Sixteen year old Redmond Barry (alias Barry Lyndon), anti-hero of Thackery's mid nineteenth century novel, is sneeringly accused of being "only a boy" by his coquettish neighbor, Nora. Barry protests the slight on his manhood by reciting a list of past triumphs including a feisty victory over the local strongman:
"Didn't I beat Tom Sullivan, that great hulking brute -- who is nineteen?"
Here, as in other 19th century fiction and drama such as the stories of Somerville-Ross, the native Irish are portrayed as roustabouts or servants of low and crafty character; at such a time a Sullivan would be known to the reader as Munster native Irishman of pure "Celtic" blood. In contrast, Barry Lyndon, the anglo-Irish gentry who goes on to talk and steal his way to Dublin and the capitals of Europe, is taken to be the model of the Anglo-Irishman who has made the great fall so lamented by the Elizabethans like Edmund Spenser ("become more Irish than the Irish themselves.")
(Barry Lyndon's character is in fact modeled after the raffish 18th century Irish fortune seeker Jesse Foot, who ended his days in King's Bench Prison a few years before Thackery started his novel.)
Another Sullivan appears in the novel a few pages on, and again exemplifies what one would expect of a crafty peasant: young Redmond, off to make his fortune in Dublin, comes upon a what he fancies to be a lady in distress, her carriage surrounded by cackling, peasants indifferent toward, even amused by her troubles;( this is a scene not uncommon in the west of Ireland, Thackery assures the reader in a footnote to the original magazine serialization of the novel; indeed Thackery tells us that in Ireland the peasants still "look on at murders.")
"What is this noise, fellows?" said I [i.e. Barry Lyndon], riding up amongst them, and,
seeing a lady in a carriage very pale and frightened, gave a slash of my
whip, and bade the red-shanked ruffians be off. "What has happened, madam,
to annoy your ladyship?" said I, pulling off my hat, and pulling my mare up
at a prance at the carriage window. The lady explained. She was the wife of
Captain Fitzsimmons, and was hastening to join the Captain at Dublin. Her
chair had been stopped by a highwayman; the great oaf of a servingman had
fallen down on his knees armed as he was; and though there were thirty
people in the next field working when the ruffian attacked her, not one of
them would help her, but, on the contrary, wished the captain, as they
called the man, good luck.
Alas for poor naive Redmond, Lady Fitzsimmons and her scurrilous husband,
will prove to be no more than fast-talking owners of a sleazy Dublin rooming
house. But for the romantic present the reader, whatever his degree of
skepticism, will soon hear, along with the naive young Redmond, who is
paying for dinner, Mrs. Fitzsimmons tale of the unfortunate events of the
day, of the hundreds of guineas, jewels, snuff boxes, and watches she has
lost to the robber, who is none other that the infamous Captain Freeny, that
eighteenth century highwayman and storyteller whose memoirs Thackery had
discovered one rainy night in Galway in 1842, as described in his "Irish
Sketch Book." Young Redmond who joins Mrs. FitzSimmons for a fine
dinner--which he pays for-- criticizes himself for arriving too late to stop
the highwayman form carrying off her money and pearls; her response is
interrupted by her rude servant:
@QUOTE = "and sure, ma'am, them wasn't much," said Sullivan, the blundering
servant, who had been so frightened at Freeny's approach, and was waiting on
us at dinner. "Didn't he return you the thirteenpence in copper, and the
watch, saying it was only pinchbeck?" But his lady rebuked him for a saucy
varlet, and turned him out of the room at once, saying to me when he had
gone, "that the fool didn't know what was the meaning of a hundred-pound
bill, which was in the pocket-book that Freeny took from her."