Jack Hinton

Nineteen-year-old Jack Hinton receives an appointment that throws his London family into alarm: he is to serve as an extra aide-de-camp in Ireland. His father welcomes the honour, while his mother and the influential Count de Grammont react with dismay. Jack tries to look unconcerned. Charles Lever begins this novel with a family conversation whose comic exchanges expose the assumptions surrounding a young English Guardsman's new posting.

The story moves into Dublin society and the west of Ireland, settings that Lever describes in his preface as drawn from people and incidents he knew. A middle passage turns a drinking party into a practical joke, with guests falling through a doorway into hay and misunderstanding one another in the darkness. Military life shares space with social mishaps, lively dialogue and elaborate anecdotes. Readers interested in nineteenth-century Irish social fiction will find humour built around manners, bravado and the gap between confident expectations and awkward experience.