I have just re-read Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873). One of the characters, one of ‘Lizzie’s Guests’, is Irishman Lord George de Bruce Carruthers . He is a man about town with no visible means of income, ‘a bitter radical’. ‘He was suspected even of republican sentiments, and ignorant men about London hinted that he was the grand centre of the British Fenians.’ The picture is complete with a full description, ‘In person he was a long-legged, long-bodied, long-faced man, with rough whiskers and a rough beard on his upper lip, but with a shorn chin. His eyes were very deep set in his head, and his cheeks were hollow and sallow, and yet he looked to be and was a powerful, healthy man. He had large hands, which seemed to be all bone, and long arms, and a neck which looked to be long; because he so wore his shirt that much of his throat was always bare. It was manifest enough that he liked to have good-looking women about him, and yet nobody presumed it probable that he would marry.’
Westminster Portrait, 1877. O’Connor Power is holding a letter from Michael Davitt in Dartmoor Prison which he read aloud in the House of Commons.