyster-house" who also flaunts his "black moustache" at Cheltenham:
Last of all, Mickey Free. Mike remains attached to our fortune firmly, as at first he opened his career; the same gay, rollicksome Irishman, making songs, making love, and occasionally making punch, he spends his days and his nights pretty much as he was wont to do some thirty years ago. He obtains an occasional leave of absence for a week or so, but for what precise purpose, or with what exact object, I have never been completely able to ascertain. I have heard, it as true, that a very fascinating companion and a most agreeable gentleman frequents a certain oyster-house in Dublin called Burton Bindon’s. I have also been told of a distinguished foreigner, whose black mustache and broken English were the admiration of Cheltenham for the last two winters. I greatly fear from the high tone of the conversation in the former, and for the taste in continental characters in the latter resort, that I could fix upon the individual whose convivial and social gifts have won so much of their esteem and admiration; but were I to run on thus, I should recur to every character of my story, with each and all of whom you have, doubtless, grown well wearied. So here for the last time, and with every kind wish, I say — adieu! [Chapter CXXII, "Conclusion," 666]
The popular and financial success that Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon brought physician Charles Lever enabled him to renounce his position at the British embassy in Brussels and make writing his full-time career in Dublin as the editor of The Dublin University Magazine, gathering around him a circle of brilliant Irish wits that included William Carleton (1794-1869), Samuel Ferguson (1810-1886), D. F. MacCarthy (1817-1882), Isaac Butt (1813-1879), John Francis Waller (1809-1894) — and Oscar Wilde.
Of all the voices that Lever assumed over a career spanning four decades, none is so distinctive and so quintessentially Irish as that of O'Malley's comic valet: "If he has not all the simple pathos of Carleton, he has at least as much humour; and 'Mickey Free' is as fine a creation of the bold, clever, ready-witted, free-and-easy Irishman, as any novelist has produced" (Alfred Web, 1878).
Mickey Free's Complete Comic Appearances in the 1840-41 Picaresque Novel
- 1. Mr. Free Making Free
- 21. Mr. Free's Song
- 24. Mickey's Joy upon finding his Master (for Chapter CXXI)
- 29. Mr. Free turned Spaniard
- 34. Mr. Free Pipes whilst his Friends Pipe-clay
- 36. Mike capturing the Trumpeter
- 38. Captn. Mickey Free relating his Heroic Deeds
- 41. Mickey astonishes the "Natives"
- 44. The Welcome Home
Links to Related Material
- Charles Lever's Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon (1840-41)
- Ilustrations of the novel by Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz)
Bibliography
Buchanan-Brown, John. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.
Christie, N. M. B. "Lever's Charles O'Malley — A Book to Recommend to a Friend?" Etudes Irlandaises, No. 4 (1979): pp. 33-55. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/irla.1979.2588.
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.
Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter V, "Renegade from Physic, 1839-1841." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. Pp. 73-93.
Webb, Alfred. "A Compendium of Irish Biography." "Charles James Lever." (1878). LibraryIreland. Accessed 9 April 2023.
Created 11 April 2023