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The Fisherman's Home
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
steel engraving
14.2 cm by 10.5 cm, vignetted
February 1862
Charles Lever's Barrington; Tales of the Trains (scene in Chapter I), facing engraved title-page.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The Fisherman's Home clearly belongs with the first (February 1862) of twelve instalments, which in total contain twenty-five engravings. Chapman and Hall undoubtedly did not issue this engraved title until the ultimate monthly number, which appeared in January 1863.
If there should be, at this day we live in, any one bold enough to confess that he fished the river Nore, in Ireland, some forty years ago, he might assist me by calling to mind a small inn, about two miles from the confluence of that river with the Barrow, a spot in great favor with those who followed the “gentle craft.”
It was a very unpretending hostel, something wherein cottage and farmhouse were blended, and only recognizable as a place of entertainment by a tin trout suspended over the doorway, with the modest inscription underneath,—“Fisherman's Home.” Very seldom is it, indeed, that hotel pledges are as honestly fulfilled as they were in this simple announcement. The house was, in all that quiet comfort and unostentatious excellence can make, a veritable Home! Standing in a fine old orchard of pear and damson trees, it was only approachable by a path which led from the highroad, about two miles off, or by the river, which wound round the little grassy promontory beneath the cottage. On the opposite side of the stream arose cliffs of considerable height, their terraced sides covered with larch and ash, around whose stems the holly, the laurel, and arbutus grew in a wild and rich profusion. A high mountain, rugged with rock and precipice, shut in the picture, and gave to the river all the semblance of a narrow lake.
The Home, as may be imagined, was only resorted to by fishermen, and of these not many; for the chosen few who knew the spot, with the churlishness of true anglers, were strenuously careful to keep the secret to themselves. But another and stronger cause contributed to this seclusion. The landlord was a reduced gentleman, who, only anxious to add a little to his narrow fortune, would not have accepted a greater prosperity at the cost of more publicity, and who probably only consented to his occupation on finding how scrupulously his guests respected his position. [Chapter One, "The Fisherman's Home," 1-2]
Although Lever and Phiz present the large cottage as a retreat from the sophisticated and bustling Irish capital, its landlord, former Member of Parliament Peter Barrington, is a "reduced gentleman" who, having suffered financial reversals, has had to fall back on the occupation of an innkeeper by converting his substantial woodland cottage into a hostelry for affluent trout fishermen. Consequently, despite the plate's title, Phiz places the thatched cottage well into the background, beneath rugged hills and framed by a sycamore, and completes the picturesque landscape by foregrounding the banks of the Nore, the peasant landing the skull, and the two well-dressed anglers chatting affably with the young lady seated below the fence on the riverbank. The fashionably dressed young woman in the sun hat is Mad Barrington's much younger sister, Miss Dinah, who, remarks Lever, "had been the great belle of the Irish court" (4). She is presented as one of the story's two heroines. The other, Polly Dill, the local physician's daughter and a noted horsewoman, faces this scene from the title-page.
The text's allusion to the Nore establishes the physical setting as south-east Ireland, somewhere before the trout river's confluence with the River Barrow at Ringwood, after which the waters of The Three Sisters (the Nore, the Suir, and Barrow) empty into the Celtic Sea at Waterford. The chronological period in which Lever vaguely sets the story encompasses a royal visit of George IV and the origin of the Irish Potato Famine (1821), the publication of Mary Leadbeater's Cottage Biography, being a Collection of Lives of the Irish Peasantry (1822), and Daniell O'Connell's founding The Catholic Association to advance the cause of Catholic emancipation. In other words, the history of the period recalled belies the idyllic scene. Fifty-seven-year-old Lever, born in 1806, would have been in his teens at the time of the story, and therefore would have been well aware of the historical context of his story. When the Dublin Parliament was abolished in 1801 under the terms of The Act of Union, the Kingdom of Ireland had become at best a British satellite.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Lever, Charles. Barrington; Tales of the Trains. Illustrated by 'Phiz'. London: Chapman and Hall, 1863.
Created 9 November 2007
Last modified 8 February 2020
